Fossils

Past few hours ago feels like an ancient past. Figments of one day separated by half real half dream stretches of time, when I am with you. One single day lasts longer than twenty four hours. Morning feels as if the morning from yesterday. Midnight feels closer to dawn than it actually is. I see notice a multitude of shades. Magenta, white, vermilion. I see denial and a constructive effort to forget. Run over erase. Hear the jingling of trinkets. And insane flashes of light. Look down at the pool of water from above the balcony, and how the stars reflect. The lone few stars in a grey plate of a sky with one dot of a full moon. With its aura rippling on the surface of the water. I see long tumultuous drives in the rain and the storm. A merciless wind and the tearing apart of coagulated water on streets by tires under ruthless feet. Hear confessions of failed love. I see dormant volcanoes within quiet heads.

And him. The other him, the one who is not you. I see him, the faces that he shows me. His stunted bearded well to do face. His mother's and father's. And everything. I sit talking for hours, to check if my heart beats. But doesn't.

I wait for the spaces in time when I see you. You, the alternator of definitions. The twister of destinies. Clasp your hands on my chest to check if you make it rise up and down. Do you drag me out of my perennial comatose? Do you chase me into the jungles of my mind, where I seek exile?

I see conchs, holy fire. And a dozen people. Men with silence draped overtheir faces. Women with indignation. And wailing children. All this, besides the evident pointlessness of our existence.

Besides the one tiny point that we have made already, by peeking into each other, whenever we have the privilege of company, the liberty to experiment. See outside of. That's the part to remember.

Rest of the day's trivia, won't be held anyway as a memory. Or carried ahead. Because it's a mere arrangement of fossils.  

Excerpt

Excerpt from Silver Linings Playbook:

..

Pat: How'd you  lose your job?

Tiffany: By..having sex with everybody in the office.

Pat: Everybody?!

Tiffany: I was very depressed after Tommy died, it was a lot of people.

Pat: We don't have to talk about it.

Tiffany: Thanks.

Pat: How many were they?

Tiffany: Eleven.

Pat: Wow!

Tiffany: I know.

Pat: I'm not gonna talk about it anymore

Tiffany: Okay.

Pat: Can I ask you one more question? Were there any women?

Tiffany: Yes.

Pat: What was that like?

Tiffany: Hot!

Pat: Jesus Christ. Was it like.. older women, a sexy teacher who wants to seduce you--

Tiffany: Made me sit on her lap and do things? Yeah.

Pat: What? You sat on her lap?

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

I quote this copious dialogue from this seemingly romantic comedy of a movie because, it keeps running in my head. On repeat. So the only way out is to write it out. Soon after that Tiffany, dragged down the table cloth, making all the cutlery crash on the floor when Pat casually confessed that he thought she was kind of a promiscuous bitch. Tiffany let lose and claimed to be a crazy slut with a dead husband. She said she opened up to him and he judged her. Now that's an intimate revelation. And this is a long post. 

Excerpt from Unaccustomed Earth:

I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you. It was another winter in Massachusetts, thirty years after you and your parents had first gone away. In February, Giovanna got in touch to say she had heard the news from Paola. A small obituary ran in The New York Times. By then I needed no proof of your absence from the world; I felt it as plainly and implacably as the cells that were gathering and shaping themselves in my body. Those cold, dark days I spent in bed, unable to speak, burning with new life but mourning your death, went unquestioned by Navin, who had already begun to take a quiet pride in my condition. My mother, who called often from India to check on me, had heard too. "Remember the Chaudhuris, the family that once stayed with us?" she began. It might have been your child but this was not the case. We had been careful, and you had left nothing behind.

I don't know why I quote this. Probably because this story is engraved on my heart. Hema (the narrator) married Navin, the man her parents chose for her after she came back from a romantic getaway with Kaushik (the one who was killed soon after). Hema, must have fallen for Kaushik. Must've. But she married Navin, out of convenience. Probably. Later, she quietly hoped that she was pregnant with Kaushik's child, but she knew she wasn't. We always wish, the one we love, left something behind with us. But he doesn't does he? We are so careful, and un-fuckin-touchable, he doen't leave a sign. Not a single strand of hair lying on the floor, not the crushed pillow, or the purple love bite on the shoulder.  

Writing for Dead

Bits of magic floating in my body, making their way hither and thither. Poking their heads out of stretches of skin. Unable to be contained, exhilarated. Free. Blown up by involuntary chemicals of attraction. Of unbailable intoxications, within temporary periods of their existence. Longer periods of absence in between in which the longing for them, rises like a snake and raises its hood up. 

I had dreamt of a woman swimming in a dark pond of water lilies. A lily growing out of her navel, the center of her being. Flapping her hands and waving her calves with the panache of someone who never had the key to everlasting latitude. Making it to the far end of the pond in breaking dawn and drinking dew from the fallen leaves of the hibiscus. Mistress of seduction. Volatile, effervescent. Yet powerful and assertive for being known. Unstoppable, singular, raw.

Suddenly, after I met you, I have become that woman I had imagined of. Swivel ling around her own axis. Losing balance, scattering herself in a moment’s notice. Suddenly I am her now. 

And you, are nowhere around. You, the one who made me into her. I look out for you amidst my wild fixations with myself. With intolerable longing. Narrow my eyes and focus on the distances, look in between the trees where I was bred and born. 

I settle in the whirlpool of dark waters, unsettled. Looking.

And then you come running along. On the edges of the pond. Showing one hand out, as if to drag me out of the water. Save me. Pardon me. And let me go from myself. 

I move further into the water. Unreachable, untouchable. And hide my hands. And a water lily grows out of my navel. 

Strings

On an unknown night, lost on the calender, chasing cars into dawn, undoing piles of dust on the highway. You suddenly have a realization. That you are in a relationship. Don't get me wrong. A wise friend of mine had once told me, this thing works out after there is nothing to look forward to. After you have raised your hands up to the sky and asked the gods to get lost. After you have considered a volatile possibility of spending the entire life mostly alone with patches of company, here and there. After the biggest love of your life has betrayed you and left you scarred. You have a sudden realization, that you may have just gotten into something serious, just about when, you were inclined to think that everything was over. You begin again, with a certain someone, who you have no idea where he was, when you were getting fucked all the way along. Who tends to be right. Tends to..

Just when you give up hope, hope begets you.

Just when you begin to wonder if love is a flawed perfection that could never happen to you, you see that it's not. How ironical is that? And however ironical that may be, it's amazing.

Every first is as amazing. And so is the first relationship. Amen! 

One Love

All the melodrama about love happening only once leaves you as soon as you touch mid of early twenties. Or late teens was it? Pessimistic guess, but whatever. By the time a few further years pass by, you realize, that love happens as many times as you want it to.As in every time you are into something, it feels like love as long as it. Beyond which the sour taste of estrangement lasts a few months and then wears off. There is scientifically researched stuff that says it takes exactly twenty one days to get over someone. Twenty one days. Twenty one stretches of twenty four hours each. Sometimes even the minutes are grueling. It's as good as a physical pain, like I have written in some places. But despite having been the agony unc. to some of my erstwhile readers by listening to how they just cannot heal from a heartbreak (yeah, I am right there with them), I believe that convalescence is a natural reflex. We may use intoxication, meaningless sex, back to back television series, some new passion or even a new love to get past an old one.

It's true, sometimes it's impossible to be completely forget. Because at some point in life, you were so invested, it is difficult to withdraw. So you stay a little hung over with some man from the past even though it has been years, or a decent amount of time, and you've been with someone else meanwhile. And sometimes, subconsciously, you pray for their well being, health and happiness before you go sleep some night, completely aware that your prayers wouldn't make any difference to whoever. Sometimes, while ordering a dessert, you remember how much he liked this and that. And how somehow you missed out on having had more occasions for ordering that. It's crazy, the man isn't around for miles and states and even fucking continents. But yet you imagine, float away with impossible possibilities. You wonder if he still wears the cuff-links you bought him, or does he have a box to put away gifts from the past. Just like you do.

In your darkest of moments you also imagine what a future with him could have been like. Before suddenly coming back to the present and accepting the fact that you fell in love as many times as you wanted to. 

Already

They had the familiarity of old lovers. Like their shoulders would brush and neither would realize. Like something very normal just happened. The spark had been eroded. But the comfort remained. The warmth of their companionship filled the air when they were both together. Even years after. The wondrous age of passion. Now they touched on the borders of whole decades and counted in their fingers, years past since when they had been behind latched doors. That way. But it was hard to rebuild that magic, even in the imagination in their heads, it was closer to impossible than to possible. They had moved on to newer people, fucked, fallen in love, unfucked. Their last memory of togetherness had been so numerously overlapped that it had almost been buried. Oddly enough though, she would bend over the table to get the pepper shaker, without even being aware that her top slid too low exposing a bit of her cleavage. She knew that he wasn't seeing anything he hadn't seen already. That there was no corner of her body that he had left unexplored. And she knew that he knew that she knew. Everyone knew. Everything already. The best charm of having been lovers in the past is this sense of information symmetry. And therefore the lack of need to tell. Or to communicate with a glance, sometimes even without a glance. They could just sit beside, and not feel this compelling need to say. Almost all definitions of a relationship would have run through their minds. More than once. More than twice. So there was nothing left except for this soul quenching feeling every time they spent a few hours between a lifeless few months.

They had been lovers already. So whatever else was left, was hard to find a name for.  

Space

Floors of broken mosaic. Shut hazy windows of white. Strings of clothes hung and forgotten. Stacks of books scattered, in a very impatient design. Names of authors, blank and staring out of hard bound covers. Sometimes illegible in the faint lit darkness. Behind locked doors lives months of unused grocery and a space. A space where souls are caged and souls are freed. Alone together. Together alone.

Love and lust never coexisted as such. She could never be overcome by the need to devour someone she loved. For love was one naive, childlike emotion. Filled with unconditional longing. Lust, on the other hand, is the awakened frenzy of sleepless nights. It is the simultaneous desire to devour and protect. An unlikely amalgamation of making love to, and then leaving the subject limp and lifeless. Love and lust never could be together that way, in her heart.

But in this space, where souls are caged and souls are freed, the two forces have momentarily merged. Become into one.

Hence, when she merges with its mauve walls, sinks into the wooden arms of furniture, he becomes her and vice versa. Reticence leaves them and un-muted, they feel their tongues for the first time and begin to talk. Converse. Unearth their minds, erase borders, coagulate, flow again, diverge converge and submerge. Be together in their minds, more than in their bodies. And lose themselves in a shallow mental orgasm.

This space, makes them, infinite, out of their bounds, super-humans they are doomed to be. For a span of time, seemingly everlasting, and yet inconsequentially momentary. This being the only space, in the whole entire cosmos, where, Love Lust & Talking blend in shamelessly spew magic

That Choking Feeling

There is no huger gas bag full of unmistakable crap than true love. There is hardly anything called that, except that some magical happyness that seems to ever-last, until it doesn't. It doesn't. Nothing lasts. We stick to that hope and bookmark that page in our lives, assuming that, that was our one chance. Our closest brush with heaven.

Later, when with another soul-mate we trade intimate secrets, under covers, when every damn thing is shared, out in the open, naked, un-judged, we open up like we were dormant volcanoes for years. We say every damn thing. To the minutest detail, the names, the incidents, the locations, the timings. Our innermost sacred feelings are spilled shamelessly without a care, with that soul-mate.

And just when we fall on our backs, looking up at the roof, feeling light like an open book, we choke. We realize that there is he, we cannot still talk about. We couldn't. There is so much raw pain, in pronouncing the name itself, there is so much disappointment in his failed promises, that we couldn't dare to uproot him from the holiest of holies in our heart and throw him out homeless. Like an urchin. He wouldn't survive the rain and heat.

What if he perishes. What would we have after that? Nothing is as completely yours as is your sorrow. Dispossessed by everyone else, you tend to look at the man with the same degree of insane passion, as you tend to look at the void created by his absence. And the bag full of unmistakable crap stays rather wrapped, forever.

What you had assumed would bring you a lifelong happyness, continues as a mere choking feeling in your throat. Life!