Always There

By PencilNammed

The sun used to follow me everywhere—
I hated how it burned.
Until the day I met her.

She stood in the sunflower fields,
Hair flying wild like fire,
Eyes burning like embers against the sapphire sky.

Chocolate melting in the sun,
A drop falling onto the yellow petals—
Like the beauty mark near her lips.

Oh—her smile.
Her smile made the sun feel gentle.

She is always there.

I followed her everywhere after that—
Through sapphire summers where the fields blazed gold,
Through orange autumns where chestnuts fell to broken roads,
Wind carrying the smell of crocus and burning plastic,
Through springs when lilacs somehow bloomed through rubble,
Through winters when snow dampened the marching armies.

She is always there.

I went to the sunflower fields that day,
Heart pounding so hard the world seemed more colorful,
Holding that smooth, dull copper in my sweating palm,
Ready to ask her to take my name.
Heart racing faster than I could run to her.

Cold rain soaked through my shirt.
The fields had drowned.
Sunflowers withered, bowed to the falling rain,
The ones still standing forgot how to follow the sun.

And there—
She stood.

She is always there.

Eyes calm as tides,
Staring at the flooded world.

I ran to her—
Reached for her hand—
My fingers closed on nothing but rain.

She is always there.

I asked anyway,
There in the flood, in the ruins,
To the rain, to the ghost, to the memory—
And the answer I'll never hear
Will haunt me more than any refusal.

She is always there.

Every morning I walk past the floodplains,
Livelihood rattling in the back,
And she is standing there.
Same spot. Same stare.
Poor man's copper circling my finger.

She is always there.

I go back every summer,
To the fields where children plant sunflowers
In the craters left behind.
The petals are starting to bloom again.

She is always there—
In the sapphire sky,
In the fire-colored hair of a child running past,
In the chocolate melting in someone else's hand,
In the beauty mark of summer itself.

I was never looking for her like this.
But she is always there.

In the smoke that won't clear,
In the way her laughter still cuts through engine noise,
In the way I've become a ghost driving past ghosts.

She is always there.

The sunflowers don't grow back the same.
Neither do I.

Still waiting for her answer.

Baibhav Singh is a poet and writer from Assam, India, whose work has appeared on international literary platforms. His writing moves between the lyrical and the imagistic, often tracing loss, memory, and the landscapes, real and internal, that outlast both. He is currently pursuing a BS Honours in AI and Data Science at IIT Guwahati, where his parallel life in research and verse continues to inform each other in unexpected ways. “Always There” is among his most personal works.