top of page

From The Afterglow

Verses, Tales, Thoughts

by Varsha Panikar


Yesterday's memory is fading. Fading from bright to dull, in tides wading. In saying I was strong, you may laugh at me. But in saying I was brave: I can still stand tall with scars - unyielding, my spirit unbroken, my heart still yearning for the thrill of the chase. But it wasn't me, just the ghost of yesterday.


Today, I can try to smile at the little things. Today, I rise & see oppurtunity. Today, I shall live a ghost in my immunity.


Tomorrow, if it ever graces me, I will not regret. I will not turn back on today, nor yesterday. I will find my solice in letter and predictions. Tomorrow, if I am awake & alive, my indomitable spirit will blazes brightly, even in the face of death. Tomorrow, like any other day, I will live a spirit of liveliness. I will shock myself in words, action and politeness. Tomorrow, I am a ghost in silence.


I am a ghost, a paradox, dead yet living, a king in my own realm.

Yesterday, I was a trace of today. And tomorrow, a silhouette of now.


Constantly, I am a ghost. Always changing in smiles and shape, in hours and days. I haunt myself. Who I am, contradicts who I was and who I will be. And even though I know this, I will not cry, nor frown, and never ever change. For a ghost is a testament to the indomitable spirit that resides within us all. A foolish thing to be ashamed of.

The dream stretched on and on. I never knew where it ended, for it didn't seem to. Eternity came and went and I just sat there and played. Lost with my toys and colours. There was no care. What I'd give to be back there.


The unrest for death is nothing compared to the vacuum, to the sense of loss, the bewilderment of her departure. A clean slate. With her gone, my whole family has disappeared. A gust of wind on the dust of time passing by in the hourglass that pulverizes everything. She was all I returned for. A slight kiss on the cheek, a little nap on her lap, inhaling her clean antique scent. I sometimes emerge from my restless sleep to bold nightmares and night terrors woven of loneliness and disillusions.


I find myself beating at her door, longing for her voice and the warmth of her embrace. The sweet illusion of being back in my childhood home to the faint beat of her ancient heart. She still whispers in my ear a reassurance, like when I was a child, but it is a pitiful lie. Everything passes and everything dissolves. People, things, love and hope.



A zine by Varsha Panikar from their ongoing mixed-media series, Origami Folds, that employs dreams, memories, archive and photography to explore the human body, and uses it as a medium and metaphor for hopeless fragility and hardened impenetrability, from which emerges the themes of identity, dysphoria, commodification of the body, and denial and loss of autonomy as conditions of globalized society and cultures, through the lens of south-Asian, queer and marginalized bodies.

​

Trigger Warning : This piece deals with depression, anxiety, and body dysphoria.

​

Buy on Amazon Kindle below









bottom of page