Only You

Last week, while cleaning up my bookshelf, my wife dug out a collection of my old, yellowed notebooks that had gotten buried under books.

To my surprise, the collection had everything in it from the notes from my previous professional stints to the notes I took way back in my school days. Even though my wife was witnessing a journey backward in quite literally the bits and pieces of those yelllowed pages, the journey was breathtakingly refreshing and energizing. I’ve realizesd that traveling back in time, even though momentarily, is a good remedy and escape from this on-going anxiety called present.

Amongst the notes, she found a poem that, on a folded paper, was tucked inside a notebook. To her surprise, my handwriting looked completely different back then—she liked that version of my handwriting. To my surprise, my writing seemed completely different back then. She thought it was more artistic. I thought it was pretty lame of me to concentrate on rhyming words just for the sake of it. Thinking past our contrasting thoughts, we discovered that the poem had also unfolded with it a flood of memories, none of which were inked on the paper and yet had left their marks. Thank you, Shambhavi, for taking up this long-due task of cleaning.

I hadn’t titled the poem back then—I can’t remember why. I am doing so now. And for what the poem conveys, or at least what I THINK I wanted to convey through it, I cannot think of any better title. After a few trials, when we had successfully failed at clicking a reproducable picture of the poem, I resorted to writing it down for you.