No exit | Sreedhari Desai

No exit

I wake up with my teeth clenched
like they’ve been holding back a scream
all night,
like the jaw is the last honest thing I own.

The ceiling wears the color of once-white paint
that gave up years ago--
water-stained, smoke-tinted,
a little bowed from holding everything in.

A fly makes its rounds in the corner
like it remembers this place
when it still tried,
like it’s got a deed to the air
and I’m just passing through.

You left the way people leave a small town--
quiet,
without taking the last look they promised,
and the street kept going
like you’d never been there at all.

I keep my phone face down
like it’s a dead animal.
You could call.
You won’t.
The silence has your handwriting all over it.

There’s a kind of rejection
that doesn’t come with shouting,
no slammed plates,
no dramatic last lines.
Just the slow, humiliating truth
of being optional.

I try to drown it--
the bad film playing behind my eyes--
but the mind is a hard room
with no soft corners.
It echoes.

It keeps a careful list:
the way you looked past my mouth
when I said I loved you,
the way your laugh got cautious
around my hope,
like hope was something sticky
you didn’t want on your trousers.

I used to think love was a door.
Now I think it’s a hallway
with my footsteps in it
and no exit sign.

Inside my head

there’s a bar that never closes.
The bartender is me,
and she can’t stand me.
She pours another memory
and tells me I earned it.

Some days I swear there’s a growth in my head--
not just sadness,
something with weight and appetite--
a tumor made of all the things I didn’t say,
pressing on the soft parts
until even a simple thought limps.

I tried to heal once,
tried to be the brave recovery story,
but you can’t stitch up a mind
without it remembering the knife.

Broken isn’t dramatic.
Broken is dishes you don’t wash.
Broken is the leash-pull of thought
dragging you back
to the same corner of the room
to sniff the same pain
until you believe it belongs to you.

And still--
and this is the worst part--
I carry your name around
like a coin I can’t spend,
like a song I can’t quit
that knows all the words to me.

So I sit here
in this overdecorated room,
with my head as the locked window,
watching the day go by
without my permission,

and I wait
for the mind to get bored of beating me,
for the heart to stop begging
at the wrong man’s door,

for something in me
to finally understand
that being unloved
doesn’t mean
I’m unliveable.

But tonight
I’ll probably just sit
and stare
and make friends with the dark
because it’s the only thing
that doesn’t look at me
like it’s already halfway gone.