Anshu Subedi

One day, I will just go. No note. No message. No goodbye. I won’t scream. I won’t cry. I won’t explain. I’ll just disappear.. like I was never a chapter in your story. Just a forgotten paragraph that meant everything to me, and nothing to you. And you’ll wonder. You’ll scroll through our old texts. You’ll call, maybe once, maybe a hundred times. You’ll look at my photos. Stare at them like they might blink back. You’ll ask yourself..what happened? What did you say? What did you do? Where did it all go wrong? And still, you won’t remember. You won’t remember what you said while we rode back home that day. But I do. I remember every word. I remember how casual it was. How your voice didn’t even flinch. Like it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. It was everything. You said it like you were tossing out trash, and I caught it like it was a bullet. And it stayed there. In me. Buried. Rotting. Growing roots into the corners of my self-worth. And you went on. You laughed that evening. You sle...

  I have given bad a chance. Let it whisper into my ears, crawl into my skin, wear its chaos like perfume, thinking maybe pain is a form of love too. I have given fun a chance nights that bled into mornings, laughter echoing off empty walls, grinning through exhaustion, dancing through silence, trying to feel alive by escaping myself. I have given commitment a chance. I have poured my loyalty into hands that trembled to hold it, stitched promises into my spine, stood still while others left because I thought staying meant strength. I have given them all a chance. The ones who couldn’t see me beyond their convenience. The ones I wrote poetry about, even when they barely spoke in prose. I have given forgiveness a chance. So many damn times. Even when the apology never came. Even when the scars were still red. I held out grace like an offering and called it healing. I have given patience a chance. I waited. And waited. For change. For recognition. For love that didn’t hurt. For the wo...

  There was a time when a bowl full of noodles made me excited.  Sizzling on the stove, steam fogging up the glass. It used to mean comfort.. something warm, something safe. But that week... I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t stand the smell. It made me gag. Everything did. My favourite perfume.. the one I wore on happy days smelled like poison. My room, the place I used to retreat to, felt like it had been dipped in something rotten. Even the sunlight that filtered through the curtains felt wrong  too yellow, too heavy, too loud. I started keeping the windows shut. I stopped playing music. I didn’t want to be seen by the sky. I didn’t want to be heard by the wind. For two whole weeks, all I could eat were popsicles. Mango ones mostly. Not because they were sweet  but because they were cold and quiet. They didn’t argue with my stomach. They didn’t remind me of what I was missing. They just melted. And I told myself: maybe this is just a phase. Ju...