The Cells Don't Know You Poem by Kumar Sen

By now, I am told, every cell in me that lay beside you has been replaced—

the body a slow fire burning itself clean, the ash becoming someone who has never touched you.

I walk around in a stranger. The stranger grieves. I cannot explain this to the doctor who asks if I am sleeping.

I sleep, I tell him.

In the mornings I carry the feeling of a country I have never been to, a language I didn't learn but somehow know the word for longing in.

The new cells don't know your name. They don't know the weight of you at 3 a.m., the particular silence you made when you were deciding something.

They don't know.

And yet—

here is the strange mercy: grief, too, has been replaced. Not gone — replaced. Something new mourning something old, the way a river mourns only the shape of what it passes over.

I am always the same river. I carry the outline of every stone I have left behind

without knowing I was leaving.