The Pause After The Fall Poem by Bishnupada Sethi

When days glide on their greased rails,
we skim the surface—
coffee steam, traffic hum,
a child's laugh at dusk—
no ripple deep enough
to tilt the mirror inward.

Then the phone rings at 2 a.m.
and the world cracks open
like a dropped bowl.
We kneel among the shards,
fingering each jagged edge:
Here is the last joke,
here the unsent letter,
here the cough we called a cold.

We rewind the reel—
birth cry, first step, wedding bells—
searching for the skipped frame,
the warning flicker
before the screen went black.
Could a word, a touch,
a different turn
have held the reel on its spool?

Death is the great accountant.
It tallies every breath,
then closes the ledger
with a soundless snap.
Yet the ink keeps bleeding
through the page—
into questions that have no column:
Where does the laugh go?
Who keeps the unsent letter?
Does the soul,
unhooked from flesh,
still feel the weight of our grief?

I have read the maps
drawn by those who returned:
Anita, luminous in her tumor's fire,
Brian tracing past-life scars,
Ishita greeting old ghosts
in hospital corridors.
They speak of corridors without doors,
of light that remembers every name.

We forget the nine dark months
we floated, heartbeats braided
with another's.
No memory of that salt country,
yet here we are—
proof of a journey already begun.

So I stand at the fresh mound,
palms full of marigold and ash,
and whisper to the wind:
If this is only a chapter,
let the next page turn gently.
Let the ink of our love
stain every life to come.

Somewhere, a new reel starts spinning.
The dance goes on—
unseen, unheard,
until the music finds us again.