When I die, will you
Remember my name?
I am dead, this is my truth,
And all that is devoured among a thousand pages,
Carpet, furniture, walls, pages,
Metrical and insane, next to them, as alliteration,
A painting of an angel,
Falling but still, in contemplation of somebody’s words:
I, he said, am devoid of truth,
In the beginning there was I alone,
In the end, God, or nobody, or nothing,
Or merely the grave;
And you, upon whom the moon breathes,
Who follows the north star,
Led, as a child through an empty space,
Are Presence: For in her great glow, eternity is but a glimmer,
While all rest is Night.
I am its witness.
I have breathed this sadness,
And heard her whisper
What I am about to tell:

‘The night alone am I,
The stars are my symbols,
The moon is my light,
The north star is the road I know,
Eternity has given me time enough to know
Myself and my world,
And graced it as pale blue,
A flame that is carried, then blows out.
The night am I,
And fears, tragedies and philosophies are my realm.’
This the angel heard,
This she understood, and said nothing.
I sit in my room, and fill the pages with litigations,
To answer the question of existence,
Claiming it to be fiction.

…

Ritwik Chaudhary is a writer and an actor. His writing has been published in RIC Journal and Unlikely Stories Mark V, among other journals. Literature to him is but a form of reasoning, albeit one where all other reasons have ceased to exist.