Sreeja Naskar

Unlearning the Monster

I still dream about the sound. The crack that split the air, the moment everything tipped. It lives in my body like marrow. I wake up gasping, the ghost of it curling beneath my ribs. There are nights I wonder if it ever really ended. The hand that struck. The voice that broke. I tell myself I was scared. That I didn’t mean it. But I did. Meaning blooms after the fact. I remember the way the silence came — thick, metallic. My name sounded different when they said it. My hands looked foreign, the veins straining through skin. I could trace the tremble like a fault line. But even that feels too kind. As if harm is a thing that simply happens. No, I was deliberate. My rage had teeth. It bit down. I see their face in flashes now. The way the light fractured through the window. The startled gasp, like a child learning the world is not safe. That the people who say they love you can become something else. I did that. I tell myself I’m trying. The therapy. The journals. The weeks I spend scouring the inside of my own head for some small, trembling reason. But there is no reason that fits. There is no story I can tell that makes it not true. I remember the way they flinched when I reached for them. How even tenderness felt like a threat. I haven’t touched them in months, or heard their voice outside the edges of memory. But the echo is there. I carry it with me. In the way I fold my hands, the way I hover at thresholds. I don’t know how to stop seeing what I’ve done. Even the sun through the blinds looks accusatory. Some days I convince myself I’m not the same person. That I’ve changed. Other days I know that’s a lie. What’s a changed person, anyway? Someone who learned how to bury it better? Someone who can say I’m sorry without their voice shaking? I could scrub myself down to the bone and still feel it. The worst part is the waiting. For the moment someone will call it out. You are not safe. I’ll nod. I’ll say I know. I wonder how long I will live like this. My own hands, foreign. My own name, a weight. I ask the mirror what it means to deserve forgiveness. It never answers.

Sreeja Naskar writes about the complexities of grief, memory, and the tender ache of growing up. Her work explores the spaces between love and loss, the intimate and the unsaid, the softness and the ache of being human. Her poetry has been featured in magazines like Poems India and Modern Literature.