Unfinished Star on my Chest

 

There is a mole on the right side of my chest...

A dark little witness to the centuries I’ve lived,

A stamp from the universe that says:

“You were loved before you were born,

and wounded long before you learned to breathe.”

It feels like a burnt kiss from a lover I lost in another era,

A lover who died with my name on his tongue,

A lover whose shadow still presses into my ribs

whenever the moon grows round and full, 

Then the air thickens with déjà vu.

Sometimes I touch it and feel the ghost of his hands....shadows of his scent,

Not from this life, but from the one

where I drowned myself in his chest

like a prayer refusing to end,

Where our bodies were constellations mapped in secret,

Where we made love the way stars collapse...

Desperate, 

Inevitable, 

Catastrophic.

My rising sun remembers him

like a forbidden scripture hidden between bones.

My dewy moon dreams about him

as a star I chase across lifetimes,

Always almost reaching,

Always almost losing.

My patient ascendant carries the grief

with the discipline of a cursed priestess

guarding a temple she cannot leave.

They say a mole here means passion...

But mine is a portal, an abruption, 

A door the universe forgot to close.

Every time someone touches it,

I feel timelines crumble,

Past selves waking up,

Old desires shaking the dust off their wings,

As if love were never meant to stay buried,

Love was never meant to remain secret.

In one life, he was my ruin.

In another, I was his salvation.

In this one, we pass each other like comets...

Close enough to burn,

Too far to belong,

Destined to taste the memory

without the body.

And yet....

Every night when I lie in the dark,

The mole throbs like a tiny cursed sun...

Pulling me into a gravity older than God,

Older than the first heartbreak,

Older than the first woman who learned

that desire is both wound and weapon.

It whispers:

“You have died for love before.

You will do it again.

But each death is a transmutation....

and each resurrection makes your soul sharper,

darker, more divine.”

So I let the universe mark me,

Brand me, bruise me, bless me.

I let the past lovers haunt the right side of my chest like a constellation of unfinished stories.

I let destiny press its mouth to my heart

in slow, erotic punishment.

Because some souls are born to love lightly,

But not mine.

Mine was carved for depth,

For surrender,

For death like passion so deep,

For submersion, but not subversion, 

For devotion, but not for provocation ... 

For allocation, but not distribution, 

For the kind of cosmic hunger

that follows you across reincarnations

until the last lifetime

where the heart finally rests.

And until then....

This mole remains on my chest as my compass,

My bruise,

My omen,

My lover from past time...

Reminding me that destiny sleeps beneath my skin,

and desire never dies...

Desire will spark again when I'll meet my future lover...

But, he won't be the unfinished star sitting on my chest, he won’t stain me in black and mark a mole on me then..

©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy

Time Frame: 11.54 pm, IUB Auditorium.