Lateral Inversion

There's this picture. Not in a wooden frame. Not in a wedding album. Just a picture, a photograph. Saved in a few kilobytes of memory. In a dateless folder, underneath. 

Among a matrix of light and grey, they stand, posing. Adjacent, touching. Her left arm against his chest. Quietly resting on it, like that was where it was meant to be. His right hand stretched along her shoulders, palm clutching her sleeve. He's holding her. Her hands are folded. There's a ring on the middle finger on her right hand, red threads wound about her left wrist. This was clicked from the camera he held in his left. Lucid, at peace. They are both half smiles, semi conscious. Very aware, yet not there. 

But wait, it's not them the picture is of. It's their image, their fleeting floating image on a fleeting floating mirror. So probably, we got it all wrong. Rights and lefts are reversed. Laterally inverted. He held the camera on his right, his fingers are so close to the mirror, you could see his knuckles. It's his left hand which is holding her by the shoulder. And the ring is on the middle finger on the left hand and the red threads on the right. It seems so. They are looking at each others' image in the mirror. How juxtaposed that is.

Their lines of vision must converge and crisscross where their real space met the mirror. Or I could just show you the photo, instead of blatantly trying so much at the description, so much. Si? 

Onward

The bunch of papers in his hands just gave in. He was getting used to the incessant traveling. Though it didn't seem a bit like what he had imagined. Mostly he would discard the fatigue of it by saying it was boredom and not the biting solitude. It wasn't may be. Some people can just flourish on themselves. Each trip he would find something fun to do or just unwind his overworked muscles and sleep. There was never the need to go out or wait or seek. 

The bunch of papers in his hands almost gave in. He walked about with an ease. A confidence known only to his kind. It was 2 in the morning, the cab booked to the airport had come on time. There was no one to see him off. He had insisted they didn't come. His mother was the stronger one and her eyes never moistened when she saw him leave. But he always saw this meekness on the father's face, a kind of forced silence that just wouldn't let him leave in peace. So he insisted on being left alone. For convenience' sake.

Taking the last few steps onward, to the land of unforgiving winter. He made the customary calls. Assuring he would text them his whereabouts each time he changed location and made a note himself that he would.

His face grew pale for a second with a pang of homesickness. He had run out of noticing the weird people at the airport, people in waiting. There was this childish urge to suddenly return home just to spend the night on his familiar bed, without being answerable to anyone.

So he called her. And asked if she was asleep and if he woke her up. Without waiting long enough for her to answer that, he told her that he was looking at a bunch of hot chicks. We don't know if they were fictitious or real. She asked him to talk to them and not her instead.

Minutes later, they were laughing at one of his cranky jokes. Laughing together, in an unexpected convergence. Sitting hundreds of miles away, waiting to be separated by light years. 

For the lackluster repulsion of distance to erode their affection. For a beautiful Chinese woman to be on the seat next to him. On the plane. 

Abruptly pausing her midway he said, ' That's my announcement. Gotta go!' And then he rose closer to the skies never to return again.

Signs

Acts of love leave no signs

Such of acts of beauty
Ensure that their marks are wiped off
No imprints, or unnecessary witnesses

For they are possessed by a vanity of their own
Of not becoming mundane;

So, the voices are absorbed by walls
Foot prints, overwritten
Sweat, overpowered by perfume
Warmth of air exhaled from nostrils, intermingled
Dust swept off
Secrets, protected, or often forgotten

They, these miniature acts of love, leave no signs
Only vaguely live on in mutual memories, their vanity untouched. 

Honeymoon

There was this girl, of those numerous girls I have quoted unawares. She and I met as strangers, introduced each other to each other as we struggled through our sluggish jobs, being the only two females around, kind of made us fall together. We would often lunch sitting by the window looking down at the road below, which I later found out was not a road but the top of a flyover. But that happened much later one day when I gauged the dimensions, standing alone beside our tall, really tall office building.

Once in a while she would made me eat half of her sturdy boiled egg, sliced in the middle and salted, to help me walk through my disgusting lunch. And give me that awkwardly toothy smile, grin. Almost like a loving pet would grin at you, without minding if the smile fit in picturesque or not. I don't take the trouble to describe her face, I am pretty bad at remembering faces and worse at describing them. To save me the trouble of that, I classify faces into two neat categories. Pretty and ugly. She was quite obviously the latter. In fact, to an extent that I had heard people ridiculing and bursting out laughing about how ugly she was. 

One morning, she asked me about the touristy places from around where I was from. As a practice I gurgled out the name of a certain beach town where everyone went. Everyone. Then almost in one breath, she told me. Told me that, she was going to honeymoon there. And she said that with authority, like she had he tickets in her hand. I choked, metaphorically. And I felt the same ridicule that those who laughed did. My first reflex was to ask her, If she was joking.

Because the idea of a honeymoon seemed too far fetched given what she was. Given the world we live in, the ugly are invariably denied the candy floss of romance. But I didn't ask her that. Instead I felt a stab of envy when I hugged her when she told me a few days later that she was engaged to the friend she was in love with for years. 

Months later, she put up pictures of them, playing with the waves in the certain beach town I had mentioned. Her husband was as thin as a sickle. And my friend, she looked spherical, in those pictures, fitting perfectly into the edges of the sickle as they posed with each other before the vast blue sea. She would put up pictures of them cutting cakes and putting off candles celebrating monthly anniversaries of their wedding. Some more of them and oddly baked home made cakes, on their rickety rooftop. 

People still laugh though, laugh their asses off, looking at those pictures and how funny they appear. But not I. I have been shut up for good. Love, when found, can make life so speechlessly beautiful. And when left unfound, can make it fall apart into a thousand pieces each moment.  

Lore

I was told a story to, as a child. They say not just a story, but folk lore. About one pot-bellied beggar. Who begged for alms, fistfuls of rice and few coins if hardly ever fate implied good, across parched summer afternoons in homes inebriated of siesta. He held an umbrella of stitched palm leaves, above his shoulder, a walking stick with his one hand, and held out a bowl on the other, begging and singing, in that softened pitiful voice. His feet would burn in the heat and his pot belly would let go with hunger, because no matter how much he sang and how much he begged, his hunger knew no end. He would weep like a child sitting on the river stairs and pray. For something to happen and alleviate his plight.  Days went by and nothing happened, no one came. His despair grew more immense and more his suffering more acute. He would just drink the water, taking aloud the names of the delicacies he wanted and assuming it was them, and walk back home. One day, however, the river rippled and the Goddess emerged. Dry like paper, out, as the water whirled all around her and then calmed. She smiled and sent an earthen pot floating towards him before disappearing. I remember the delight in his eyes and the delirious joy in my child's mind as I imagined him unwrap the banana leaf from the pot and dig his hands into each of those delicacies whose name he had taken in the days leading to this, cooked in ghee and filling my nostrils as strongly as his. 

Now, those stories had hidden themselves somewhere as life suddenly has become a travesty of priorities. Until recently, I met his niece. In a video from years ago, shot in their courtyard. She had just about almost learnt how to walk. The art of walking, unraveled, she who had her uncle's exact eyelashes and brows, walked about like a queen with a long stick on her shoulder, losing her balance midway due to its weight. Her hair tied in a tight pigtail and her eyes with two mystifying black pools of awe in them. Baby talking, baby screaming, and baby giggling her way around, with the stick intact on her shoulder. Sometimes elves would appear from above the skies and swoop down below with a speed only known to her and I. Now ants would climb shrubs of hibiscus, beginning their life long pilgrimage to the top. And dust would rise up in the coagulated fatigue of my fake adulthood and give way to many storms. I saw them, these phantoms of imagination, in her eyes, black pools of awe. Like, we shared our secret, without quite knowing we did. He, only stared on. 

Woman, Being a

Years ago, more than half a decade ago, we used to frequent this place, this restaurant, not entirely classy, but itsy-bitsy classy in its own way for people who ate out of pocket money. It was at one end of our sooty town, under the expanse of a tree, in the shade of which they set up a barbeque on some evenings. We would go dutch, strictly dutch, no man splurged on us, bunch of single females, religiously dutch at heart. For hours we would sit there, perched like tired birds munching coleslaw, strings of cabbage, nibbling a cutlet at its edge, to just sit there long enough. Look at people, until the icecreams from their cones melted, flooded and overflowed. 

Once we noticed, paticularly stared at this man-woman in a corner. You know such corners, where they could sit dangerously close to each other for distances dictated by propriety. Distances to be illustrated in public, where anything that can catch the eye, does. She was plump, dusky, with her long plait ending way below where her blouse ended, half of her back exposed, towards us. He held her by stretching an arm across her shoulders and whispered into her ears, that sparkled with chandelier earrings, supposed dirty secrets that made her giggle quietly. They chatted and ate oblivious of our lingering awe and gaze. At the gluttonous plates on their table.

The other unsplurged on single females uttered. He's feeding her so well, such that later she would let him do. Whatever had in mind. She was a pros. They said. That's the word we used then, that's the word we use now.

That woman, sold off, for money. I don't look up or down on her. She does what she does. But each time I see a car slowing down beside a waiting girl on a highway, and the man inside raising eyebrows, posing that question; I think. I do. 

Deal-breaker

Wasn't I led to believe, that we have each become a walking talking mystery. Each one is a twisted novella within its own bodily boundaries. Some are even novels. And some have sequels after sequels to themselves. Oddly enough prequels too come to exist, like a sudden revelation into the past. And they come to being long after the novels we are have died their ends.

Didn't I comfortably assume that our skin was the one illusion that hid well all those distortions within? If not for the skin that covered our flesh, our pink flab and all the gluttony in them, our green veins and red arteries and the fucking heart that had learnt to fake love for centuries would be exposed. So thank God for the skin. And the tongue for all the talking and the keeping quiet and victoriously sheathing the ugly underneath.

But now. Haven't the tables turned?

Done with the faux pas, all I have come to understand is this. I am the one semi circle that completes the circle of life. I ain't a mystery, or a novel, or a concoction even. I am an arc. One half of which curls and awaits the other twin, facing in my direction, which is often the opposite to the one I am facing. And together, we complete the circle of life. He & I.

All theory apart. All bias done with. That we befit, into each other, is the sole standing truth. That we stay put, our green veins and red arteries, and our merged heart. We swim inside each other. Be like yin and yang.

That is the big change that a little it of love can get into our life. A little bit of it, makes this world of difference. Love heals. Love clears the air. Makes us see, for once the truth. 

Afresh

We make a big deal about knowing. What we know blinds us more than anything. It makes layers of bias settle on our fatigued heads. And we hang in there, secretly proud that we know so much.

But like once the professor said, unlearning is as important, as is the act of learning itself. One should have that agility to erase & start afresh.

This is not one of those. Motivational writing stuff written exclusively to bore you. Just that, I am here to narrate the following anecdote:

So, exactly when we are in the middle of a conversation which is losing direction, stemming from an ancient misunderstanding or correct understanding, so to say, when we have begun to kick our crystal colored dreams, when there is that stemming anger, mild in between, and ten other things on your mind, and you lose track of the words you say and hear, we realize that we are not getting anywhere and begin to classify the conversation as an argument, the mobile network plays a trick and ditches. So we were left hanging, trying to remember which point we abandoned it at, and if there was any fertile point left in taking it to its hasty closure. And obviously, I call back. Without a pause, I continue from the mid sentence, the approximate phrase which had witnessed the disconnection.

Abruptly, he asks who i was. I swallow. What? He repeats, who this was. And more crucially, he adds, who is it that I wanted. On the phone. In that flattering voice.

I breathed in deep, almost forgot everything else. 

And i responded. it's me. and all i ever wanted was him.

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. 

Chi·mae·ra

Look, I am writing. Writing because of a love for a certain font. Writing because, I adore this midnight air. And the guitar in my ears. Because, I love how black blotches on white. White as in, emotions that vanish leaving many faces in my past, white, as I chase them until far away. Not just the ones I loved. Also, the ones I didn't. Also, the ones I couldn't. The many who I ignored, consciously, unconsciously. The dozens I split my fags with. The dozens on the near by tables in cafeterias I asked for a light. And vice versa. The purposes I chased, the purposelessness that chased me. For years together, the futility of various manifestations of a promise of prosperity, leading to layers and layers of bias over my mind. Forgetting the truthful core I am made of, honest, blatant. Naked, open, free, lover. The stories I am made of, and those that I make up. You know, a lot, a serious lot, seems to be losing any importance. Almost everything of value seems to be depreciating. The lost, seems to take leaps like a naughty dolphin would leap over waves in the sea and then sink back, just so as to tease me, how the aftermath of that loss has disabled me to value the things I should value, and that are actually precious enough, dream like, icing on the cake like, dancing on a string like. And I seem to be losing any understanding of whatever it  is that I want. Do I want freedom? To float like a fallen leaf. Or do I want to settle like dust? That question, I am not able to frame it fucking right in my head. The older I grow, the more I lose my fixation with that question. The more time passes, the more I tend to confuse and repel you with what I write. Let me just sink in the high that is me right now. My toes, tiny balls of lust, are floating out my thirteen floor window. In the midnight air that I adore. And there is guitar in my ears. And I see so much I don't want to see, and hence, I am blinded. Chi·mae·ra. Chi·me·ra.

Our Monsoon

Does rarely so happen that it's raining and you're in love.
That it's coming down in lashes,
You can see drops conjoin to form streams in the air
And there's love coagulating like sugar in bits of your flesh

That there's car screeching brakes on sliding shiny wet roads
In 9 o'clock nights
And you are feeling, deeply stringed.
Rooted, loved.

The world ends at your windshield
And home is inside your head

Never, barely ever
Does it happen that the Monsoon,
Brings anything other than tears,
Quiet melancholy, year after year

This time, however
Our past ache seems to have vanished
This June has erased, made pointless
All of our singular drenched walks in the rain

Now when it's thundering outside,
We're nearly orgasmic inside our head.

This time,
There's that lovely umbrella of rainbow colors
One that I always wanted.
And there's you.

Bed of Lies

We lie to save ourselves. We sugarcoat, slip our tongues on bare truths. We lie out of not knowing for certain. We lie to hide the truth. We lie to hide another lie. Lie in love. Lie to the one we love. We lie at home, to the only ones we own. We lie at work to save our ass. We come up with excuses and explanations. For not turning up, for not making time. To keep our character un-tarnished. We lie in pity for ourselves to begin with. And then we become svelte liars. We mouth lies like they were truths. One after the other. Like smooth like cream. Without one hiccup. We keep going on, sometimes we lie much more than required.

I lie a lot these days. My conscious is built of water tight chambers set apart from each other, making up the whole, which is my mind. I be with people, who do not know absolutely anything about each other. I strive they don't meet or match notes. I have hardly one confidant. Or two. The rest, are a bunch of people, who I expect not to cross check the lies I sell to them, day in and day out. 

The trick to becoming a seasoned liar is to be assume that that lie is the only truth. Not merely assuming would do sometimes, you have to believe the lie you utter, if you want it to be bought. 

I try to consciously believe in mine, and end up doing it so good, that the truth escapes my memory. It's only ridiculous, but every night I lay on my bed of lies, I see the beautiful truth that I am, become oblivious. 

Livin-in

Sometimes, she would leave about strands of her hair red green over the floor, rolling in circles, to some mild invisible breeze. Playing tiny games till long after she's gone. Would have her earrings removed and slid underneath the pillow case, because they were too dangling to be worn around at home. And this, I would discover weeks later. One by one, many of her hair-clutches would disappear and stock up at my house. And by each day, her hair would hence grow, wild and untamed. Her head too. Corners of my room would not smell of her perfume or of her sweat. But of something else, those drops of secret vapor that leaked out the pores of her skin, and hung lose in the air, stood caged, for she kept my windows always shut. Her brassiere slung quietly beside my shirts, like she owned this place. The misplaced knife in the kitchen, the saucers out of place. And she never tightened the faucet enough and that dripped all night, not letting me sleep. Obsessing about her being in my house, livin-in, despite her having moved out days ago, weeks ago, months ago.

..

Before this: here

Perfume

My world of unhindered glee begins from under his nostrils. There is the half day old stubble, invisible but still there, brushes rough against my fingertips. A remnant aftershave under the chin, around the neck. 

Faint wriggling odor of deodorant off his arms. Last night's dish-wash mildly, mildly oozing out the pores of his palms. That faint lemon fragrance and our vague month old romance. 

His third shirt in one day. Sometimes that one shirt for three days. There is an odor of love that lives locked among those threads of fabric. In those checks and in those colors. There is that faded intimacy growing stronger by the moment. The blinded rush of passion. The dissolving taste of mouths. Leaving behind, thoughtful aftertastes. 

That last for days, sometimes for even weeks before they are written down about. Explicitly. Sans inhibition, like in the act of love itself. 

Life, lazy, languid. Time, we believe must be moving. Watches tied around tens of thousands of tiny wrists in the world must be ticking, because we believe they must. But we can't see that happen. 

Where we are, temporarily, in this exact fucking spot in time and space, our interlocked co-ordinates, I do not want to care. Whether it does or does not.

I am only lost. Only lost. I have even forgotten myself. Usurping the un-bottled perfume that exudes when our souls cuddle. Momentarily. Or so.

Idyll

When there is just the two of us in the room, and I am intently staring at how conspicuously his eyebrows meet, or the depression on his upper lip and talking about it, there is actually three of us in the room, I say. There is obviously the two of us in flesh and soul. And besides, there is another me. Right beside us, the couple. Sitting perpendicular to the axis that connects the two of us. Quietly, existing with large eyes she, the third person, isn't taking notes or anything. She is noticing the passage of moments. And submerging in our heavenly inaction. I tell him about her. Ask him to keep looking only at me though, and not get distracted by searching for where she is. Instead, he tells me, there is actually four of us in the room. I jump to an alarm, looking for that other woman of his imagination. But then he adds. There is obviously the two of us in flesh and soul. Then there is the other me, who I just mentioned. And then there is the other him. The fourth person. Our two other persons spare us a glance, and then continue at each other. We the real ones, end up sometimes as reflections and then sometimes those distant observers are the apparitions and we stay real. Amid such fluctuations, we inch closer to an idyll.

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. 

Ca·dence

Our pumpkin colored cheeks, mild orange cum pink. Where the flesh shallows into tiny dimples. The glory on our white faces. Enchanted with stolen smooches. We, instantaneously are closer to the skies. If we jump and raise our ankles an inch above the gravel roof, we would gather a bit of the grey clouds under our fingernails. A bit of those unbounded water bearing uncut giants that hung low, undifferentiated from one another. One bit of them in our fingernails. And then we would stand facing the other and shine. With the aura of the future and the rust of the past both lost. Locked in one precise moment. Our gargantuan shadows crisscrossing each other on the wall. Like our true demons within. Unshackled, unsoiled and beautiful. Unafraid of being seen. Or indulging in the forbidden. 

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! 

Baby Steps to Sanity

There are these following stages to sanity. Sometimes not in that exact chronological order. But whatever:

1. Singularity: And all the other fancy-pants terms used for being by oneself. With a sparkling clean head. Making through the day, calling for cabs alone, standing by the ATM machine, waiting for cash alone. Etc. Not being stuck in some wait. Content, by measurable parameters of human reason.

2. Infatuation: Being one of the most dangerous sorts of fixation. One-sided. Unspoken of. Driving oneself to the ends of insanity. And making her fall off the edge, with the elan of an enchanted lover. Living, vicariously, lopsided towards imagination. Hunted by cravings of the anti-pragmatic kind. Counting the inconsolable, unsettled gasps of a perennial adolescent.

3. Non-committal Non-serious: The conscious choice of being in this kind of an arrangement finds its root in the dearth of conversions of series of infatuations into regular affairs. Parties engaged are mostly busy convincing themselves that this is indeed the non-committal non serious thingy. And there are no stakes. Either party exclusively look out for their reasons.

4. Non-committal Serious: This usually kicks off at a book shop, or a meeting at a common friend's. One doesn't understand why one likes the other, given that the track record of past flames doesn't match with. But there is a certain level of comfort. Understanding of mutual flaws. Something that comes with seasoned loveless-ness. Parties are semi-involved. But neither has the bloody guts to commit.

5. Committed-Serious: Finally, when the most necessary issues of arrangement are worked out by the art of persuasion and the fear of dying alone, parties enter into what is commonly called as a relationship in romantic parlance. Movies, dinners, stay-ins, taking the sex for granted. Etc

6. Marriage: One day you are made to believe that you were created to only pro-create. That is the beginning of marriage and the end of what is called life in common parlance.

7. EM: Stands for Extra-marital. After the boredom of feeding on the same face for years kicks in, one finds an artist on the street, with long hair, or an unkempt beard, living on alcohol, the perpetual hedonist, or any one specimen stretching from 1-5 above, she secretly elopes with whatever she previously cursed as unconventional.

And then someday, if the stars are pleased, gets to Sanity.

Unrelated prequel: here

Unloved

For the first time in many years, my head feels clean. No emotion clouds my judgement and I can see. Clearly, for once finally. But there is nothing to see at all. I don't know what I am meant for yet, but there is peace I have suddenly come to know with my sense of being. With both who and what I have been made to become. Being okay is very important. The situation of constant internal struggle, endless longing has left me without a notice. And I am okay with the way I am. The folds in my belly, the way my kohl smudges, the way my hair coils. Every flaw, I am okay with. I am being real here, I am being dealt with as I am real. Befittingly.

I have left my desires far behind. I don't need them anymore. There is no unrelenting urge to be somewhere with someone for some reason. There is no reason. For anything. The way my flesh sits on earth, the way I displace the exact volume of air as my body, never stood as unchained from every other reason of existence as I yearned for as now.

I have broken the vicious circle of sorrow. I overshot it, by some large unintelligent margin and now I am floating in space. Yeah  

I just might have become un-fuckin-touchable, as someone had said. I am for keeps.

Now playing: Beethoven - Fur Elise.

Settling Down

The mind wants something tangible now. Tan-gi-ble. To smell touch and feel. To lather up in foam, watch. Some definite matter the way physics defined it. Long long time back in school books, when the heart hadn't learnt to yearn, yet. Pleasures were unknown. And we waited to age. Our lives to ripen. Now that our minds aren't pink no more, and we have chased half our lives away chasing, the vague, the non-existing, the intangible, it dawns upon our silly dwarfed psyches that, everything was a lie, all that was a waste of time, hope and even imagination. So now not that we regret that we half lived our youths by whiling it away in bitter-sweet waiting, we just sulk. And break down within sulks and sigh wanting to have a relapse to the childish excuse of pursuing our unreal dreams rather than settling for what's real.

You were an unreal dream, honey. I am completely over you now. I wish I was. But I believe I am already. Or may be not. What choice do I have, what choice have you left me with. Nothing. Zilch.

This is not poetic heart wrenching writing, but now I would rather have a different life. Of settling for what's real. And touchable. And not so vague. Real with faults. Not completely adorable, yet lovable. Not you, never you, but. It's all I have and I am happy. Or I should be. Or may be not. Who knows, who can tell. What choice do I have, what choice have I left myself with.

Blah blah blah. 

Facade

Well, as I am too disentangled to write a story, lets make tonite the night of one liners, shall we.

• I have got very bad intentions for you. In my mind. Destructive. Very dirty, filthy intentions
• Nothing sets you as free as the absolute lack of commitment. Peals off two layers of  your skin to reveal your true colors
• You may do whatever you wanted to do with me. The question is, and the very big gigantic question is, baby, would you want keep me after that. May be not. So choose, which window are you gonna throw me out from. Huh
• I like the surreptitious noises. If sometimes, I get to hear them, I cherish and cage them in my middle ear.
• Love rain. I love rain. Not the first showers of monsoon. But the ones that never stop, once they've begun. Incessant. With continuous warnings of flood and dams crashing down. Those rains. Cannot wait for them anymore. 
•  Fuck the following things in the following order:
• Facebook
• Peer pressure
• The Tropic of Cancer
• Need for attention
• Awful beer
• Blah
• Food, is the biggest distraction. Thank God for Food. Is it illegal to marry food. Like I came back home, pretty drunk and artsy. And I had plans to scribble the hell out on this blog. But, now that I've eaten, I can hardly remember. Like I have complete amnesia of the turmoil in my head of an hour ago.
• Life has frozen, shopping is a panacea no more. Consumerism nauseates me. It makes me want to puke my lungs out. Malls suffocate me. I hate the mirrors that make you appear prettier than you could ever be. 
• I despise how the ATM machine never fails to reject my card the first time. How is that anomaly maintained every time I am in severe need for cash, I would never know.
• Back off, whenever someone sits that close to me and talks, my eyes zoom in and zoom out on them. And you keep getting larger and smaller in my eyes. That sickens me. I like to see you for how you are, for real, without your pretension. So back off, may be a little. 
• And give me my sanity back. Or never ask me why I am insane so much. 

The Incurable Romantic

Thoughts and intentions cannot be truths. As much as actions can be. That doesn't make my love for you any less true just because it is caged inside of my mind as a mild intention. However, I would never know what the truth was from your side. Because your intentions never transpired into an action. And both you and I, and the fleeting, highly improbable emotion between us, disintegrates, unquestioned, unanswered.

Now, why I take an exception (that only actions can be classified as the truths, whereas my and only my love stands true even when it is a mere intention), is because of this. 

I have come across numerous other men, off late. Numerous. An adjective that comes for more than one. More than many. Some of whom are rebellious and wildly attractive. Non-conformists. Artists. Men rich in emotion. Rich in time. With the promise of an enticing adventure. Hinting of worlds I have never explored. Touching bits of mind that I didn't know even existed. I have come to know quite a few such, in the recent past. 

Yet, last night. When I was stoned and asleep on the street, under the stars with my hands under my head, staring up, I was trying to figure you out. In a semi-awake semi-hallucinated state of existence, I wondered. When clouds look like people and things, what intentions do they have. What conspiracies. Because, the sky was overcast, I couldn't trace the stars. I saw two clouds, dark water-bearing monsters, lying side by side. I saw hands and legs, and hair. And bellies, and heads. Every time I shut my eyes for a brief few seconds, the two clouds would fall apart into each other, merge.

I wished, we were the two clouds. I missed our mundane moments from the past. Wanted to steal them away to the present. Or hide them away for the future, may be.

I don't remember, how long I was there that way. Must have been for a greater part of the night. I felt this deep, unhindered connection with you. I realized, you are the one I will be in love with forever. 

Courtesy: Krish

ap·pa·ri·tion

Years later, we would meet again.

Clasped in a different situation, than now.

Haunted by fresh ghosts

In love with separate people

With families in far off cities, waiting.

Eye to eye, nose to nose

Our thoughts accurate, coincident.

Seasoned with years of similar predicament


And ask this question

Quietly, under our mouths.

So as to dissolve the sound in our breaths

Ashamed, yet not shy


That,

Why didn't we kiss tonight.

When we could've

When we so could've.

Im·bro·glio

It's gonna get obviously haywire, when a woman as passionate as I, falls for a man, as detached as you. There's flames going up in the air. That's bits and pieces of me, burning. I stay awake nights, procrastinating telling you. Wallowing in my shame. And tongue-tied-ness.

It's been this way for years. Yes, years in our such short lives. And I worthlessly realize that your love has rendered me incapable of nursing that emotion for another man. Even in forever.

I set imaginary deadlines, for culminating this thing that is. This thing that we have. And in my sleep, keep pushing that lazy frontier of time. Telling myself that this wait is worth every nanosecond in it, even if I don't get to have you at the end of it. Because, you are the only one. My solo.

It's you or no-one. So, I don't do anything about me. And I don't sit still either. I fret, cry, pray, in whatever intervals I get in between phases of loving you.

I look at distant blue windows and dream. And tell you, fall for me already. Fall, already.

You shrug, every time. And walk past.

im·bro·glio  
/imˈbrōlyō/

Noun
An extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation:

Synonyms
entanglement - complication

Wild

There was nothing that kept her. Could keep her. If let free, if left alone, she could go reckless. There was no restraining force in her system, once you got her unhooked once. Just once. Just one push and you would give her an excuse to go insane. She would know no shame. And fail miserably to understand any logic behind cultivated inhibition, of any sort. The woman was not the show a lot of cleavage kinda wild. Her mind was unchained. You get the difference? She did not pause and look at anyone's face for acceptance. She didn't have to learn to be non-nonchalant. She just was. She had no fears. Her head was clean. Absolutely see through.

Her face was gaunt, but with weird slant cuts. She would make her lips pout at the mirror. And throw her hair open. Turn off the lights and up the music. And dance. Wild. Like nothing else was.

And when she did that, she was such a spectacle. Such a spectacle. Her face shone with her aura. With everlasting latitude.

As the night progressed, she blossomed into an amusing temptress. Scattered with magic. Gurgling with laughter, that sound cutting across her dark room. Her memories fading into the distance. Legs and hands not  stopping. Waist swaying like in love. Hair, oh the hair!

Reason

But I don't know how I got here. Can't remember a thing. Feels like waking up in a strange bed. All hung over and head-ached. Only not that much head-ached. I am fine. Sad, but manageable. Not devastated. Disgruntled, or hopeless. Or, may be I am even hopeless. But that's okay. What can we do. I am okay you know, something I never imagined I would be, without you. Don't know how or why. Memories do come back to me, but they make me happy than sad. Like I see the lanes you walked, the places you waited at, the faces you told me about. But none of that affects me with a violent gash. I just smile. Merely, smile. Sometimes my eyes fill up. Moisten. But I look down and pretend to wipe my glasses. I miss you already, and I know this won't work. Something that didn't work the first time, will never work out. It's true because there is a reason for the not working out part. In afterthought I even see and realize and understand and accept what our reason was. Is. But then in the flush of lucky second and third chances that fate threw upon us, I forgot that very reason. For one crazy moment I felt, coincidences are an act of God. Fuck the reason. But no, the bloody reason has outlived even my affection today. Now. When I look down from a midnight window and assume what you must be up to. Sigh. Feels like a violent gash though, but only sometimes.

You are the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. However cliched and overused that may sound. I don't care. I literally have never been happier. But now look. The reason. Keeps coming back and makes us look less worthy than another try. I just can't. 

Either Way

In the middle of some intimate act, she would often suddenly leave him panting for breath. Gasping too much to even ask that question. Why would she choose not to love him when she very well could. Loving wasn't that hard, in the first place. And loving him, the one guy who had stretched out his entire life before her, wasn't to be hard anyway. But she was too distracted, sometimes. Like in another world. Like this was not meant to be. Like she regretted the series of decisions she had taken that had brought her to him. He would often try, merely try to gather the courage to ask her, what was not right. But he was worried that question would make her introspect deeper and she would walk out, for all time. At whatever the cost be, he chose status quo, over everything else. Every other possibility of heart break.

She would often pause under the shower, while rubbing soap on her arms and stare at the mirror. Touch her wet hair and be drenched in regret. Why hadn't she done everything when she had the time and the chance to. Everything that had the possibility of companionship. And even love. The little expressions of affection, that she had forfeited, because she hadn't the intentions of making it known out of cowardice or outright laziness. Sometimes she wanted to know what courses their lives might have taken. Similarly, she wanted to loiter back to every such might've and could've and explore the mood swings of an unknown future. Instead of just sitting there and waiting, when she could have hugged a quaint promise.

The aforesaid stanzas of prose could be read in either order. May be she regretted in the shower first and then went to him, made him miserable and came back to regret in the shower again. May be she married the man, only to run away from him and regret it in the shower and then go back to him. It is like a vicious circle. The same act precedes and supersedes its counteract. What should I do with my life. Do I go either way.  

Once.

It was a winter afternoon, to the best of what memory tells me. Could've been winter or monsoon though. Or one of those days when it was just cloudy and the canopy of pine trees didn't let you see the sky. And it didn't matter if it was evening or afternoon still, the sun set at 4 pm.

Had been trying to get a cab on the way back from solitary lunch. You know how hard it is to get cab in that city. Almost impossible to find one that's going where you want to go. Almost as difficult as finding love. And then it began to hail. Yeah, you won't believe. Hail. Sheets of frozen rain hit everything on the road, all shops had their shutters down. There was no place to hide under. It was relentless. How perfectly I had forgotten my umbrella.

I almost pleaded a cabbie to take me back. He charged me thrice. Or so it sounded, I didn't have the time to calculate exactly how many times he was charging me over the usual. I got in and rolled up the glasses. My sweatshirt wouldn't suffice. Like I had gotten into that habit of stretching their sleeves to cover my palms. From the cold. I did just that, breathed in air, breathed out mist. And counted on the silence. That couldn't be broken. That had encapsulated me ever-since, I had begun craving for love. Dogmatically.

I had been hiding in my bag a neatly packed slice of cake. Chocolate fantasy. That I had coaxed myself to believe wouldn't twist and turn and spoil itself as the cab made numerous rides uphill and downhill. When I reached, the hail had stopped. It was cold still, I borrowed the umbrella from the gatekeeper and quietly walked till the stairs. There I must have paused for sometime, let myself be further disillusioned before finally tip toeing up.

I wanted to be quiet, like a sleeping child. Didn't want to be heard, didn't want to be a nuisance, or an intrusion. I knocked their door. I say their- they had begun living together past few months. Though people outside constantly talked of how much more they had been fighting after the moving in thing. Ironically, I believed in both, their firm love and the rumors that made rounds. Probably because it never mattered what I believed or felt or thought.

Put the cake on his table, I owed him one because I had lost some silly bet. Or something. And turned back to make a quick exit.

But turned back again and smiled, grinned. Seeing them together that way, huddled against each other under a blanket staring out the window, at the chaos outside having been settled. I felt peace. Love, once. I don't remember if I felt envy. Somehow, I can't remember walking out that door anymore.

From that moment till now, a lot had happened to me, with me. I haven't done much except write some 700 odd posts on this blog. Oddly enough, now..I don't feel the need to be in love anymore.

Consequence of severe affection.

This is me walking away. And I choose now to do this, because precisely now, I love you the most. Beyond this, it can only go downhill. Because we are flawed and human. Love, often when left alone for sometime, self-destructs. And I can't see that. I can not see that. I cannot see this love degenerate. And make nothing of itself. So I am walking away now, when everything is just so perfect. When I am assured that I love thee. And I will never find this love again, with anyone else, I forfeit, abandon. Give up. 

No, I am not exhausted. Just a little numbed I believe, I am unable to feel a thing. Neither affection, nor repulsion, not even the sorrow of going away from you, not the pangs of heartbreak. I feel nothing. And I am taking this very very conscious decision of just being by myself. Sometime back, I found it hard to imagine a separation. And now I am just inert to all tiny insecurities. It must be some life-saving involuntary bodily mechanism of self defense. Because deep down, I know a lot of things I pretend not to know on the surface. Because deep down, I know I wouldn't survive the impending umpteenth heartbreak, that you're gonna so cause me. Baby. I wouldn't. So, I am drugging myself to leave.  

And sometimes, walking away is the more feasible option. Than staying back and fighting for you. Putting a lot at stake, and hoping for nothing. It's hard, I swear. So this is me walking away. 

No one's coming.

It’s such a relief sometimes to know that no one’s coming; No one’s coming to get you. This night is endless. The door is bolted. Home alone. It’s such a remedy to be alone. All your life you have waited for someone to come and get you. But not tonight. You have got no place to go to. No answers to answer. No second voices. Just the vice of sinking into an abyss. This abyss beautiful, soothing as hell. Hardly any pretension. Company is overrated, may be even love is. Love too is overrated. Heart is one complete thing. It needn't await fucking completion, not a piece in a jigsaw that needs fitting in. Home alone, this is nearly perfect. Nearly. Misery has taken a backseat. It’s soon vanishing into the horizon I am leaving behind. No one’s coming to get me. 

The Proposal

That day when you bought me purple shorts with yellow stars in the blistering afternoon wind by the sea because I couldn't stand the summer. From that day when I couldn't stand an inche's distance between you and I, till today. When I sit in coffee shops alone, merely thinking about you, having developed a silly audacity to get away from you with elan because I could never tell you that I love you. What has changed. Throughout there is the overlapping all encapsulating general disappointment with life. The repetitious loops my mind gets into, swinging between artificial happiness and perennial sorrow. A slow volcano erupts inside me, not knowing why. Mostly watching both you and me decaying in cowardice as against love. And disappearing. Into molecules and atoms. And protons and electrons. And the gigantic spaces between them. What have we got. What have we done. Except for ignoring, denying the presence of, an impending empty future. And just underneath our skin, sulking in that fear that we are being returned empty-handed. Naked and unloved. But where will the love come where there is no courage. Where the heart and mind do not collide and confess and make it known. Quiet love is only as good as no love. Only as bad as it. So say. Proclaim. Make known. Carve out the love you feel you desrve.

On second thoughts, don't. Because where does arise the need to say. Show me. Isn't everyone literate enough to just know. Feel understand. Through the gift of his five senses. And the mind. That he's being loved. So desperately. And with such impunity. If he doesn't understand it by himself, he's just living in denial. Or acting funny foolish. So don't just say. Not yet.

Living in your shadow

I am not a giver by default. But the skewed equation of love has made me into one. Power games fuck with the mind bad. And now I am what I am not. I had an identity, with very distinctly carved outlines that didn't haze out. Now I merge in and out of your preferences, you prefer it or not. And I choose this, would have it no other way. I like living in your shadow.

Where your dreams come first, your wants are superior than mine. Where you have the louder say. I merely cherish the shade in your shadow. This love is like an escape for me. For as long as you would let me be, I would be. Here, not asking too many questions, or demanding too much time. Or too much of your attention. Mumbling my inadequacies to you when you're asleep, finding solace in that.

I believe this post sounds overtly dramatic and something very unlike what I would do. But trust me. This is how it feels. Today I saw a movie & I quote:

Q: Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we're nothing?

A: We accept the love we think we deserve.

And how true is that. I think I deserve you assuming that you'll realize what I am worth someday, yet not wanting that realization to come right away. My patience is sweet and I want to take you on a journey of realizing who I am, who we can be. Both of us, how magic awaits to happen to us.

But you won't budge. From where you are.

Sometimes, I doubt if it's an equation of love at all, I can't see the = anywhere. There isn't even a ~ honey, hinting approximate equality. There must be a massive <<< sign somewhere here. And I can't see it yet because the darkness of your shadow has eaten up my mind.

Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon

We don't do reviews. Because we firmly believe we can never judge another man's work of art. We could never be equipped well enough for that. Things are subjective, we know. One cannot generate a score and draw that dirty line between good and bad. And say. This is that and that ain't this. 

I may be cheap to impress, more often than not, I love what I see than not-love. Though I might pretend the strength of sarcasm because love makes my knees weak, but I keep the margins wide, to err is beautiful. I am forgetting the point I was trying to make. 

Works of art change the way I see. Breathe in and out. And if you know me, you should know that I talk like a maniac for a book that I have adored, more than adored, a movie that don't let me sleep. And this is an understatement. The effect is sometimes toxic, repeatedly addictive, I can't unhook me from what I love, from who I love. The latter is, another story. Anyway

I am in awe of mad geniuses. They rock my world, more, much more than perfectionists. 

Getting back to the point, hold on. I found a movie, another movie, that I am gonna keep coming back to for a long time. It's nothing short of a treasure. Pulp fiction. Every time I watch it, I want to smooch John Travolta right out of the screen. 

Work of art, joy forever. 

PS: Not to be understood otherwise, title is a song from the movie. Google, at your own risk. Disclaimer. yeah, life's full of them. 

Simile

My love of you
Is the amount of love
Bound in the birthday poem
I wrote for my mother
When I was eight

My love of you
Is more than the sarcasm
Contained in the worst misanthropic shit
I could ever think of

Though, is slightly less
Than the number of stars
In the night sky.

My love of you
Tastes like a neat curse
On someone's angry black tongue
That apt, adequate

I love you like time loves time.
Zones apart, on different faces of the planet
Yet that rythme, of moving together

I love you in a way, similes fall short.

Even words fail

So no matter how ridiculous it sounds, I earnestly believe that I deserve the right to love you. In my own ridiculous way. I cherish this right too much, it's almost sacred. I choose to love you, because I know no other prejudice.

Though all love fades, and no man can ever be able enough to deserve a woman completely in forever time, I  love you now. In a way, I desperately need you to appreciate that in as long the now lasts. 

Forsaken.

In TV serials, there are these shrewd conspiring aunties. Where are they in our lives? Our life. Plural no more. Singular, held together by the glue of love. Our life. Not lives. Marked correction. Where are these shrewd conspiring TV serial aunties? So is missing the rain, romance, honeymooned beaches. Skimpy clothes bought and hidden for far off holidays. Gifts and special days. Staring at the moon and talking. When will I be reading out all these poems I wrote for you, all these years. When will you pause from the race you are running and say, you love me too. When are we gonna rest, baby. I am tired, working days, thinking work at nights, working my ass off for the money that is never spent to purchase lasting joy. I am exhausted, being stuck so much away from you, that if I scream, you would never ever get me. Where is the life I wanted so much. The satin bed sheet, on which I would count creases in the morning. Where is the half burnt dinner I would manage, to be nibbled with rapt attention, in front of the TV, watching serials, and wondering why is whatever missing, missing indeed. Our life, is exhausting itself so fast, in the hands of time and fate, I couldn't feel more crippled sometimes. Of missing out on so much. Of missing out on so much, that it is as if, everything is being missed out, forsaken. And what for? Why? I know there always is somebody who is more underprivileged than us, but why do the good things seem to happen to someone outside of the aforesaid underprivileged and us. Just why. 

Acquaintance.

You are like your own reflection in water. Disappearing into waves every second. Unsteadily swaying in and out of my shattered heart. You. Are just like your reflection in water. Now you're here by me, the moment next, you aren't. I can't say. You won't say. A word about what would happen hereafter. We won't take that chance. Too much is at stake. When you are here, though you are vivid, assertive of your presence. Loud and clear. When you aren't, you are only an imagination in my mind.

And I am a woman of minimal means. I am never beautiful enough. Only men who have spend sufficiently long enough time with me, alone, fall for my internal complications and hidden falacies. It's almost obvious that I am not obviously beautiful. And I believe you know this for a fact. Yet you hang around. And then run away. As you fancy. I do not understand.

This Time*

We say, there is a next time. Serial procrastinators. Killers of today.

But you know. Now I feel, that there is no tomorrow. No next time. Only a frail and hardly breathing this time. So pale and sick and fading out, that it makes me shiver to feel its pulse, on my fingertip.

We keep tossing love. Kicking it out from between us now. Assuming that, we will meet again. Through miracles and coincidences. But the ruggedness of our fates, tells us that, our miracles happen as often as never.

The odds are very slim, that we meet again, after a couple years. And regain the spark that used to be. Forget our intermediate loves, and fall for each other again.

Because, next time, it would be too late. Too late. I should feel hopeless. I know you are the one. But.

It's not meant to be I guess. What can you do. What can I do.

* the title is inspired from the title of Jesse Wallace's book from Before Sunset. Call me crazy, if you will. Please. Call me that.