Dog Years

It’s been a slow unraveling.
First few months, I noticed ants and the trees infront of my house
I don’t know their type. So I gave them names.
My evening tea was dedicated to them.
Then my blue screen started calling me all the time.
Slowly I became a slave to a regime old enough
To burden generations of my family.
The skin around my nails became rough with my irritation
Their marks on my hands were a common occurrence.
In between meetings in my boredom I often drew my new friends on my knees and ankles
Flowers of colour with a blue pen.
My sister came back and with her came life I was missing in me.
Nearing the wall, I made space for her once again in our room.
Soon, it lost all character as just mine.
Frames and candles were replaced with common products- perfume, skin lotion, and a pouch full of secret stuff that marked an individual life.
Sickness and the tightening of death around us introduced a new being into her life, my life
Anxiety became a daily term, far more abused than my own feelings that sat still in some corner of my chest.
Slowly, months spread like sand under the sea.
Suddenly I did not miss having a sky to me.
I was okay with two walls to my name.
Blue screens became home in a way my own mind was not.
Spurred by medicine and science, a better day stepped into our lives. A dream of a dream.
A thought of another nation, other existence pricked our intuition
It would soon be time to move.
After days and weeks of deliberation, it is almost here.
But make no mistake, my life is the same.
The life that I claim as the energy in mine is making the move.
Like a shell, I exist in the remembrance of these walls.
Did I imagine these past few months spent in the glow
In the flow of a warm yellow light that is going away, one at a time?
Or was this existence real, spending dog years in a human life-
Sixteen months stretched to eat emotions and identity, in a slow bite
A sharp canine at a time, one at a time.
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~insight07
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