Siya Shah

Prose Section

Short stories, mini essays, etc!

  • Dreamers and Lovers

    I still write you letters. Whether you deserve them or not is irrelevant. For whatever reason, they are addressed to you, and I am left to sit in wonder at the life you have brought out of me when I thought I had none. I think that maybe I would like to kiss you a hundred times, only to fear that even that wouldn’t be enough to convey my adoration, nor all the gratitude I have for all you’ve done for me.

    This adoration was not created out of nothing, it was roused from within me. Even when the day comes that I have no one around me and nothing holding me up except for my own two feet, I will look for you with x-ray vision behind some shaded curtains, or wherever you may have gone. My eyes will light up with mirth and I will leap for joy when I find you, in the dark, where I am unable to see you. And if the day comes where I see you again, I know I will have truly gone nowhere, and have only managed to walk in a full circle.

    In the dim lighting of my imagination and memories, however, you exist more beautifully than you, or I, or anyone in this world has ever felt. The beauty of that is that you don’t have to be happy to dream of such things. The spark is induced in you and, like an infant, you must try and learn how to breathe it in.

    On that note, after years of restless dreaming, I am stricken with the thought that maybe all this time, I did not love you, per se– it must have been nearing the threshold of admiration. Something closer to worship. I worshipped you more than I could be able to love you, in the way that a devotee returns to throw coins in a holy fountain. It is an unfamiliar feeling I returned to whenever I felt incapable of holding myself up. My ability to recognize that doesn’t in itself exempt me from my old ways, and that is probably because I have always dreamed of loving fully and wholly, to the point that I cannot feel any of the anguish of a soul, barren. May my dreams be the map to a life that is my own, exempt from the fatality of a love that will not be found in the light of day. Even though I am hungry, and I’ve been hungry, it will take me a while to learn how to eat.

  • Sensory

    “Oh, would you look at that! Isn’t that the girl

    who would crack under the pressure of her own resolve,

    forgot how to use her mouth, hands, and the like,

    who had not a shred of kindness to her,

    only niceness, or– go figure, how

    to write happy stories, who

    desperately soaked up all words of affirmation

    meant for her, and who one day

    reached out her hands only to feel

    etchings of neuralgic blessings so that her bones

    started to stiffen, who no doubt had

    a propensity towards her own ruination

    ‘till she became a dried plum

    in her ripe adolescence?”

    “Oh! Look at her now!

    Grief and hopelessness, grief and hopelessness,

    dozens– no, hundreds of her reflections revealed as swirls on paper

    under the honest moonlight that led that child to circle back to a home

    that welcomes children too afraid to step into the world,

    visualising God, and love, and justice, the sort of things that led them to

    swallow their fears and absolve

    themselves of the guilt of those deadweights, only to

    throw it all back up.”

    throw it all back up.”

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