Drunk on Moonlit Skies
Artwork by Daniel Bermejo, age 14
Staring outside the window,
Drunk on moonlit skies,
I close my eyes,
And see us sitting side by side,
Watching the sunrise,
A hint of evanescence,
A moment of epiphany,
When did we shatter into pieces?
Do you not remember why we fell apart?
Like shards of broken glass,
I still don’t get why we’re all that remains of the melodies we formed,
Because each time our favorite song plays,
And you’re not around,
Each time I’m watching our movie,
And you’re not with me,
I swear the silence,
It eats me alive,
Until all that’ left are these beautiful scars,
I refuse to let them heal,
What if I forget you after they’re gone?
What if I lose you?
And what if I'm already lost too?
You mess me up,
And sadly, I let you do it every single time,
I often sing about you,
To the flowers in my backyard,
But sometimes when I return back to them,
In a black dress at evening,
Tear-strained and tormented,
The roses too beg me to leave you,
So just to shut these noises up,
I end up breaking them into two,
Because how was I to stay away from those golden-brown eyes?
The ones that filled my days with a little more sunlight,
So how strange of me to now feel colder at night,
my friends don’t understand that they belong to the same face,
I endlessly wait for the warmth to return,
While I continue to die under that piercing, icy gaze,
Again feeling just half-alive,
Don’t you think we should have learned by now?
We’re playing monopoly in a burning room,
And neither of us is winning,
I try to escape it,
To run out of this maze,
Which seemed so enchanting at first,
Until you set it on fire,
Left me by myself, wondering if I’ll reach the end in time,
Before the smoke suffocates me,
Wondering why you’re still clinging onto me like ink stains on a perfectly written poem,
A lingering nightmare,
Toxic, psychotic, chaotic,
You know it too well,
Using it against me,
Never realizing that you’re a part of it,
Of this madness,
Of this nothingness,
Of this mess,
So I asked her to let go,
When I met her through the rear-view mirror that night,
I turn to the clear reflection in the pool,
And start to whisper,
‘’It’s time for a goodbye’’
In the pier glass,
I see a single red tear trickle down my cheek,
I wipe it away and every trace of you lying within,
My echo tells me we deserve a happy ending too,
I don’t know if I fully believe for it to be true,
But I close the pen cap and hold myself back from writing pages,
To a chapter that can’t be rewritten,
A chapter that is through,
You.
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Aayreen Baagwala is a 12-year-old seventh grader at The Riverside School in India. She is an avid reader and plays basketball. She often expresses her understanding of the world around her through sketching and painting.