Mathematics Fails.

I perceive the thought as it enters my mind
and then quickly brush it away like a mosquito
that I know will return once it has spotted
me, a half-hearted attempt, with clear intentions.
And now, like the mosquito that keeps buzzing
near the ear and then flies away only to buzz near
the enclosed ear of a tortured soul again, the thought
enters my mind when I see my mother’s loose skin
and the father’s pepper hair, and the slow, yet steady,
constantly increasing messiness of the house,
as my mother’s knees give way to the arthritis and
notice the increasing summons of the plumber or
the guard or the electrician to pick out something hidden
in the high shelf as my father’s backache prevents it, and
the reply that I don’t get when I greet ‘good morning’.
my hung-over-sleep voice rarely above a whisper
as they don’t hear and the quivering of my father’s hand
when he signs a cheque and the uncertainty of my
mother’s foot as she places one step after the other.
And I realize that though I may have known them all my life
and though they may have been there for me (physically or mentally)
all my life, I’ll be there for only half of theirs. And then sinks
the grim reality that there is probably only a small fraction of their life left
that they will spend with me, and with the planet, after which
they will cease to exist but in the memory, which will continue to haunt
me till the day I take my last breath on this planet, my entire life.
And yet even in that half life, they do so much for us that even
a hundred thousand lifetimes wouldn’t be able to pay
that back right at them . And I think how in that half life, they can
know us better that we can ever know ourselves.
It’s funny how promptly the rules of mathematics change, where
one will always remain less than half. One half life less than a full.
Slowly, as the mosquito leaves once he has sucked enough,
so does my thought, and as the mosquito leaves behind a  red sore spot,
the thought leaves behind a faint resolution to make the most of
the time that I have left with the two angelic souls that I have
and who I love most deeply and without whom, I shall always be
half.

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