T3 শারদ সংখ্যা ২০২২ || তব অচিন্ত্য রূপ || বিশেষ সংখ্যায় Sankalpita Mullick

Unfamiliarity

I look at you and beside you I see,
A wave of faces, some bright, some dull,
An ocean of unfamiliarity.
The spotlight on your face shines even when I forget how it looked when you were in front of me.
I forget every wrinkle, every scar, every tear.
Your being becomes unfamiliar to me.
As you slip further into the crevices of my memory,
I forget how your perfume smelled,
Your being becomes unfamiliar to me.
Unfamiliarity…the word once seemed so familiar
And now I need to look it up in a dictionary.
Unfamiliarity, the feeling of being distanced from something that used to be so close to me,
That it hurts to see it remake my reality.
Unfamiliarity, a word I wish I was never familiar with.