The Anatomy of Staying

For a person to leave,
one reason is enough.
But
to stay,
the entire body must be wounds.

Some people
don't live in houses,
they live in habits.
In the sound of an old chair,
in the way a door is shut,
in the times when tea goes cold.

Even after they've left,
our daily life itself
wanders around
wearing their form.

To stay
is not love every time.
Sometimes
it is a tired heart's
inability to let go
of a known pain.

I have seen
that even after the rain ends,
wooden benches remain wet.
In the same way,
even after some people leave,
their weather within us
does not stop.

At nights,
after the entire city
has slipped into sleep,
only some memories,
like the flicker of a tubelight,
are still awake.

Then I understood,
staying
is not keeping hold of someone.
It is keeping
some space empty
for those who are no longer here,
for them.

That itself is the anatomy of staying.
Old conversations
between the bones,
unspoken apologies
in the blood vessels,
doors around the heart
that will never open.

Then,
the breath?
It is merely
the sound of slowly carrying
the memory of those who have gone.

Manasa Reddy Chichili is a poet and short story writer from Hyderabad, Telangana. Her haiku and tanka have been published in several journals, including Under the Basho, Mainichi Haiku, Awen, and Atlantean Publishing, among others.