The Existential Migration
rintu borah
I gaze at you
and you in all your charm
look away from me.
In my nothingness
I collapse in a flash.
The paralysis hits everyday.
I survive inch by inch.
I go back to my innermost recesses
and try to dream of happy endings.
Like that of a Morigaon farmer
who was made homeless
by the Kopili river
but was happy to share a biri
and tell his river love stories.
You look at me and
I submit to your splendour.
In return you make me an object,
sunk in a wired sphere, skyscapers, metros,
ivory towers of my university,
cocktails, fragmented socialism
and anti-NRC stories,
and all other stories of ‘Assam proper’
that I carry from my vacations.
Yet, in the defenceless meeting of our eyes,
there is a cosmic moment of stillness
that I will call mad falling
when all skyscrapers, metros, and stories,
all come crashing.
For in your falling away
there is my falling into you,
and this existential migration;
that no matter how much
I wrench away from you
I am always outside of me
I am always within you
more than me.
31.08.2019
(Note: This poem was written on the day that the final list of National Register of Citizens (NRC) stripped 1.9 million people in Assam of their citizenship and made them stateless.)