Pulse

A pulse. Like a heart beat. A beep that ensures a life. Just one pulse, between myraid stretches of time. My thought behaves like a pulse. It's ridiculous, or may be it's even a disorder. Sentiment visits me for one instant of time. Or rather, sometimes a fraction of that instant. It's so gone in the next instant, its hard to believe it was even here. Right inside my heart. Making me break down and shatter into shards. 


It's like an unbearable moment of pain & recollection. Between droughts of any feeling at all, complete sanity.  I don't know what's tricking me, or I am tricking what. But I don't know how to deal with this anymore. How can I, tell me, how can I understand why. In the middle of a perfectly monotonously healthy day, for one fucking crazy moment, for no reason in particular, I would miss him. And want him so bad, that it would make me cry. But the next moment, I would fail to understand why. And move on even before my heart skipped one complete beat. I fail to understand this phenomenon of a pulse.


One moment I am working, typing away, switching windows, engrossed, sane, checking time, looking at my watch. And stuck in that moment, I remember a peck. Not the dozens of kisses, or the things said & unsaid, or the lines on his face. But just that peck. Out of the blue, in the middle of nowhere, the warmth of that moment shoots back to me. That sorrow, paralyzes me. For once. It's hard not to want to cry. Then I begin to remember the periphery of that moment in the past. But something happens. Something distracting happens, and I don't recognize the lapse I just had. 


Anymore.


The pulse is gone. And has ensured that I am so alive, all over again. 

Getting Past

Let me be. Stuck in this limbo, that I am. Unmoving. Let me just oscillate about my center of gravity. Just don't let that center be you. Leave me. Divorce me. Tear me away. Discard. Throw away. Abandon. Forget me.  Me. Believe that I never was. Believe, in your heart, that I am not, not even now. I don't exist. Our pasts don't exist. And my present is in its entirety a separate entity from yours. We are not connected. We aren't. What-so-ever. We aren't the same. Not anymore. Not ever. You are, merely, someone I happened to know. Some man I met in a bar one night, drunk and hallucinating. The breeze that unsettled my hair, and put it in such disarray, that it won't just settle again. But I have recovered. I ran my fingers through my strands of hair, and combed them fine, just now. Just about now.

So don't come back. Don't even think about it. Don't you dare!

Superwoman

There was this perverted whim I once had. To understand, appreciate and be able to utter, all the slang that language has had to liberty to concoct. But my mouth won't open, whenever, I said the word inside my mind and had the honest intention of making it heard out loud, my goddamn mouth just won't open. Like my lips were pursed with some archaic glue of femininity. A glue that eluded all the obscenity that existed in mankind, and walked away straight faced.

But as life often solves many of its problems like a well-oiled self-sufficient machine, it solved this one of mine. I found a teacher. He would sit with me, devoting hours of sleep deprived nights, until, I said it, until I said that mutherfucking word. Looking right into his eyes, out loud, with the right amount of venom, that deserved to be thrown out of my system. He would even incentivize the whole thing for me. By tempting me with a pout, a peck, even sometimes a kiss, if I was par excellence.One new slang every night. Such that, in a few months, I would write my own dictionary of them. And become Superwoman. Of sorts.

tonite i wonder if it was all my fault. if i should have held on tighter. waited for you longer. compromised a little more. understood and sacrificed like everyone else. fought harder with destiny, to keep you for mine. and not let you go this easy. ya, now it feels easy, in retrospect. then the world was upside down. i was crazier than ever. but i should have been saner. how much could that have cost?

now it has cost me love. 

Men

Just you. Only you.

There is plenty of men in this world. Arrogant blokes. Jealous colleagues. Men on the road who stare at you like you were a porn star. Autowalas cabwalas. Bus conductors that hassle over change. Men who are obnoxiously obsessed with themselves, can speak of nothing else, even if they tried. Really hard. Eve teasers. Potential rapists. Supposedly gay best friends, who aren't exactly gay, and stay with you because they are secretly in love with you. Men who befriend you because they would wanna sleep with your best friend, and your recommendation is their last resort. Seriously. Men who talk to your boobs. Like your face didn't exist. Men who would fuck exclusively the size-zero female only. Men with a fabulous sense of humor. And men whose jokes are funny to no one else. But still, you burst out laughing because you wanna flatter them. Men who are overpoweringly brotherly for no good reason. Men who pursue intellect. And those who pursue flesh. And speak no other language. Men, who have been the indefatigable infatuation of a lifetime. Forgotten lovers. Written about in random pages of diaries. And abandoned right there. Men who have turned on every single nerve end in your body. Men you have wanted to live for. And then die for. The tireless heartbreaker. Middle aged pedophiles for relatives. Men who hover around just because you're a woman and you have a vagina. Men who don't care. Because they are from another planet, supposedly. The guy from the teenage couple walking by, holding hands. That guy in school, first crush and bench mate. The ones in college. Ones that are getting married..Everyone, everyone. There are men all around.

But not you. Only you.

"Love will come through"~Travis'

Years later, she would pause and think backwards. Till this moment when he had looked right into her. For the first time. His glare was piercing. And very honest. It almost spoke for itself.

Years later, when there would be a creeper of money plant growing from a clay pot on their kitchen wall. Against the morning pale filtered sunlight. She would remember this moment.

Of course the journey would have been decades long by then. A couple such more, short of the end. And she would relentlessly stare at the thoughtless creeper, to listen to their story. Understand, respond. Compassionately sympathize. Dispassionately comment.

There would be boxes of glass bangles. Concealed in corners of her shelves, containing alongwith, the void left behind after all the gold that was given away to prodigal inheritors.

In the many rooms of their ancestral house, would hover the mild soapy fragrance of his crisp shirts..and his disintegrating voice. As if, it sent across ripples in the air before finally finding her. Deep inside the house. Bottling pickles. Year after year. Standing in the sun. Growing batches of flowers in their garden. Not a single winter went blossom-less, in those many decades. Pampering pets, street dogs, homely cats and talking parrots.

Albums of black and white pictures. Of pubescent daughters posing by flowers, and sons with toy guns. And weddings, and numerous birthdays. Anniversaries, gone by. And annual days at schools. Year after year. Every year. Keeping moments. Until now. Until now.

Until that very moment, when she would stare at their kitchen wall. And try to remember, hard, almost like an amnesiac.

Matrimony, they say..