Manual Override Ignored Poem by Pratikshya Satapathy

I left you long before i let go.

I left you inside a vending machine.
Row B: things no one really wants but still buys at 2 a.m.
That's where I placed us.
Behind glass.
Spiral-coiled.
Price unclear.
Every now and then, I'd come back,
feed in exact change.
Something smaller:
a memory of your laugh,
the way your hand used to hesitate before holding mine,
the sentence you couldn't finish.
The machine would hum.
Light would blink.
Something would shift.
But nothing ever dropped.

Once, I shook it.
Hard.
The whole world inside rattled,
packets of dusty apologies, and
a chocolate bar expired years ago.
Still, nothing fell.
People passed by.
They bought easier things.
Water. Chips. Distractions.
No one noticed the way I kept returning,
trying to rewrite physics with persistence.

One similar night, i went into my pocket.
I had the key!
Not dramatically or hidden in some symbolic place.
It was just… there.
In my pocket.
Next to lint and a bus ticket from a day I don't remember clearly.
I knew it existed though.
I knew what it could do.
Open the machine.
Take everything back.
Or throw it away properly.
But I didn't use it.
Because as long as you were inside,
stuck mid-fall,
we weren't over.
We were.. pending.
And I am, apparently,
the kind of person who can live inside pending.
Who prefers the soft torture of 'some other time'
over the clean violence of an ending.
So I left you there.
Walked away.
Changed cities in my head.
Rearranged my routines.
Learned new versions of hunger.
But I never let go of the key.