‘I Have Started to Forget Faces’

I have started to forget faces.
Faces I used to see down the road
to my school,
or at the neighbourhood market.
Noises of vehicles and screams of vendors
outside my window,
reminiscent of my past.

Today, each breath feels like a stolen blessing
and a dangerous game from childhood;
games mother told me not to play.
My phone is just another regularity these days,
I hardly smile scrolling through Instagram now.
Every dying soul feels like a lost family,
unknown hands holding the essence of my wounded city.

Newspapers are just another claim
of the ignorant power
and webs of lies
they have knitted with hatred
for me and my community
or perhaps anyone who
questions their crown.
My existence — and yours, are just a number they want at a polling booth.
Their words echo loud in the deafening silence around me.
Their smiles, so delighted,
empty of any guilt or remorse
of lives lost at a hospital corridor, gasping
for oxygen,
for value of their being.

The moon fails to light the night sky–
burning with flames of a thousand lifeless pyres.
I fear the ticking hands of my clock,
and the sound they make with every receding moment.
I fear the ringtone of my mother’s phone every time it fills the silence in my room.
My neighbourhood feels like a battlefield,
of people I have known as my first memory.

I miss the peace between the worry-lines of my father’s forehead.
Every day, my textbooks remind me of a world beyond them
and every day, I wonder if I could ever sit in a classroom again.
All my friends are worn out with helplessness
and their voices, absent of joy
and different from what I remember.
I come across prayers and names of God,
but didn’t we all fail our religions for things which do not matter now?
The world—as I had known it, feels like a delusion, a dream.
After all, wasn’t it?

Zunaira Habib Alvi is a 17-year-old Class 11 student at Aligarh Muslim University, UP. She finds escape in writing, so she tries to write loud and clear about what bothers her.

Featured image credit:Pixabay