Unfuckwithable

I miss home, I miss storms and windy nights. Home is where I be. Where I am me. That place is warm all the time. In summer afternoons, I miss the way storms engulf my home and it rains in torrents. Like it wouldn't stop till morn. After the heat of the day, I miss the way, the rage of storms aroused dormant emotion. The way it awakened the dead of memories from their grave, made me sit beside a flickering candle and feel. Helplessly thrown back and forth in time. The way I danced, unaware of who was playing me, those forces, shadows, blacks and whites and grays. The wind stayed throughout the night, scaring, beating rickety windows, threatening to break and enter. How those storms roared and raped the earth of its last ember of stability, I miss that. Home was the place where love had the power to move and hurt.

This place is cold. It's beautiful, yet it's nothing like home. Here the trees have burst in full into pink flowers, there are insects making fleeting noises, like they would go extinct any day. The cold keeps me from feeling, the fog keeps me from seeing. Hence, I am numb. I am numb, and hence powerful, away from the storms, I don't go back to memories anymore. Here the wind hangs like dead, their silence is unfuckwithable. When I sit out alone in the cold, I realise that there is nothing in this world that even comes close to being as good as being alone and being at peace. My days are devoid of emotion, there isn't a hint of yearning. I do not dream. Defeated by destiny, I have taken refuge in this dark. My patience has solidified into a rude rock, nothing can thaw it. Sorrow gave way to tears, and now tears have made way for something I can't name. I choose to call it peace.

But still, my heart hunts for an excuse to get hurt.
I miss home, I miss storms and windy nights. 

Life is understood in retrospect. There was a point of time when I was sick. And I was ready to trade it off for absolutely anything else. I would be anything but sick, I thought. Now when I think of that phase what shocks me is that I had everything I could ask for. Mom used to look after me like I was a baby, I used to feel at home, be at home. And then you were always around. I realize it now when I have lost you. Shit, I had you and I din't even know. Why? How could I be that ignorant and silly and ask for that phase of time to pass? My days used to be spent in the most usual of ways, except that the hours had your caresses..the nights, your voice to talk me through to sleep. To keep telling me that I would be just fine and this is just a bad time. In no time, I would be back on my feet. I remember how I had just drugged myself with you. I held your hand and prayed that I get well, recover. Because beyond that illness was a tomorrow of you and me, our tomorrow. You made me see the light of day, you filled my mornings with joy and I had no idea. There was this undercurrent of happyness and I couldn't just realize the presence of it. I had everything I ever wanted, and fuck I wanted to get past that phase? What was I thinking? Seriously, what was I thinking.

Throughout this time, there have been many things I haven't been able to tell you. The most of inane of things, the most mundane of things, the minute details of you that have struck me, my perception of you, of us, my childish dreams, and more so the list of things that I feel are wrong with you, the tiny faults in you that I find adorable, but could never tell. But could never tell. I have written these notes to you that I've never shown you. And now, would ne'er be able to show you. While writing them, I had this promise to myself that someday I will watch you read those. But if that would not happen, I would publish it on my blog and sell my sorrow. Selling it helps getting over it.

My Heart

I owe my heart an apology. I have always taken away from it the people it has so badly wanted. And it hasn't stopped beating still. Kudos to its perseverance. But the heart doesn't even exist does it. It's just bloody pumping organ to the left of the chest. And I have no evidence that it is empowered to think/feel. The mind does all the thinking, evaluates options and tells us when to give up on things. Nevertheless, my sympathies for my heart. It has done one hell of a job. I would have called it quits long ago, had I been in my heart's shoes. But my heart doesn't wear shoes anyway.

I owe my heart a thousand apologies, having given it away to people who din't keep it well. For making it travel so much, back and forth, all those tumultuous days of mind boggling confusion. For all those ego clashes, silent battles that I fought and my heart had to be witness to. For swallowing all that violence, for bearing the unbearable and continuing to be with me, within me.

Sometimes I think, I should send my heart away for a few days for a therapy or something, it's broken so bad, like totally shattered, it should be given sometime alone to convalesce, to breathe. I feel genuinely sorry for it and  bow down before that degree of patience.

I have taken away from it every single thing it loved. I have trained it not to remember things and people I've wanted to forget. I have deprived it of its right to feel. I have drugged it with the survival drug every now and then. I have sent it off to concentration camps every once in a while, tortured it to unhealthy extents, never obeyed it. Rather I have fought and trampled to death its every wish, reasoned against it. I have cried and wailed. And my heart, it has only succumbed, succumbed to me. My rage has murdered its free will.

And tonite as I do it all over again, my conscience wants me to apologize. So, I am sorry. But there isn't much I can do about this.. the show has to go on.

N

I have a middle name. Of the many names I call myself, my middle name is the one I never use. Somehow I am ashamed of it. No, it's sounds beautiful. But I am so unused to it that it rings too many bells and puts me on guard. My middle name scares me. I don't like being called N. But it's so sonorous, and feminine, some strangers don't give me a  chance to choose my name and call me N.

And I don't particularly dislike N, it's the prettiest part  of my name. Just that I like it being used only by the creme de la creme, the very special ones, the ones that I want to keep in my life. You know who. I am very possessive about it i.e. I don't appreciate it being used in public places, for the lack of a better word, yes public places. Lingering intimate conversations are just fine. I even remember the way N sounds in the voices of those creme de la creme.

N, strings together all my secret qualities, only those who have the slightest inkling of who I am could call me that. And no, this is not narcissism. To even have the faintest chance of calling me N, you need to know me in all my shades, the gloomy insides, the maddening passion, the stoic indifference, the end of hope. But if you're just an acquaintance, and not here to stay, you have to choose from the other offerings, D, just the letter D makes me the most comfortable. I love calling people with their initials, nicks are so passe'.

But N is ominous you know. I know if you call me N, you're gonna leave me very soon, desert me. And you're gonna be the reason behind a lot of my tears. So yeah, there are just too many terms and conditions involved. You could just chuck the whole idea and call me nothing. You could alter a few lines of fate and not meet me at all. That way, you would save a lot of my exotic tears, thankyouverymuch.

On a parting note, don't call me N. Please. Now it hurts beyond that point. You know which.

Notes of an Endless night

The night doesn't end. It just goes on and on. Sleep eludes. Eyes open wider as the night gets deeper. The irony is, at no point is the darkness impenetrable, impenetrable darkness being the only thing I yearn for. All the time, there is some or the other source of light and I can see myself. And when I see myself, along with I see a void. The void is so obvious that it looms larger than my person. And I can't see anything but it. It is in a place where I used to keep you, untouched, unharmed, like a delicate dream. You were the summation of all that I wanted to become. But that was not to be. It all broke and broke very fast. I ended up empty handed, with a lot of pain caged within. And of course the void that created itself after you left. I had very few options. Just two, rather. I had to choose between love and life. And I am trying to choose life over love. I had to choose between you and me. And I am trying to choose myself over you.

Getting over you is the hardest thing, you wouldn't know. Every moment has become this constant fight to think of things other than you. Every passing hour, to engage my mind in something that takes it away from you, as away as it could. Days remind me how we were and how we could have been. Weeks, of how long ago I saw you last, heard you last.You wouldn't believe if I tell you the sort of things I do, just to not to think of you. But no matter where I go, I come back to where I was, to where I left you, to where you abandoned me. All this isn't taking me anywhere. Take my word for it, it's really feeling harder with time. Getting over you has been the hardest thing.

I am failing at loving you, I am failing at getting over you. Tell me, what should I do.

I run around, lunging for fresh air, I lock myself between four walls, trying to curse myself to sleep. It doesn't work, I try getting lost, try forgetting things, but no that doesn't work either. One moment I sit alone, I can't help crying. When I am with others, I just pretend normalcy. Yes, that's it!

This pretension has taken me a long way though. I have become a pathetic human being. I try to convince myself that I am this stone cold woman with no emotion, no warmth. Who doesn't miss anyone, who doesn't need anyone. I picturize a life in the future with just me in it. But it's not working. One moment of weakness, and I give out those soul shattering wails, begging you to come back, take me along. It's unbearable, you wouldn't understand.

..

Men in my Life -5

There is a sense of shame that I associate with this particular title. But mostly as about other things I am shameless and on your face, I would stick to that. Men in my Life -5. 


I had moved into a big city, the lights scared the hell out of me. I often lost my way. Also, I had this terrible habit of getting on the wrong bus and reaching the place I never intended to reach. Having done this many times, I was getting used to my foolishness with time, enjoying it in a way. Living alone, not yet all alone. In my mind was him. Almost all the time. 


It must have been Friday night. You know how people in big cities go crazy on Friday nights. TGIF and all. I mean I totally understand that kinda crazy outburst after the weeklong suffocation and empathize. But when that chokes all traffic, and you literally glide your way out in an hour out of a stretch of road that could be walked through in ten minutes, you say happen to say a lot of things inside your mind. I didn't. I was a good girl, apparently in love. I was enjoying stuff, strangely when you think you're love, the moods are better, aren't they? You seem to have a happier outlook towards life. 


So in this mad rush of chasing some deadline, somehow I hadn't realized that I had stayed longer than usual. Then someone screamed, dude it's Friday night. Go home and sleep! And I thought, I should get going. Mom had pestered me on the phone too, a couple of times to leave that place, but somehow I get so used to not listening to her that it's become a habit. So there I was, stuck. Waiting for a bus, beside the highway. And none of them came my way. There were a lot of indifferent others too who were sensible and could wait but I got into a bus which dropped me at some crazy place. The place looked familiar but I had to literally stop strangers and ask them what place was that! 


Then after a lot of coaxing and cajoling I got a rick. He wasn't even close to giving any assurance. Bleh, another risk! Some fly-overs were totally choked, the traffic was redirected and this guy, the rick guy i.e. kept taking me up and down the same way for like twenty odd minutes and the meter crossed like a hundred bucks. I decided to take a call. My place was near a lake of sorts and I could see that lake already. So I trusted my instincts and told myself, I would find my way if I walk.  


But I had edged closer to my tipping point. I was kinda getting a li'l scared. The road beside the lake was pitch dark and there were lot of strange men. Also, I tipped over and hurt my ankle a little. I am really good at such things. There was no point in calling mom up, she would get more scared than me. I just needed someone to talk to and walk.And walk. So I sms-ed him, 'I am lost :('. He called back immediately, which was cute. Then followed a conversation, I don't much remember. I was so much in it, I didn't make it a point to make a note of anything. For me, that was so real, I almost saw the future in it. I was foolish and I don't enjoy that kinda foolishness anymore. But he was asking me to stay careful and be fine because he was there, you know, giving that protective touch all the time. It was weird, unexpected of sorts. Very caring and loving, might I sound more cliche'-d. The darkness and the strange men didn't matter to me anymore. I hadn't felt that cared for in my entire life. It just struck me in the wrong place, my heart! 


And then I took many modes to reach what I called home then. He was there with me all the time. It was almost like he had walked down all that distance with me. Brought me home. And I think I should stop right here! 

In the Land of Women

Waiting alone on a Saturday afternoon, resisting to order a cappuccino right away is not the most pleasant thing to do. Worse, when one has a slightly tremulous mood to deal with. I was looking beyond the glass walls, trying to catch a recognizable face in the crowd, between erratic intervals of time, wondering if she was stuck in traffic, or if she had forgotten the meeting altogether. I rummaged through my purse, fished out the cellphone, almost clicked the last dialed number which was his, to ask if he had taken the pains to remind her that I was here waiting, not ordering cappuccino. But promised myself a deadline of another five minutes and placed it on the table, waiting for it to beep or something. That's the problem, I always wait for a call, rather than making it myself, it isn't as a big a deal as I make out of it, or is it?

Meeting his sister was the first big step. Rather a leap. Getting to know her was the first tick in fulfilling the Terms & Conditions for marrying him. And we are very particular about our T&Cs. She, being the younger sibling, must have been the more pampered one. When it came to me, he was no good at pampering you know. Calling me 'sweetie' was all about it. But she was brought up like some princess, I was made to assume. So was I expected to treat her like one? I hadn't the slightest idea, as I fidgeted and watched her enter the cafe'. The many photos of her that I had seen, all those mental snapshots of hers, embedded with his dictations of her mannerisms, left me momentarily. She wasn't as tall as her brother, thank God! The walk was no less suave though.

Smiles felt more than obvious. It was supposed to be all goody-goody. Except that I was a total carnivore compared to her religiously vegan habits. And I wasn't told so, unfortunately. The man always skips intricate details, rare trait in the family considering his sister's carefully manicured nails. I began hunting for the color of her nails in her dress. We do all that, don't we? She too must have been toying around with ideas and visions, colors and emotions, and me in her mind. Now that I was stealing her brother away, or so we felt.

Too Soon

How fast is not too fast?
And how slow is just alright?
Tell me,
which one is
Just about the right pace
To fall in love
with You

Because, tomorrow
I don't
want to cry alone regretting
That I gave in too fast
Or have that question
in my heart,
If you deserved some time
a few days more
and Love, a second chance

Because, today
I am insane
and all I do is cry
Darlin, darlin..

Just about the right pace to fall in love
Is this too soon? Too late?
What would you do
Had you been me?

Also, I feel
shaky and lost
Vulnerable, like never before
Powerlessly, in love
May be

Yeah
So tell me..
before I sleep off
tonight,


..

Cold's here, again

All the light is turned off. What appears is a faint shadow of the tree on my window pane, and I can't bear to look at it. Months ago, in a similar time I had written something called Misanthrope looks for Misanthrope. But that's not true. A Misanthrope doesn't look for a Misanthrope. She doesn't look for anyone. A misanthrope is always lost in narcissistic despair. And what scares her/me now is the faint traces of daylight that have entered the sky. Yes, day light scares me. It tells me that though the day is still away, the night has almost come to an end. And if I don't get sleep in the next few minutes, I probably never would. I start counting minutes and this chase inside my mind, puts sleep further away.

The best part about winter is the long nights it brings along. They give better alibis to people who want to hide behind their ownselves. To dream longer, to stay away longer, distant, pretending ignorance and convincing themselves of it. The one other thing about winter is the easy anonymity it brings along. I could just hide under layers of jackets and sweatshirts, pull a scarf over my face and walk down into unknown streets, without the fear of being recognized. But the one fucking thing bad about winter is that it's so fucking cold. It doesn't let me do anything but hibernate, and sink deeper and deeper into my apparently non-existent sorrow.

About what, I don't know. I might just figure it out if I wanted to, I have enough of degrees for that. In my domain, everything almost is supposed to have one logical reasoning. And if it doesn't then well, chuck it. But the issue is that I don't want to. It's quite an oxymoronish thing to say, but may be, just may be, I do not want to be happy. Yeah, that could be it. Because you know, nothing, practically nothing makes me happy for a considerable period of time. And I would rather not fake being happy, it's like faking an orgasm. So let's be sad and let's be me. My foolish pursuit of happyness has been so volatile, and I have been so capricious that sometimes settling for a status quo seems like the more reasonable option.

I never write about beauty. It's been my controversial thing and it freaks me out why haven't I ever written about it here, in the ten million posts I have published since the beginning of time. I always thought, I would be too biased to write about it. Beauty or rather the dearth of it has screwed my entire life up. And that's why I have a lot of bias against it. And I never wrote a word about it fearing that my bias will drip from almost each one of it. But now, I guess things are different. At least, they should be. I am much older, have been through a lot. I have lost some of my bias, some of it yeah. In the process of losing the rest of it. And this cold, this biting fucking cold, makes me want to write my perception of it, beauty hah! So write about it, I will.

yasp 9

At school, I used to have this class from 12:30 to 2:00. I was in that class, staring at the clock, watching the hands of it chasing each other, but not fast enough and I was so losing my patience. I made a pact with myself not to look at it in less than five minutes, but that wouldn't be. I was getting so bored to death. I had this notebook open on my table, some of the ink had spilt on the sheet, white. One corner of it had random designs, that never ended up beautiful. At some other random patches, I had tiny poems scribbled, in illegible italics. There were a few names, written in uncrackable codes and messages to people who owned those names within inverted commas. Some random words heard within the four walls, were noted down too. Anything to kill time. Whispers in the air. Heartbeats heard, all waiting. I was cursing the prof for asking us to down the laptops, how on earth was time supposed to pass? It would skid, slip and fall and come back to where it was, but not move. I would scribble some more on that notebook, I remember the neat spiral binding of it, the ends of which I had twisted, impatience. I had a tonne of things on my mind, a couple of assignments, reports, some competitions to be done away with, presentations ah, the lack of life in life. Normally I wouldn't waste my time thinking about the people around me back then, they wouldn't change anyway, you hate them, you love them, do not consider them to be a participant in your life, they will anyway be. But when locked in a room with them, I would generously spare a thought, some of them I would hate more, some I would love less. And so, it would strike 1:30. The longest half hour of our lives. The hands of the clock would go off to sleep. The prof wouldn't stop, no mercy, incessant she would be. People would laugh, people would understand the big jokes. I would be locked in my own senses, trying to decipher a language none of these had an idea of. Away, scribbling things, spilling more ink, on white sheets, filling life. 


The worries of life look so small in afterthought, funny and silly, funny because silly. Years down the lane, bigger sorrows confront me, bigger failures come my way. Strange how the enormity of life is inflated with time. The past sometimes looks so tiny, insignificant when put beside the present which totally engulfs us. Yeah.


But you know what the good news is? I am still in that class, and that was not a long time ago, it is now. The moments haven't moved. Time is stuck at 1:45, somewhere in the longest half hour of our lives. And I am busy doing silly things, scribbling names, thinking of people, with another thousand things on my mind, away from the commotion of the class, lost, but still in there, in that moment. Feeling every one pulse of time.

Just Friends -2

Just Friends-1

We lived in our exquisite world, scarce of outsiders.Like we had been caged between parentheses. Him and I. He was my last refuge from love. No, I didn't love him. He was the man I ended up with, after hope left me, love failed me. Almost two years of time, felt like a lost layer of life, in afterthought. When he was with me, I engaged untiringly in the process of convincing myself that, it was not him, it was not anyone. After he made a quiet unexpected exit, without an explanation, I was shocked. During our last days I was coaxing myself to believe in the possibility of a life sans him. Later, I gave up. I missed him. Though he left, he probably never did. He became this vague outline of his previous person, my friend, and constantly loitered around my conscious.

We never believed in gifts though, me being the girl, sometimes he pitied my faint craving to be gifted something, anything. Once on the walk back to the hostel, he had plucked out a few wild lilies, tied them with my hair band, put in a few leaves and handed it over to me and started laughing like  he would collapse any moment. It was my birthday, nineteenth. I smiled too. But to make things even, I bought him an ash tray with skeletons and skulls on it, just to remind him that every time he smoked, he was indeed moving closer to becoming one of those skulls. I don't know if he uses it still. Or may be his girlfriend made him quit. I don't know. Has he moved on? I apparently have, now that I'm married.

We didn't call each other except for a first few times. I used to ask him about his art, the reason why he quit college, or so he told me, I never believed him though. I had always loved to watch him paint, how the random colors on his canvas took shapes, and how he never even distantly considered my suggestions for his work. And to avenge that, I never let him read my poems. He mustn't have had the slightest idea what I wrote about. Sometimes, many times, I wrote about him. Things might have been different, had he known. Or, I don't know.

Becoming Me.

My patience doesn't like being tested. You have to get this straight. My emotions paralyze me beyond convalescence. It doesn't look like it in the first go. I give an appearance of a totally mentally sanitized, mature, peaceful woman. But the truth is that I am burning within. Only I can't show it. The chaos inside me has given up on its urge to settle down. It can never, it can never. And I realize that this is what has kept me going, till this day, till now. My only confidant is me.

I am not an antisocial. I have scores of scores of pals. I do. I chatter, I gossip, I bitch. Sometimes, I am so normal, that I cheat myself. But as the night comes on me, and I am in the dark and I close my eyes, none of these companions are there, absolutely none. It's a curse that I have, I can see beyond now, into tomorrow, I can see people falling apart right from the moment they get together. And away, I run. Chasing nothingness. This is roughly how I have been becoming me.

Aftermath, just a few, one or two, could afford to break into the sphere of my conscious. Sad but true. Everyone but these one or two, has lost their ability to lodge an effect on my being. That's the life of a cynical, misanthropic loner for you, in a para or two. But yeah, the one or two have the privilege of emotionally paralyzing me beyond convalescence, they are always at the back of my mind, tickling my nerves, kidding around with my moods, dictating things to me. Always, always, always. So much so that I am tired,  yet never tired enough. The mission of their lives, is to test my patience.

But. My patience doesn't like being tested.So, let me Be.

Only Be.