The Other Half: A Poem

If half of it is in the stars,
The other half, in your hands.
While the stars might be fixed
You are fluid, and you can flow
To wherever you want to go.

Think of water when you get stuck,
Think of fire when you are cold.
Then, think of Hawking when
life is stacked against odds,
with 2 years to live at 21.

The only way to know
If you are an exception,
Is to live forward.

If you are the only one
You can count on,
Then,
Half the sky is yours,
Half the battle is yours,
Half the bait is yours,
Half the luck is yours;
Yours and yours alone.

The half that stays with us
Isn’t always
A lot,
But it might be enough
To live through-
The thing we’ve been sent here to do.

This other half
Might just be the better half;
The half, that is with you.

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As I turned a year older, I woke up at 2 am with two lines buzzing in my head. It feels romantic to speak of artistic work in this manner, but it’s more likely I had been thinking about the poem for so long that the words crystallized and became this piece. Since it was still early morning, I thought it to be a good idea to gift myself this poem.

Then, as I began typing word after word on my phone, Professor Hawking came to my mind. I read about Prof. Hawking in school, and I’ve never forgotten his remarkable battle with ALS, his witty sense of humor, and his contribution to science. But I also know his personal and family life cracked from time to time. It is probably a sign of being human. When we look too close, cracks begin to appear beneath the powdered skin of ours, and no one is devoid of this feature.

Life shows us all sorts of things, and sometimes it’s okay to believe them too. But then, life only has, at most, the half, the other half is you, and the only way to know what you got for real is to keep trying till the last of life beats in you.

If you feel hurt, if your spirit has been bruised, or if you ache under the mysteriously difficult-to-explain circumstance of life, I hope we both remember that the other half, the better half is always with us. It is us.