Breakage

Tonite, um chasing a firefly
in the dark, I see its sparks
but can't figure out what
or where it be

I'm not collapsing
not exactly
I'm breaking, slowly
disintegrating

Cell by cell
Flake after flake
In chunks, may be
Into a grey pile of dust, beside me

I'm reading letters
from the past
pointless letters
and allowing them to get to me

What a debacle
this has been, my darling
what unthrottled waste
of my spirit, this all is proving to be

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

Homecoming

Stories that we keep telling ourselves. Every day. Day after day. We have become these incessant story tellers, hon, ain't nobody stopping us no more. That going through the motions is doing us good. It isn't. Every day is a disguised failure. Trembling with masked anger. Unspoken, unspoken wrath. Sugarcoated love, that only isn't. In all this rush, when am I myself? Never. I am scared that I am underacting my way through life, not pretending enough. So I overact. I laugh really loudly when I am sad. I joke around when I am angry. I make small talk when I am lost. I overwork to get rid of the omnipresent feeling of disappointment that life has become. Somewhere, a while ago, everything has shed its meaning. I keep masking one thing with another and then that with another. There are so many masks, hon, I forget where I hid the real thing. Life has become folklore's quintessential demoness's soul, stored in a chamber inside seven other chambers. 

Sometimes I recall the hallways in which I became a person. An adult from a child. Tunnel like long endless hallways with rooms on both sides. My memories are trapped in dungeons of the past. And it takes so much effort to uncover them because they have been positively hidden for my benefit. Yet I scratch that wound sometimes, hoping that probably, I would find something I left behind. And that something would help me hold on to the real and slowly unmask myself. But there too, I seem to find only pain. Only sorrow. I have nothing concrete to hold on to in the past. Because I mostly lived in imagination, partly in denial. May be I am still living in denial. Wobbling in knee high denial, you never know. Some truths are so tough to accept and internalize, I would rather choose denial. I am living in denial despite being fully aware of the scores and scores of flaws in my mind and body. Goodness, what else, is even there.

And more often than I would like, I think about the years to come. Will I continue to be this dull. This selfish, even. I ain't crafted for too many challenges, hon. In the face of adversity, I lack the fortitude. I collapse and become a shamble of bones. I wonder if I will even begin to deal with my issues, or will I have the glorious courage to accept oneself as one is. Probably, I will float in the mundane middle, forever and ever. And whatever the potential I deem to have, I shall never achieve. Will I always measure myself and never fucking free myself from the fucking scale. 

Living entangled this way, I have made chaos my home and look forward to going home. Deeper and sooner. 

Now Playing: Nina Simone's You don't know what love is. 

Yeah, hon. I don't. And I never would. Hon. 

House with no mirrors

I took an auto to the market. I had some money. I didn't even bark at the auto wallah over the fare. I paid whatever he demanded. I was there to buy clothes for me. Dusk was dissolving into the air. And I was at the beginning of long and seemingly endless veins and vein lets of streets. Filled with hawkers selling split open raw mango sprinkled with salt and chilly powder, guava the same way, and bangles and wallets and trinkets for your home and you. Of course there were so many well lit stores, filled with stacks and stacks of clothes. Thousands and lakhs of clothes, I couldn't imagine how many there were. For the first time in months, I began to feel overwhelmed.

I randomly walked those streets to regain my breath. Paid for things in cash and hoarded clothes and bangles and bindis and earrings into my bag. It got heavy, but it didn't matter. It began to drizzle and I didn't stop even then. Despite knowing that the rain would wreck havoc over the city traffic and I wouldn't get an Uber to go home. I ran out of cash and started coaxing hawkers to take Paytm. I swiped my cards at so many shops, I don't even remember. And then suddenly, my gusto collapsed. It had enough reason to, alright. But that happens, you don't know why you feel the way you feel. You take yourself by utter surprise. It makes you think if you've been hiding something from yourself. Intimidating thought that.

My mind traveled back to my first apartment. It had a lot of windows but I had the maroon curtains so stretched out end to end that no voyeur would even dare. I lived there for about a year. And entirely by happenstance, that apartment didn't have a mirror. I lived an entire year without looking at myself. Not that there was anything to look at. Life batters the self esteem of a no looker by the time you are thirty. But nevertheless, not even the tiny flagellant remnant of the narcissist in me wanted to see myself for a year. So weird was that. I now come to realize. 

Self esteem apart, what does a mediocre laggard even get in life. Except crying in gulps sitting on the office toilet. Reading what great writers have written. And how every sentence of them once read pulls a chord real strong and pours out of those fucking tear glands. Because I know I will never write like that and never be cried over like that, at least, not anymore. I would rather go shopping in endless streets and feel overwhelmed. Once in a blue moon. 

Anathema

Drunken slurs.

A woman once was

The funny caricature in her ex-lover's poem

She sat feet outstretched in winter wind

On a January midnight

Old Monk in her hands

A glass with a square base

Fit into her hands like magic

Ice cubes clinked 

And it was all that moved

She spoke in indistinct 

Drunken slurs

As he drew her that night

Eight years later,

That ex-lover is a father

Of the child of another woman

And everyday, he dotes

On his naive daughter,

Who knows not one bit

Of what life holds

And packs her lunch box,

With the purple butterflies on it

And takes her pictures

The woman with the Old Monk

Eight years later,

Down the line, or so

Contemplates freezing Old Monk 

Into cubes in the tray, to drink that then

Such that it doesn't water down

And that her passing out each night

Take not as long

Simultaneously,

The woman tries to write a poem

About the new daughter, and the butterflies

And the utter obscenity of fates and heartache

Her drunken slurs, not much coherent.

The passage of eight years

Has been as cruel as healing

Everything happens for a reason

And yet, for no reasons at all. 

How they became whoever they did,

They would never know. 

But they did become their own.

Anathema. Anathema. Anathema. 

Thirty

Is it indeed deliciously befitting to lose everything, indeed. Aging is losing something everyday. I stare at the mirror. At my pale midnight reflection. And lather coconut oil on my cracked feet, this winter has been harsh, particularly. Where my eyebrows meet a wrinkle has permanently appeared, I worry a lot. The eyes look exhausted, dreamless. Of course, it's midnight. That being my alibi, I dissolve into a dream. Suddenly I am eighteen again. I am young and plump. I write poetry about how my hair looks like a tree on above my head. About seeking out my shadow from among the shadows of dozens of trees while walking back home on late nights. The street lights dazzle me. I wean myself off my infatuations by writing their names on pieces of paper and burning them in candle flame by the window ledge. Turning love into ash by some warranted act of karma. Exploring newer ways to dispel the many jinxes of unrequited love. And learning to accept my body, of course. Everything that I came with. My bulging thighs, messy hair, my dusky tone, overall anti-delicate-femininity. That was at least a decade before the phrase body positivity was even phrased, and I was fighting my own mighty battle. And losing everyday. 

I was losing then, as I am losing now. I am thirty. It's a gorgeous age to be. Fucking gorgeous, mind wise. You have seen just enough of the world to start taking the right calls on it. To stand on your own two feet, somewhat. To have a place of your own. To quote from poets you have fallen in love with. To laugh quietly when you hear a book you read being discussed. Thirty is as good as it gets. 

But on certain midnights as these, now that you don't stare at the moon much, you stare at the mirror slightly longer than usual to notice the loosened skin on eyelids, the sagging arm flesh, the extra flesh in the wrong places as goes by acceptable misogynistic standards. You feel maligned. Wronged. Abandoned. Depreciated. 

So many years have gone by, so many of them. So many films watched, songs heard. So much prose written. So many many miles walked. Yet nothing has changed. At the end of the day, pretty is all you gotta be. #ohfuck 

Baker's Delight

Do you remember the year of depression? Because I do. A terrible year that. 2015. I don't know, why exactly I realize this just now. Now, that another year has also almost followed 2015 into the bygone and the forgotten. Yet, I cannot cease myself from writing about it. 

The weekdays used to be delusional. You understand the kind of delusion, when you cannot recall how did things get so worse. You cannot recall the steps, the small pouches of misery coming in before the surfeit of it choked your throat. And you ask yourself, rhetorically though. Only one mere word. Why.

That kind of delusion. That could nudge mental heath enthusiasts off their comfy couches. It was concerning. But what was more demanding of empathy was Sundays.

I recall, it started with a rant of not-feeling-well to I-feel-like-cake. I poured an instant cake mix into the pressure cooker as directed on the cover. And, voila. An amorphous antidote for depression. I knifed it out, spooned it out, in crumbs and that was the first of numerous.

I took to the heavily underused microwave then. And blatantly decided to mix my own batter for the better. Better batter. And boy, did I bake some mediocre unpalatable stuff. I am told baking is so simple and often asked, how can I be bad at baking. But I just was. Probably it as my mood. My mental heath, as enthusiasts would say. 

I was battling my own wars. Arguing, screaming. And almost simultaneously baking. I whisked flour, eggs, milk, sugar. Sometimes bananas. The baking soda was either too scant or too much, it always failed me. I was in tears. Chocolate powder or vanilla essence, nothing sufficed to fill the holes in my soul. The knife I stabbed into the cake to check if it was done, I weighed against it the option of stabbing it into myself. I couldn't handle anymore questions. I had no answers. 

It was such a ruthless time. And I was so callously lost. 

I Google-d newer recipes to keep my mind engaged. I once baked an apple pie with a bunch of overripe apples. I distinctly remember baking my personal favorite, the caramel custard. Cup cakes were done too, Jars and jars of Nutella, and Hershey's chocolate sauce. Powdered sugar as icing with cherry toppings. 

But nothing helped me as much as I would have wanted to be helped back then. I would cut myself two generous slices on a plate and go to bed, every Sunday afternoon. The rest of the cake would lay on the dining table next to the microwave, untouched. Sometimes, I ate the rest of it, on week nights. It didn't matter. 

And then suddenly, things changed. Both for the better and the worse. It's hard to imagine it bothways, but it's true. And I stopped baking altogether. Probably because I don't own a microwave anymore. Amen to that. 

Much Love

The cyclone that was to be,
Has now been averted.
A changed course,
Perhaps, on the way back from Myanmar.
Somewhere else, on this indented coastline
It shall make landfall

Now the coconut trees
In my backyard, shall live.
But alas, I have no backyard.
No coconut, just a sterile shrub of potted hibiscus
That refuses to even, flower.
And ants ate away the basil.

Now, there are long nights
And deep sleep.
Dreamless sleep against the backdrop of
Instrumental guitar
And the masochistic pleasure
Of losing oneself.

And never finding oneself again.
For there is a certain bliss in being lost.
You my judgmental friend,
Will never know, what glee this is.
You stay where you are,
Go to parties.

I will stay back and smoke in my portico
Releasing circles of smoke into still air
My toes resting on the grille
Beside my sterile hibiscus
With my head, between my deaf ears
Pregnant with memories, shallow regrets and the
Immeasurable joy of solitude.

Much Love

For: Donald Hall

An Introduction to Murakami

I wish I could write listless fiction. Like Murakami does. A story needn't have a beginning or an end. Either. It can be, peacefully be, a random extract from time. Happenings of a day, or an hour, or a lifetime. It needn't even carry any direct meaning. Or a climax. Or a moral. A story in itself is a being. It begs no justification. It can be about a man getting random telephone calls all day, or making spaghetti brunch for himself, or listening to records, or taking a train alone. Or an elephant vanishing into the blue, or an insomniac woman driving around all night, or a man with nothing but a strange sounding name. It can be about me-you. It needs a faceless narrator yes, one who is neither happy, nor sad. Who is neutral enough to merge with Murakami's canvas. And his sole job is to narrate, read out Murakami's fucking brilliant mind like a dispassionate reader. Isn't the man a genius? And genius is clearly an understatement. There are days, when all I can fantasize about is reading him. He addicts me. With his bare words. I don't know how to stop. Or to look the other way. I am obsessed, with him, like I am never with other stuff. 

Probably, I love him so because in his incomplete unpredictable abrupt endings, I have snuggled up to a new found comfort that not everything is entitled to a meaning. And things can be, just because they are. Just for the sake of being, and nothing else. And I am otherwise so fatigued with jumping to conclusions and drawing deductions that I find a certain relief in Murakami. It's okay. It's normal. And even if it's not, that's okay too.

That's okay too. Because Murakami says so. 

28

It has been so long that I've stayed up a night. Not a single night. And read a story. Or just dreamed with open eyes. So long. This is a passing phase, like every other phase that is. Not a song written, or word scribbled. This breathless chase to get things done, is slowly ruining my appetite for life. One has to get some place, be some one, buy some thing. All the time. I haven't paused. In a long long time. 

Truly, pauses scare me now. And, motion does too. 

This is a time of forced peace, But I don't know why I seem to be pushing this disequilibrium down my throat. All this urge to be moving, is not letting my limbs rest. There is a constant vibration in them. My soul, if there is a thing like that is suffocating in utter restlessness. The excess of this tension is slowly oozing through my skin and settling as wrinkles. 

And under my eyes, is getting darker. And damper. As I age, rather relentlessly every night, every day, every year. 28. 28. 28

Whole Again

While smudging kohl in my eye, I noticed a hole. A tiny hole to the corner on the lower flap, on the inside, towards the nose. I thought to myself, this must be the tear gland. Not the gland, but the orifice for the gland beneath. It's amazing, how I hadn't known where tears came from. After crying my eyes out. And today, it shows itself. It's like finding a blackspot under your chin. You had it ever since, without knowing. Without caring to know.

My mood lately is a cosine curve. I sink into troughs, for a set of predefined reasons. Loss, failure, disappointment, a deep, really deep sense of feeling misplaced. Mostly, I sink because I think I am stupid. Just foolish. And that's not a good thing, feeling foolish. Because it is accompanied with inexplicable anger. I choke myself screaming, howling, literally. I tear down wall hangings, punch pillows. It's like a mad woman has gotten into me. And I actually do relate to her in the span of my fit. And cry, cry a lot. I sink into the trough of the cosine. 

A while after, I consolidate. Very mechanically. Like an auto restoring system. I cool down. I feel up again. I try hard, really hard to convince myself that being a good person compensates for being stupid. I know, it doesn't. But I try. What can we do? I try to tell myself stories. That things will turn around. Even if they don't, I am strong enough to just take the shit. I fail, I shatter. I cry. Again.

And such, it goes on and on. I don't know if there's an escape, but an escape. I so want to feel whole again. 

Scattered Soul

I left my soul at the mouth of the river. In my old room, standing aloft on the third floor beside pines. I left a chunk of it on the balcony of his new home. Also a bit of it in the wilderness I never could go to. A piece of it, on the scattered skies above the earth I slept on, gazing up. I left my soul inside the God of Small Things. In the diary made of pure bamboo pulp and on it as a spot of blotched ink. I left my soul in the wind at Lovers' Point. I abandoned a slice of it, back in the darkness which I smoked. Bit by bit in the curls of fume that escaped my mouth. In the sweat and breath of strangers. In the eyes of the men who stared. At breasts, at legs. I lost a bit of her in the minds of men who read my poems. And a few compassionate women, it would be unfair not to say. On the edges of my broken nails, and upon the roofs I wanted to leap down from. Last, on the chair I drank coffee on alone, and thought of writing this poem. Each of these places, keep a piece of my soul, frozen, un-agile. In comatose. In original specimen, undiluted, unashamed, described by other similar adjectives. But most of all, I left my soul, the last time I saw her, on his bed. On his bed. Yeah.

#NowPlaying - Shakira, after a long long time. 

Between Lovers

They kicked it off on a good note. On a note of mutual ecstasy. Literally speaking, if the note were a note, you could see that chit of white paper with utter profanities scribbled on it lying between the distant silhouette of their legs as they walked away, holding hands and letting go, holding hands and letting go. They believed they owed too much to the coincidence that made them together. And that was the only one trait of gratefulness they had toward anything on the whole. For the rest, sometimes their misanthropy would tie them together, sometimes the endless talk of truths and illusions. Sometimes, the art they were about to unravel would make their hair stand up, sometimes it would be the intoxication or the libido. In that phase, when long time passed in slow undulating curves when they were away and in one sudden shot of alacrity when they sat talking, and undoing each others' minds, things were mostly this way. They relished their secret life under covers. They sewed together promises, of travelling to unknown countries and abandoned islands. Of cutting themselves out. Of knowing peace. The one within themselves. He and she, they would do their own curious experiments with life and then possibly for suitable stretches of time, merge into one person. Can you even imagine, what that would be like? Can you?

Later, much later, however, a certain immunity to whatever was unreal guarded their minds. The thick curtain of reality that hid their magnificent persons hung lose right before their eyes. Shrouding everything. Everything. They couldn't even see each other. Their sewn promises were left knotted, somewhere in the corners of the room in which they began. The love didn't wear out as much as how much the pinches and pinches of salt you are expected to take life with, coated it. Lathed it with true sounding lies. Reducing them to some two people, who instead of merging, began suspiciously looking deep into their systems. So as to fathom, how, just how, they were humanly capable of kicking it off as neatly as that.

Between Lovers. Between Lovers. 

Indignity

She asked him just to look at her. 'Don't touch me', she reiterated and moved away, an inch or two. He was shocked by how voluntarily he obeyed her. And then she began talking, about how she had never been appreciated, never been eaten with eyes. Between sobs, deep breaths, she again pushed him away, when he tried to touch her. With the tip of his finger, just to see if she was there. For real. For he was sloshed. And she was half-high, half-naked. And talking. Wildly.

'Dangerous woman, this one is', he thought. 'Her species, worth having for once, never for keeps'. 

Between sips of the drink that he had placed on the night stand after carrying it upstairs, he saw the skin of her neck shine. Shimmer in the red bed-light. Against the shadows of leaves outside, on the window pane. Almost asleep, he realized, he wasn't listening to her at all. 

Out of guilt and shame, he stretched his eyes open and began listening. 

She had neatly placed her right palm on her chest and was saying that she wanted to withdraw something she had said earlier that night. 'Erase any memory of me having said it. Was preposterous', she whispered, leaning closer, still out of touch.

'Said what? What did you say?'

'That all women are the same neck down. I said that.' 

'You did? Don't remember.'

'I did, and you had agreed. Downstairs. How could you agree?'

Now she was fuming. He could feel the heat in her ears. The whim to burst open, in her gut. 

'All women aren't the same neck down. You see, just below the neck, is this thing.' She slapped her hand on her heart. 

'The heart?'

'Yeah, that..' 

Mild Love

I am not saying that no one will love you how much I do. I am not saying that you will ever regret having lost out on me. I am not saying that an appendage like this happens rarely in our whole lives. I have no claims.

Only, some nights I merely wish these were all true. Unconditionally. But, now, tonite I know for sure that these things that I do not say,  are indeed true. Every letter, every space between words, each pause and punctuation, is true. You will never find anyone who loves you how much I do. Even if you do, and there exists my competition, you will still regret having lost out on me. I haven't figured out the reason for that yet, but you would.

It could be because, every germ of passion in me awakens when you are around. The way I get drenched in sundry emotion, Baby, I cannot explain. I know, nothing lasts. But lets put that cynicism of a lifetime apart for a moment, this feels endless, undying. At least, for now it does, tonite it does.

Cue.

Anklet on her left foot. Silver, like a snake. Curled, cold. His lips froze when he kissed it. Luscious curves of her feet. He ran his fingers across. Warm fingers on cold feet. Shy feet. The right one, anklet-less. Ignored to begin with, lay quietly, fuming. Then later toyed with, blushed pink. The anklet on the left made stray noises. Clinking noises. That pierced the silence of hours past midnight.

Toe rings with black dots. Dot like stones, studded in the center. Shone in the dark of the room. The trapezoid nail on the big toe. The longer middle toe. Swayed in drunken haze. Like crazy in love. The other three. Stood fixed like three tiny spheres of lust. The night skipped a phase when he took the ring off and looked up.

At her face. A melange of emotion. Stricken in lovelessness, the past had left lines below her eyes. In the protrusion of her chin. There was a question in the arch of her eyebrows. Which asked, now what? To him. Who couldn't hold his heart from thumping out loud, still awed at her feet.Her eyes were sinking in ecstasy, though. Ecstasy. Taking a cue from them, he moved up. Up. 

Phonebook

I was in the mall picking up groceries. I got a text. Someone thought we shouldn't see each other again. That's called breaking up over whatsapp. I choked. Couldn't breathe for a span of a few seconds. A paralytic pain took over. I walked out for air. From that groceries section to the hall where children played games. Clutching my bags in one hand, I took out the phone from my pocket with the other. Then took it out of the cover with my teeth. That part was always the trouble. Read that text again. It went all hazy over my head. Was choking still. Deleted it, that text. Breathed in two three deep breaths of air conditioned mall air. Told the friend who I was with. She asked me why I hadn't told her inside. Like that would've helped.

Nothing helps. Nothing could. The worst happens, invariably. We had been talking in spells. In an on and off fragile acquaintance that ran across years of our adult lives. Between other fragile such acquaintances, with other people who cared the same or less. Whenever we talked, was good. Nothing extraordinary, but good. Sometimes it even felt just about alrite, tending towards the meant-to-be category. 

The moment I got that text, I assumed he was getting married. He must have been getting into something very committed and serious. And honestly, I even felt happy for him. He had been wanting to settle down for quite sometime. He used to tell me about it. And what was the cheapest alternative for love but marriage. I totally got that. Yet I was shocked.

I got over him with time. Over long walks. Unfinished blog posts. Most of him when someone else happened. 

But now, I stare at my Phonebook. I am yet to delete his number. It isn't synced with anything else though. Just his name and number. And a black and white picture of his. I like that picture. I love the look in his eyes. I wonder if he got married. I wonder if I am ever going to delete this contact. I stare at my Phonebook. Blank.

Wist

Whatever happened to the guy, who defined him-self as Pi. Irrational & Infinite.

Haven't flipped through those timeless definitions in a long time. Haven't rested to shed this cyclic chronic fatigue. Haven't meandered back and forth in a flea market. Or fiddled for loose change in a clumsy wallet. Put on capris, and chosen steamed momos very particularly over fried ones. And reminded the waiter twice, as if a plateful of the latter was pure terror.

Haven't kept track of who owed who, how much money. Haven't dyed finger-nails in crushed petals. Nor shopped for worthless trinkets. Toe-rings and anklets. Which would be lost on the way back home. Of cycling through tortuous roads, and then hands-free when one touched the highway, giggling into an endless horizon.

Haven't been infinite. For a long time now.

Haven't figured, in my imagination, the longish awe on his maid's face, when she found a strand of my hair lying on his pillow and asked. Was there a girl here, last night.

Haven't lined my sleep-less eyes with kohl, suddenly in the middle of the night, for no reason at all, tousled my hair and took crazy pictures. And saved them in forgotten folders. Pictures, never to be looked at again. Pictures, found again, accidentally, on another tireless night, years later. And stared at.

The smoothness of that skin, the fancy in those eyes, envied.

Asterisk

Do you not get it? Is it that hard? And the anatomy of my affection so inconceivably difficult to unravel? It isn't. 

It's rather simple. Honest and uncomplicated. And you're not naive yourself. So don't flatter yourself yet. Not now, not ever. 

Don't flatter yourself with the sole assumption that I am in love with you. I am not. Can never be. 

I busy my mind with your thoughts, force feed the imaginative future that I may come to live in with you someday, because, baby, I am only trying to run away from myself. Yeah.

You see, I am this obnoxiously obsessed woman who cannot stop thinking and constantly needs something for her mind to feed on. Anything, at all. Like they say gastric acids eat up the stomach walls if there's no food, a similar force of self-destruction is my underlying. And if I don't think about you, proxima centauri, some extinct mesozoic reptile, or you, nothing would stop me from thinking about myself. 

And thinking about myself, is fatal. That's why I pretend to love you. To convince myself that it's not yet time to take the self seriously. So don't just flatter yourself. And boast about getting me off your back. Hah! You've no idea. 

Lost & Found

The weekly horoscope, comes Sunday morning with the faint fragrance of newsprint. Layered between matrimonial classifieds and steals of second rate paparazzi. One quiet paragraph, beside the logo of a lone girl with wings. I try to focus; on every written word, and on each unwritten parallel, that could possibly be drawn between some silly astrologer's drunken babble and my life.

As predicted, I ensure that I cut short on all long term financial investments, which by the way are fictitious, and steer clear of backstabbers at work, and wear green on most days, and gather confidence for that turning point of my career that has kept me waiting long. I also wonder which of those past flames is going to make a peaceful retreat into my life. Before realizing the joke is on me, I actually, look up from the paper, ponder for a moment, which one could it be. Which one may have that slight possibility of pausing long enough to even consider. I shove the paper under the bed, where its ancestors have been, accumulating the hopelessness of a future that wouldn't be.

Then I take to a strange fancy. I should find something to contradict my turquoise nail paint. And go around looking. To come across this ancient-smelling market, which I could never imagine would be, stuck in a lost little place down-town. With dusty clay pots. Shiny silver toe rings. And anklets. Numerous other trinkets to appease the tumultuous effeminate swings of my mood. Pastel work on wrap-around skirts, and embroidered ponchos.

That neatly cultivated old world charm sunk into me, as we sat by a pond, pool of black scattering faint moonlight. Later I noticed a ring on my finger. The string of diamonds that never shone in the day and sat pale as a stone from every possible angle; now glittered. Glittered like a diamond should.

Later, I murmured, my ring shines in the dark. Just like me.