(On June 1st this blog turned two years old and adding the two years time I wrote on an older blog elsewhere that makes it a total four years of blogging. So instead of the usual anniversary post I decided to ask four of my favorite bloggers to contribute a guest post here. Happily, they all accepted immediately. So here is the first guest post. The rest will follow roughly in the chronological order in which I came to know them. Each guest blogger will directly respond to your comments to their respective posts.

Phantasmagoria was a regular and very popular blogger on Rediffblogs for almost 3 years. She recently stopped writing there but I hope she will soon begin again elsewhere. What I love about her writing is her simplicity and economy of means. Using the simplest language and minimum number of words she manages to evoke the deepest of feelings.)

You’ve left.
But memories of you fall like warm summer rain.
It was just yesterday that you had wrapped your
arms around me, pushed the hair out of my eyes
and kissed one questioning eyebrow and then the other.

This way, I tell myself, I live the day twice over.
It was at this time yesterday that we pulled up
at a mountainside store and asked for directions.
It was now that you drew patterns on my thigh,

Let me sleep, I would plead. Sure sweety, you said
And started to write my name, then yours, and then
suggestive messages. It is a whole day later and if I
close my eyes I can as yet feel your hand around me,

pulling me closer into you, stealing kisses on the
road that leads straight into a sky heavy with rain.
I am dreading tomorrow or the day after. Will we
forget the sulk I was pulling for not getting my way.

I have already forgotten the song we listened to as
we drove through the rain falling in sullen sheets, the
mountain is now littered with discarded words of a song
that filled our silences. And now possibly discarded

memories will flutter out of the grasp of our entwined fingers.
Your body curves into mine as we lie on clean, antiseptic
sheets. The sun outside the window sets without ceremony.
The day draws to an end and even the banter has slowed down.

We look at each other longer, kiss softer, hold tighter.
The streets are bright with the fallen rain and the lights
from passing cars. Yesterday at this time we were saying
goodbye and I was saying, not yet. Let me make a memory.

Yesterday at this time you had already left.

© Phantasmagoria