The Lizard that Waited

I grew up as an extrovert:
I loved going to school,
I stayed out beyond deadlines
with friends who were my life.

At nights when I went to sleep
I saw a lizard on the ceiling,
I wondered if it will fall through the blades
of my running fan.
I often pictured
the green walls of my room
being splattered with blood
and the mangled parts of the lizard
all over my bed and me.

Most of the nights I wouldn’t blink,
afraid that the picture in my head
might come true.
A part of me, scared, often wanted to run away.

Another, however, wanted to stay.

There were moments when I assumed -
if I shut my eyes for a while
then the lizard would just go away.
But, I had come to believe
that in the dim blue light of the zero watt bulb
it had become a voyeur to my voyeurism.

For its upside down world,
I was perhaps a monster.
Unaware it was of the fact,
that I had made it a monster in my head,
the one carrying an equal amount
of blood in its body as I did,
the one with body parts as big as mine,
to create the horrifying picture
of limbs pulled apart,
intestines hanging from the ceiling fan,
a still heart in a corner of the room,
and perhaps, the last thought before the fall,
“will anyone notice that I am gone?”

Yet, I slept peacefully every night
to wake up at five
to get ready for school,
to spend thirty minutes setting my hair,
and to go to the bus stop,
where my lifeline, my friends were.

The thoughts of the lizard
were long forgotten in sleep.
Every day was about living,
while the lizard waited patiently,
for the night to fall;
for my home works to be done;
for my pretend sleep to work
so that I won’t have to eat dinner;
for everyone in the house to go to bed;
for then I opened my eyes again
and found it slithering
around the base of ceiling fan
Again.

Every night the lizard waited
for my meditation on death.