Strangers
By: Hamsi Radhakrishnan
Tags: Strangers, Poem, Poetry, Long Poem, Loneliness

I

You could have been my best friend.

We could have been secret glances and misplaced toothaches,

long somber afternoons, pouring our hearts open over iced lemonade,

my grandma’s recipe in your refrigerator,

your jeans in my laundry basket.

We could have been two strands of hair so knotted up

that our ends had to be snipped apart

before we belonged to ourselves again.

We could have been fairy lights and camping tents,

sixth grade lunch boxes,

bargaining secret crushes with quality time,

same shoe sizes and stolen sandals.

We could have been candle shopping before anniversaries,

spent our fifties talking about high school,

had so many inside jokes that they stunk up the room like dung beetles.

We could have been cider sipping gossip queens,

matching flower crowns on warm spring days,

two charms on a friendship bracelet,

macaroni pieces stuck together for our mothers,

consequent words on a lullaby,

broken syllables that fit so comfortably under everybody else’s tongue.

We could have been two hands on the same clock

only ever feeling like the day had begun

when our arms interlocked.

You could have been my muse

I would have sung serenades

on how your sleepy voice reminded me of vacationing in the Caribbean,

made charcoal fit in my fingers as easily as your teeth fit in between my sentences.

An irreversible cure to every writer’s block-

I might have laid poetry on the colour of your eyes

as they lit up at a birthday cake,

stood behind lenses trying to trap that smile

the way your soft hair trapped rays of light;

could have hidden hints of you

in every song, every story,

every secret thought thrown into the wind

until my art got so heavy with

your arms in my brackets

and your voice in the guitar riff.

II

How do you make a stranger?

Like a lost handshake in a crowded bus

our finger tips barely scraping off each other

as we fought for the same rung.

You could have been my best friend

but you were a paper cut on a summer night

when I was a December hailstorm with thorns in my hair.

You could have been my muse

but we were the same alphabets

in different languages,

pronounced in ways the other couldn’t hear.

Or even,

we were parallel roads

sharing neighborhoods and families

perhaps even meeting on barbecue nights and city carnivals

but you were an entire parking lot

when I was a mere speed bump-

you had people waiting on you,

while I was just being cautious.

So how do you really make a stranger?

Not in different hemispheres, but in the same room.

You take the muses and the best friends,

the promised kind of love that never ends,

you stack up on the memories

like study sessions and double dates,

out of state tournaments

and open mic nights,

and then you wait

until you erupt just like you had begun-

an under-cooked decision,

or an overcooked white lie,

a misunderstood statement,

or a betrayed secret.

You storm away in directions that don’t lead home,

stop holding hands because you’re too busy clenching fists-

and maybe one day the pain will melt and the anger will die,

and you find each other in awkward silences during midnight wishes-

misshapen hugs to appease the cold,

escaped good byes and accidental encounters,

but after, when I call out for you,

and a head turns,

it doesn’t belong to you anymore.

like the perfect stranger is made out of the last person who was.