Sabbatical

She took a sabbatical. A two week trip by herself, probably the last attempt to feel rootless freedom. Before sitting back and planning a life out. She traveled to a couple of least known places she had known on the map. As a child poring over geography books.
Now she took that trip, with barely a backpack and slippers. No etiquette. No camera either. 

On the afternoon of the third last day, she landed at his place. Her college boyfriend. His single bedroom cum living room cum kitchen place, remote, away, falling off the edge of her geography map. She wanted to see him with no particular intention, as such. There was an ember of love though, but repeatedly wiped off by the series of other guys that followed. Walked his footsteps. Toward and then away. But she chose him over every other. 

After she had slept a straight eight hours to shed her fatigue of days, they nibbled from take-aways. Quietly, reminiscing. Remembering. Then loudly shivering the walls with laughter, with their stock of forgotten jokes. Legs were pulled and released. They flashed back and forth. Crushed their stoic adult poise with the memories of their once adolescent love. Then crushed the sheets underneath when they mildly made love, and then jumped to intervals of wild fucking. It was difficult to begin with and they missed how they then could never steal a moment to kiss when back in college. She quite felt at rest. 

The day after he took her for a drive in the shamble of a car. She bought trinkets and stoles. A pair of pricey yellow boots which were seen and returned. And dozen other memorabilia. No pictures though, except the one on his cell phone, which he swore he wouldn't put up anywhere. She posed for him before a crumbling temple. The orange hue of the broken bricks went with her sunset dress and the blood-burst in the evening skies.

That night they cooked. Their amateur culinary expertise, with ample doses of faded lust simmered lumps of chicken. Stoned, their brains drenched in vodka, they slightly fell in love again. But markedly only slightly. 

On the third day, she put on shades all day, because she didn't want him to look into her eyes. At all. Until he saw her off. 

On her wedding day, she opened messily one parcel with her henna smeared hands, till elbows, to find those yellow boots and their sunset picture. 

Inkling

There is that specific moment when words deny you the privilege to own them, when they slip out of your fingers and get lost in a forest like naughty little children. And you are left abandoned in turn, gasping like a worried parent. Sweat trickles from your temples and you feel eternally blank. Because it is them that you assumed you possessed in entirety. And suddenly you realise you were indeed powerless all the long way. You are now distraught, even feel conspired against.

Because all these years, when you wove stories about the imaginary, women and men, insane women and thoughtful men, circling about loss and love, you thought you were just about okay. When two or three or four stopped by, paused to read those stories about the imaginary and breathed in lungfuls of cold lonesome air, you thought you were good. When you met people who knew you through those stories only and per se were complete strangers to the real person you were, you felt almost proud. You lived in your unfinished stanzas, on the nib of your pen,in the creases of your diary, over the edges of all the minds you touched. When you went through your writing from the past, and you couldn't relate which collation of sentences was based on which real life episode of loss, you felt like God.

But now look here, what you have done. Where you have gotten yourself to. You have reached a gauntlet, fleeing the wavy ups and downs, where you cannot express, with a bare approximation what is it that you are thinking. Whatever is on your mind, never gets your mouth. Everything's lost midway, or kept back as dirt letting only zilch filter out. You feel tonguetied, fatigued even ashamed. Ashamed. Losing your grip on the one tiny thing.

Then the doubt creeps in. Are you not able to speak up because you cannot translate thought into speech or is it because you have not a hint about whatever it is, that thought. Ideas feel like scattered dots. The brain is but a grey mass. With too many complex equations knit into one. 

And the heart. That is unravelable. 

Words are so superficial, to sum it up. Thoughts are inches more deep. And feelings are the deepest. Sometimes, they leave no trail, not even an inkling. 

Being Monogamous

I see lovers biting into each others' throats, not all, but some of them, standing at the edge of their wits not being able to stand each other, and looking into absolute darkness. Though I am condemned enough to feel that being in love and feeling loved in reciprocation are two things indispensable, I also happen to be one of those scholars who strictly believe in the fading away of love. It's a contradiction. 

When I recite names from the past, some recall emotion, but mostly otherwise. Also, isn't love, like happiness a very very momentary emotion? Even if love were to last more than that moment, and I do believe it does sometimes last months, even years, the realization of it, comes only in those few bright moments of the mind. 

Down that lane, which we have all been through to be however screwed up we are today, is that menagerie of men. Some we undermine as infatuations after we moved on, some we still doubt if we were in love with, some we have begun to hate, some for who we feel nothing more than cold indifference, some who have grown to be strangers, and the rest who have hugely contributed to this blog, unknowingly though. Sometimes I wonder if I should be charged guilty of having been infatuated these many number of times. Should I be accused of naming songs after the ones who sent me those? Of naming folders in my laptop after those who never paused to care? Of writing poems for those who never gave me even a card? Of naming my dresses after the ones I associate them with? The red one with black polka dots after A, the one with the purple print after B, the golden one with embroidery after C? 

Life is not as tragic as it seems, it's rather funny. In few bright moments of the mind, even bordering on ridiculous. And honestly, there haven't been as many as I make them seem to be, just that I exaggerate to escape. Just the few, chosen ones, who were mismatched with me, by accident, inside the dull chambers of my mind. But now that, it matters, now that love has come to count, and is to be valued in return, I wonder if I should exactly consciously feel that I have been roughly polygamous, harboring affection for different men during separate phases of time. 

Kink.

Many a time, it feels like, we are watching a movie that we faintly now remember that we have watched before. As each scene unfolds, we recollect it from our shallow memory, though to begin with, we felt like we hadn't ever seen it. Hasn't it ever happened to you? There is this duality of experience, of the beating curiosity of what is going to happen next, and the moment it happens, a boredom settles in, because we knew that was how it was going to turn out. A suppressed sense of repetitiveness drops by home, life becomes an odd summation of our failed projects. How we never got that job, never got to meet X, never traveled to the city afloat on canals. Though the surreal motivation stays that we aren't dead yet, and we do have the time to do whatever we want. Yet, we never break the rule, erase the line and run off, like a wild child chasing our dreams into the wilderness. We do not outgrow the safety of status quo. And this way we witness a lot of tomorrows become yesterdays. 

Only sometimes, the purpose of bad fate is defeated, and we drip with ecstasy. Quite like the substance itself. The vigorous powers of pure love and undiluted freedom, however momentary can make many a banal life worth its salt, sweat, blood and tears. In those certain moments when we get tired of breathing in gasps and fretting and cursing, life chooses to make a complete fool of us by showing us one momentary glimpse of what having everything we ever wanted contained in a moment could mean. Saying just that it sweeps us off our feet would be an understatement. Saying that our heart, our tortured fossilized unloved heart, leaps out of our thoracic cavity would be an understatement. So I wouldn't say much, would I?

In one go, it heals the estrangement for forgotten friends, our regret for lost career goals, our failed nomadic ventures to be a traveler of the world, the sense of awkwardness that we never per se fit in. Fuck, it almost begins to heal our heart, our tortured fossilized unloved heart. 

And sometimes, it feels so surreal that I hope it's not just the goddamn sun in my eyes.  

Breaking the Mould

Learning to disappoint is vital. I barely do it. I fit into the mould with absolute precision, the mould that is crafted by expectations of everyone around me. I don't think I have genuinely disappointed anyone in the world with the honest exception of my boss.

I do exactly what is wanted of me, supposed anybody with my age and roots would do. I wrote all the exams I was supposed to, went to colleges that were understood to be good, slogged in a regular job because money and recognition are considered necessities, cultivated behaviors that were mostly socially acceptable and harbored guilt whenever I deviated. 

But I should unlearn the above, because I indeed should peel away the sense of shame. I haven't done it yet because I am worried of causing a lot of disappointment, of falling beneath. Now, better than never, I am wanting to break that mould. I want to be unafraid of letting down my, friends, family, admirers, even my indifferent gazers on the street. 

I got an extremely crazy haircut done today. I look like a patient of dementia, or an insane cow girl now. I can't tie it up, or let it down. It looks like a mad crow has munched away my mane. The hair, doesn't go with who I have been, nor does it go with who I so desperately want to be.

Before it grows back to its past original shape and size, I just hope that this, makes me learn to stand the ridicule. Makes me brave enough to cause disappointment and move on for the greater reason. I hope that and more love to come by me, inspite of who I be.

Anyway, if you love me, you would love me anyway. Won't ya? 

Sold Off.

After years of sitting on the edge of the plateau, standing ankle deep in cold ocean water, craning up to look at the sun between tall green conifers, after years of losing umbrellas, twisting one's ankle and returning home bare-feet and limping, songless, writing in childlike diaries, saving leaves between their pages, till fossilized their thin veins and vein-lets showed, walking nonchalantly across aisles of gift shops on valentine's, of gazing amazed at kids holding hands, buying new dresses with noone to see, noone to say, getting a sad haircut, a happy haircut, after years of trying to purchase all possible substitutes of love, now I am in something, that feels so much like it. 

It's not straight out of the books I read, poems I hugged, movies that remained in my head, it's not. It's not something I have waited for. And now it makes what I waited for feel slightly inane. Or, it's my bias, definitely. 

But, this has an exclusivity of its own. It defines itself. In its own insane longing for life kinda way. In its own capricious unorthodox fashion. What can you do.

Ultimately, a brief while after everything seemed to have finished off, I seem to have just begun. Or allow me to to use a slightly more slack pronoun. We seem to have just begun. 

The Missing T Shirt & Other Stories

One day,  I found my one T shirt to be a tad too lose. And obviously I didn't lose weight (never do). It was a lose one already, like one of those big ones you need to get inside of and spend the whole day in, in the room, not necessarily with any shorts on. Naturally I was very possessive of it. Plus it had one of those anti-global warming slogans with a double meaning. I loved that double meaning, which was obviously the first  (and sometimes the only) meaning people got. It (the T shirt not feeling like mine thingy) didn't matter much though, like a lot of facts & figures, in my life, that might have a chance to worry me, I brushed it under the carpet.

Later, a few weeks later I discovered, some guy in the campus wearing the same T shirt. And then I realized that the laundry people must have swapped mine with his, and look, he didn't even realize. Or did he? This guy and I had graduated from the same school years ago, and then were doing our masters together. The T shirt in context was a college T shirt that everyone had bought way back then. I looked at him for a few moments, wondering of our shared history, and how less often we even spoke.

Today, I look at that T shirt, crumpled in my closet, which I really don't know is his or mine and think. How many many men and women we come across and how little they leave their impressions on us. Chemistries, in particular are that transient. Nobody seems to remember. Sometimes, I shock myself with how indifferent I feel toward someone I loved to my breath's end, to the edges of my heart, to the depth of my intestines, and to the mighty horizons of my mind. And today, I could pass by him and not look back. That's how minuscule of people I carry within me.

Even when I am with someone, I let their aura sink into me only for those brief couple of minutes, and if only I like them that much. Otherwise, nothing, hardly ever stays.

The only thing that stays, is the memory of that companion, being with who, sometimes I tend to forget that I do indeed have, company.