Kaput Again

Living days in perfunctory anxiety
Missing the bus, most of the times
Building worlds within worlds
Pointing all furniture toward the TV

Waiting for that day of the week
When you can say, that
My day has been bad enough
To deserve a smoke

Cooking, chopping vegetables
Peeling vegetables
The same condiments, in every meal
Yellow mildly disgusting food

Walking, looking at your toes
Stealing eye contact
Being mum, containing poetry
Caging prose

Coating hours with abandoned love
Soaking minutes in sunlight
Chasing cabs, chasing autos
Wading through knee deep flood waters

Fiddling for change
Running out of money
Thinking you're poor
What have you done, nothing

Except watch TV and shirk
Watch TV and shirk
And live in this perfunctory anxiety
Waiting to go kaput

Prequel here

Who You Be

I don't keep a good track of time. Because what is to it. Every realization that such and such quantity of time has passed, you only feel nostalgia. And along with nostalgia, a tinge of sorrow. Helplessness because we have been so callous in life. Though we have been extremely savagely prudent, we have managed to be callous, nevertheless. So I don't appreciate keeping a track of time. I keep no album. No journal. Nothing. And it feels liberating, living like this, deliberately, without a care for time. Living life day wise. Hour wise. Week wise, at most. But not in any longer tranches of time. 

However, I remember, faintly though, deeply loving myself. Loving yourself is a good thing, no doubt. But I was a narcissist. I don't judge you if you are, by the way. But I don't like being one. It's a huge waste of time. But then what is not. If you are not the artist or the muse, your life is a ludicrous waste of time. But I was arrogant. For no apparent reason. I wasn't even pretty. That I wasn't pretty played over my fucking head a lot. I overcompensated the lack of being loved. It's basically sort of playing defense. But in a twisted sort of a way. 

After a long time, I cannot tell you how much time exactly, because I don't keep track of time, but after like a dozen rejections or so, I learnt my lesson, that beauty probably cannot be attained. And no matter what you do, you be who you be. And nothing you do, believe, can ever alter that truth of truths. So I shed the arrogance and compensated the lack of love with deep compassion for the self. Yeah. And it's been working. I guess. 

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly. Khaled Hosseini

Epilogue

Whatever happens to those writers who narrate an entire life story in a sentence or two. It's quick and done with. Like, they met in college, married soon after. She bore him his first child, a brilliant little fair girl. A decade into, differences emerged and they separated. Moving on, he met his second wife at forty two. They have a son, who is neither as brilliant or fair like his half sister. But he is, nevertheless. Or, let's say: He was the unwanted third child, conceived by mistake, half heartedly. His father wanted him, mother didn't. So, he grew up with half the love, half the heart, tagged along with his older sister and brother, until, they would no longer have it. So he branched out, broke bad and became an alcoholic. Or, let's say: Ever since, she was seventeen, she wanted a child, a cute plaything of her own. But she could find no man that was a keeper. She studied and worked. Meandered through life, far from effortlessly. Swinging between depression and self doctored therapy until she met a keeper. But then it was too late to have a child, her fluids had stopped flowing. A hostile uterus, or something. Like that. So easy. So easy. So swift. Thanks to those writers, you can live the lives of their characters with such ease. 

But your own life! It is so excruciatingly slow, painful. Excruciatingly slow and painful. And fucked up. There's no way you could just cut short some of the agony. Some of this misery. Some of it. You've to roll on it, lick it, swallow it. There's no way out. Only if the writer of my fate would learn something from these on the fast track. And get done with it. 

Tesseract

Of late, I have been afraid. And afraid is not good. Fear is all consuming. Crippling, sometimes. It takes away a lot from us. I've been trying to fight it. But failing. I guess. It's been years. Yes, years since I had begun looking. Looking for my feet. Still haven't found 'em. My feet. It's been so long, I can't remember.

All the soups I have sipped, men I've ignored, women I've discarded, clothes I have grown out of, books I have read and taken credit for and forgotten, the attachment I have faked, the time I've lost. Ages. Months, years. And I am still looking for my feet. Oh, it's boring. Almost illegal to be this banal. I haven't heard myself. Because, I am mostly dumb.  I used to speak when provoked. But lately, I don't speak at all, I don't know if I have any voice at all. 

Mostly because I have come to believe that I am nothing. I don't mean it in a demeaning or pitiful way. I just claim knowledge of the minisculity of my existence. With humility and arrogance. Mostly I am sick of the way life turns out, eventually unfolds. And I am afraid of the gigantic amount of energy it takes to change its course. Yeah, I am afraid I don't have that kind of energy.  Not right now. And afraid is not good. Fear is all consuming. Crippling, at times. It's taking away my everything. 

Then again, I like to imagine myself in a tesseract. And in a five dimensional space-time. There is a parallel universe may be, in which life unfolds exactly the way it's supposed to. From in there, I am staring at myself through this tesseract, and passing me some sort of answer. About how to find my fucking feet. You know. Yeah, there's that. 

See

It's a ridiculous wish I had. To see Khushwant Singh in person. He's the one who taught me how to live without shame. Now he is dead and gone. That's one item struck off like that. Sooner more than later, I am sure I will forget who I am. It's like losing sight of oneself. And it's a horrible thing to say. To become someone with no identity, wishes and aspirations. My autobiography could be named the autobiography of a corpse. Because my life is pretty much a list of things to be done, things to constantly worry about, work wise, life wise. I feel I have made too many unwise decisions and now there is no getting away from those. Like a vicious circle, the aftermath leads to the cause itself. And can't look out, look within. I am entangled such, I can't see. My biases are such, I don't think I even understand my environment very well. It's like being really stupid, immune to the obviousness of the world. I am so serious when I say I can't see, I can't see a damn thing. 

I need a filter, something that tells me what I should see, what I should ignore. Because there is so much fucked up stuff happening around, they all merge into a haze, I can't differenciate one from another. There is nothing definitive, it's all infinite and irrational. I feel small, incapable. And stupid. Like a failure.

A friend recently halted at a guest house by a lagoon on a rainy night because their car broke down on the way. In the morning when she woke up, the lagoon and the sea it merged into and the sky, everything looked like one grey screen of nothing. She stood on her feet and stared, unable to figure where the sea ended, where the sky began, they were all so homogenous. No sight of the horizon, of the distances we could go, of the persons we could become. Nada, nothing. Then, minutes later an orange sun punctured that grey screen. It rose slowly up the sky, shooting out rays, drawing out a horizon in front of her eyes. Separating the sea and the sky. Differentiating the closer from the distant. Showing her what exactly to see.

I want to see. Just like that. 

Your average woman

Being a stringent believer in intimacy comes with knowing the sole truth that it can never happen. Any two cannot love each other bit by bit. There has to be a distance, without which the temperamental momentary nascent intimacy just cannot be. I am a stringent believer in that distance too. In that kind of superficiality. Once fell for a man for his shoes. Just saying. Once fell for another for how he kissed. So, understandable.

I am your average woman. I could know half a dozen men who would sincerely like to take me out for how I think. The slightly twisted men with the gift of intellect. Unorthodox. Open. Yeah, open. But notwithstanding, what I write, open still scares me. I have the most ungetoverable of crushes on the average man. Man who would run behind the pretty face. I would pursue him, just because he wouldn't me. You get the point. His parochial vision fascinates me. The way he is blinded by his primal limits, the way he hasn't cared to rise above what's much beneath him, attracts me.

So I sit with him, not craving for the intimacy I crave for. And utter my quietest silence in trying to become a good listener. About what pretty face was like what. Exact ornate descriptions of who he fucked, and who he might, just in case. And the like.

Between awkward pauses in these conversations of the skin, I crave for the distance. The antithesis of intimacy. Where in, I wonder among all those descriptions of faces and bodies and vital stats that he has in his mind, where in would I fit in. Just in case. You know. Wild waves of intimacy between dry brushes of impotent distance. Swept in those waves, I so try to be, the average man's woman. Your average woman. 

Thirty

I saw two eagles chase each other. Underneath the 8 am sky, above the February fog. This winter has gone senile, I thought. And then remembered her. Her dead disposition. How she never combed her hair. She obviously did, but how it never stayed combed. Untamed, falling off her face. And not in that suave sexy way. Rather, in a rustic callous one, one would say. In a way that didn't give a damn to being pretty. In a way that was tired of trying hard to be pretty to begin with. Exhausted. Drained. Sometimes, that dryness shone on her face, when she smiled, over-coated with glee. Clothes never matched. Tops went unmatched with bottoms. Like they were on a weird blind date. And they just turned out to be what they were. She seemed to be at peace with it. Or probably, she regretted whatever she wore everyday. I don't think so though. Ate with her hands. Licked her fingers, not a care. As locks of that hair fell off from being loosely clutched, and tucked behind both ears. Pored on the computer, working. Walked, meandered, holding a bag, that looked like something a much older woman would keep. Beside sleepy auto rickshaws, looking for one that would take her home, every night. Safe from the prospective eve-teaser. Such was life. Age wasn't on her side anymore. It never is. Nor were other things. People said things. About what she should do next in life. I wonder, if she thought, that people never had anything worthwhile to do. Or did she practice indifference. It must be hard, to practice anything other than that, being her. Being anyone. Being me. Thirty. Thirty. Thirty.

Prequel

catch-22

Love, which seems to be the answer, is another question by itself. You know. You are the love of my life. Yeah, you. No one else can ever become what you are to me. And all my life, till now, I have been looking for you. Desperately. Running from corner from corner. Scanning faces of strangers in empty streets. Sitting alone on solo benches in parks, watching, un-involved, the passage of sun drenched afternoons. Writing poems, heartlessly; waiting, incessantly. I have been looking for you. With the basic assumption that love is the one answer. I seek. But.

Now, that I have found you. Yeah, you. I don't know what to do anymore. With you. With myself.

This love feels different, than the one I had imagined, inside my head. Long long ago.This has rough edges, feels incomplete. With flaws.

I used to believe, that flaws are beautiful. In fact, flaws are the only beauty. Perfection is a ghost. But, somehow, I stand un-quenched. Here, now. Standing beside you, I feel like miles away. As lovelorn as then. As untouched as then.

I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. So, tell me. What is it that I seek.

"There is a loneliness in this world so great

that you can see it in the slow movement of

the hands of a clock.

People so tired

mutilated

either by love or no love."

- Charles Bukowski