Parkinsons’ Disease as a Lake Being Drained

For Didi, the woman who shaped me from lakeside mud and cake batter, and

for the lake I grew up beside

Your departure was like a lake being drained.

Pumps drilling away, changing so little

For so many days, then so much all at once.

By the time you were drained half-empty, the kingfishers had disappeared;

So had everything else that was blue and beautiful from my life. Even my body

Has felt different since, the child in me worried about the kingfishers,

The woman in me weary and forlorn from deep waters--- water that made shrunken raisins of my fingers

That cannot rise to the glory of those in your cakes: proud and bursting with juice, like the woman I’d have loved to show you,

But when the love that had held my seams shut for all these years was sucked

Into the stomachs of heartless machines, my heart cracked into a dried lakebed. Where still some storks

And spoonbills wade, absent-minded with grief,

too broken to think of flying again. Birds forgotten to utter bird sounds.

Just like your human lips.

Time that muddied your speech like sweet lake whirlpools in June: time, time that makes all stars fade.

All I felt when I poured my words into your ears was my own tiredness. And my guilt,

Wrapped around my throat like the gold bangle on your wrist that couldn’t move itself anymore.

The rift between the love this water holds

And my soul’s longing for it

Is that of a disease. The final undoing, not of your making,

An affliction whose seed you did not sow,

But whose pain we reaped--- a hole

Shaped like your warm touch, the ending credits:

sun bursting into smithereens on ripples, hot noon wind tearing through my childhood.

So when you left, my two old friends, in close succession, like twins, like lovers,

I looked up at crossed stars

In askance for a shower of impossible moments---

Even after years in your shade

Even after so much time together, so much love,

I feel like I didn’t have enough days with you.

Divsha Ray

July, 2026