Shownotes
Lebensabschnittspartner
Sarthak Mukherji
Lebensabschnittspartner.
Life - section - partner.
A gorgeous German distillation
of something about as mystifying
as splitting an atom and the violence that follows,
the wondrous shine.
Have you ever sat with your hand on your side
covering a pain you can't quite understand
but as soon as you are diagnosed
a relief washes over you as this phantom
is lassoed by a definition.
Here is Lebensabschnittspartner for your wound.
They were your whole heart, your soul mate
but only till the expiration date.
They were before the March and April of you.
The right person for the time, the better loved and lost
rather than never loved at all.
Exactly who you needed to push you
and pull you, kicking and screaming,
into exactly who you needed to be now.
Your Lebensabschnittspartner.
Come lie in me, they said.
I shall be the snow to soothe you
before the spring of you rolls forward.
I will be gone but I shall water the earth
you will bud from, whether I want to or not.
I was the object of your ire,
thank me for the scars you acquired.
For the way I burned you so utterly.
For lessons you learned not later but early.
I brought you to the brink of the wire,
gave you the sating drink you desired
but oh, did I make your poor heart stir,
call me your Lebensabschnittspartner.
You breathed them for days, months, years.
They sat in your lungs,
ran the circuit of your body from legs to ears,
lapped it with their tongue
but now they’re just somebody
and you're not as young.
You look at the clock of your life,
the way it ticks forward.
You can't deny the gears
behind the face of it,
every misshapen one.
The way they clambered into place,
day after foreign day,
amongst the mechanism of your being.
Just another cog
but a whole new chain completed.
Is there anything as subtle
yet obvious as growth?
But you were there once, together.
Not three gears apart
but arm to goose pimpled arm
in a garden staring up at borrowed starlight.
Behind a house you both loved,
sometimes lamented,
for its warm corners and mouldy windows.
For the space it gave you,
the way it filled that space with bills.
You eventually left home behind for work,
or after you broke something
soft between those walls
and ran from the wreckage,
too much to clean.
You left because calling a house your home
does not qualify as rent
and all the real money was spent.
Take pictures in all the rooms you forgot to
in the midst of contentment,
in the midst of surviving.
Every room a living room, well lived rooms.
Your Lebensabschnittshaus.
The beloved chaos that is your dog
joined you on the deck, nuzzled your neck
just after lifting a leg by your one surviving plant.
They do not gaze at the light in the sky
just at you, as if you gave a tender glow.
Your dog taught you patience,
that after a day of reigning in and nipping
you will still abstain from moving
just to avoid losing the pressure of
something using you as a bed.
You are rest
for a few more years, for the rest of theirs.
Their mild weight stays in your lap
long after.
The one command they knew well,
stay.
Your Lebensabschnittshund
pissing on your Lebensabschnittspflanze.
In that moment, surrounded
by the currentness of your life,
an Abschnitt of your life,
do not worry about the next.
Accumulate with borrowed starlight.
Fight that moment,
embrace it,
weep for its passing,
for what it brought you and chiseled away.
You have no idea how long it will last,
how it made you,
you.
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