If feelings were a slide under the microscope

I flood the smear with stain. It clings to what it chooses. 

And the rest slips away as i tilt the slide.

I hold them under the light. And tiny landscapes spill into focus. 

Love. It is not pure red. 

Even with the perfect stain. You will find pale vacuoles where fear has made a home. 

The nuclei is stuck to an edge, restless, as if bracing for loss. 

Grief is not all dark. 

It has filaments of tenderness

That glint like silver under halogen light. 

Joy is not perfect. Its cytoplasm has hidden fractures. 

Fault lines. Where old sadness still seeps in. 

The edges are uneven. As if joy had rushed too quickly. 

Longing. Looks empty from a distance. 

But if you magnify it up close, you would see thin filaments stretching beyond the frame. A proof that longing is both absence and fierce hope. 

Anger. The field burns with swollen cells. 

Some are ruptured. Debris all over. 

Yet in one tiny corner some small cells are intact. Anger protects the tenderness it cant show. 

Peace. You would see orderly cells at first. 

Smooth and undisturbed. Like still water.

But when magnified, there are fracture lines across the surface.

Echoes of old storms that taught peace how to hold. 

Nothing on the slide

is only just one thing.

Even the brightest fields

hold shadows in their corners.

Even the darkest

are threaded with light that too bright to name. 

If feelings were a slide under the microscope,

We would realise that we could not have existed without the wound. 

That we are all made of the anastomosis

of breakage and bloom.

-Dhruvi Joshi