Outrospection
Far away, a distant thought
slips away like an unstrung kite
Try as hard as I may to keep
it within my bounded sight
I open up my photos drive
to find a cluster labeled “Me”
google seems to know what belongs
while I just stare: emptily
All these different faces captured
to whom and when do they belong
To me they seem like different verses
in another badly written song
I found it hard to search for answers
until that one bright rainy day
when at my train station market
I picked a crusty book on display
It was a diary half full
with scribbly writings from the past
someone’s happy escapades or
someone’s broken kite aghast
On the train, that day it rained
I didnt notice the stops fly by
the suffocating trampling passengers erased
by the pages, I was reading dry
The author of this diary
was someone that I recognized
He wrote like me, he thought like me
I saw myself through another’s eyes
Many a years had passed my being
that I had bared and borne alone
but today this wondrous newly feeling
of a friend, it seems, I had always known
Here were words, laid so pretty
of thoughts that I had often thought
His were struggles, not so petty
fights that I had often fought
Forgotten all my questions
my daily introspection laid to waste
I was merely hanging by the threads
stitched inside his every page
I hurtled on traveling through time
sitting in my cramped train seat
tides and seasons passed him by
our lives converging, ready to meet
I thought I had my answers now
all I had to do was read
but if God’s plan was handed to you
“what if you disagreed?”
“what if you disagreed?”
It has been a few months since
that happy scary rainy day
I can’t remember if Its lost
or on that train, I let it lay
But on that day I made new friends
with my past, my recollection
I still wonder, I still ponder
but now I call it Outrospection.
Manaswi Mishra 