Beautiful

I feel beautiful now.

Inside-out

How my hair caresses my shoulders

My eyes, curious - are dripping with kohl

Brows, thick and steady like arches 

Lips, brown, holding a smile.

I know I am beautiful

Like, I knew never before.

When I was longing for you

Decades ago.

I stared deep within, for this beauty

And shrugged, disappointed, finding nothing

How would you see my beauty,

If I was blind to it myself.

I would've held your hand and shown you myself:

Ah, see. Nothing is a-wanting

But now,

When perhaps, so much is lost

It dawns upon me

That, there is no one like me

Neither will be

I am so niche, like etched from stone

And so delicate, that will vanish in a breeze

What have we lost.

So much water under the bridge 

Easy

For the past few days, I have been at rest. I breathe slow. There's no hustle. Or bustle. And my eye-lids are droopy. There's this light casual kind of burn everytime I shut my eyes. Like I can sleep half the day away. I close my eyes and fall asleep. I wake up, saliva leaking from the corners of my lips. Eyes are even heavier than when I fell asleep. I don't understand what is happening here. And I don't bother, either. All I want is more sleep. Some more, and more, of lie down time. Is it the buried exhaustion of years that has suddenly erupted, over a long weekend?

Also, I want to eat. Like gobble down the whole fridge. Sweets and cakes and chips and slurpees. Leftovers, won't be any more, left over. Cuz I'll eat them all. Like lick bowls clean. What's with this insatiable hunger. And the thirst. I guzzle down and chomp chomp chomp. And then I am off to bed. With no enthusiasm for waking up. Tuck me in, somebody. And don't wake me up, unless it's to feed me. 

Layover

You know how flights work. You pick a flight with a four hour layover at some airport you've never meant to visit; just to save a couple of Ks - which you plan on upgrading your hotel room with, or buying some other compensation for your overtly critical overworked mind. You never upgrade your hotel room; rather you don't do any memento shopping either. All that you manage from your vacation is that you manage to come back home. Or atleast you've done one leg of your return flight, you're dragging your feet and sixteen hand baggages and your kids are getting lost at the airport, nobody has eaten anything in seven hours (they have!); and you're sitting there in a lesser known, not exactly obscure place, wondering how much better a direct flight would have been. You start to measure, obviously you can't measure such things, you drift and get lost until someone else gets lost, or someone else craves a snack, or so on and so forth.

Four hours is easy time, you wink and it's gone. You gather up, and board the flight. You wonder if the take off would be smooth, all the other flights on this vacay have given you the free falling in space experience. And you've been training yourself not to give in to fears, rational or irrational. Surprisingly, the flight is mid take off and you haven't even realised it.

You look out. Oh my god, the night lights are so pretty. What city is this? It's his hometown, isn't it. The x before the y before the zee. You wonder if he's home. Of course not darling, he left home long ago. And it left him too. When you met him, he was a bona-fide homeless nomad. He wouldn't settle and you wouldn't budge. Then he left you. 

Today, looking down from the clouds, you wonder where his house would be. And where he went to the movies or where he played cricket. Or where he went to school. May be his parents still lived there. He moved and abandoned the country long time ago, and hasn't been heard of since - wreck of a lover that he was. You wonder if he calls his mother every day, or now and then, or has he called her now, like exactly now.

Then your mind drifts, you wonder if you got your ID back from that flight attendant, or whether you should get some shuteye. Knees are a pain, already.

So yes, in other news - the layover has turned out to be a fair enough compensation.