In Which I Eulogise the Winter

Paridhi Puri, India

yesterday, I woke up to the noon of a memory folded for a decade — opened my eyes and scrutinized the expiry date. my hands remember the cold afternoon when music spilled from your tongue and the calendar wept with joy. our twenties warming up to us near the end of the world — there are platitudes and then there's heartache. the poets are a dying breed, but they still write of december in the sun, and liaisons under the canopy of a future so young it was naive. our bones remember the time it craved sickness, the want to burrow in the heat of the laughter that bloomed under the sun. the reign of death followed — ghosts mingling in the freeway, still stuck in the fall. the dead are feasting under the ashes, this city lies for them, it doesn't brush the past and has bad breath after all. days succumb to months succumb to seasons succumb to years. we just can't bid goodbye, even when our love has gone cold.

Paridhi Puri (she/her) is a student and writer based in New Delhi. A scholarship recipient at University of Iowa's International Writing Program, she has worked as the Head of Events and Collaborations at Ayaskala. Her passion lies in the close observation of pop culture, politics, art and literature—you can find her writing at her newsletter, Opium of the Masses.