Threshold of a Dream

Shame, precisely was the lost element. There was barely any fear of consequence. So they would hide behind giant tree trunks on sultry afternoons. The birds would chirp away in drunken siesta as they were, underneath, below. Or if the birds made more noise alarmed, they would shift into the tree's holy womb, its crevice. Sharing the warmth of the rugged walls of wood, and the cold of the air trapped inside for months, with their bodies.

Or be on the river bed. Upon yellow sand, reflecting mirages into the sky. Stretched out asleep, their lithe limbs parallel. On the threshold of a dream. Once up, they would walk toward the tiny island in the middle that cut the river into two, for a while and let them merge again, out of relentless love. Down the line. They dug their ankles into, to check if there was any quicksand. 

They breathed the clouds, breathed the smoke. Of dead leaves burning in summer. In wild forest fires, ravenous and all-consuming. Giving up, giving in. Laughing. Inhaling carbon monoxide and losing senses. Clasping palms and being children. Hiding and seeking.

In December, sinking in snow.

Why tell me, again, can't we be like them. You & me. Tell me again. 

Odour

I must smell of him
Molecules of his, stuck in between mine
In empty spaces
Trapped odour, irreversible love
He's my envelope,
Like my stratosphere
All around me,
Sometimes you couldn't tell us apart
Entwined lovers

When my nostrils graze from
Chin downwards
Via the throat, his neck
They collect souvenirs.
Memories to be saved forever
No matter how we end up.

Enroute they collect bubbles of his odour.
Aftershave, sweat, flesh, skin, soap
Love, estrangement,
Fear and frustration
My nostrils cage a bit of his spirit
And save it in my lungs

When it gets dark,
That smell seeps into my blood
And oozes out of my skin

I must smell of him. 

Faded Flamboyance.

It's unfair to say, but I couldn't recognize him. From behind, I felt a pang of uncertainty, who could this man be. And then he turned around and I saw his face. The same face except he looked older by a decade than I had seen him last. I must have grown too, but it's difficult to notice age on oneself. He had lost all his color. He had no hair at all, whatever little he did was grey. He had trimmed it today, that was his excuse. Though I wanted to ask what was so desperately wrong with him, I couldn't. There is nothing that is ever cardinally wrong. Life ruins us all in general, in bits, in its own slow paced process. The loss of friendship, fading of love, tarnishing of belief, being few of the numerous causes. Therefore I didn't ask. No questions were exchanged. 

He said he'd come by, our place. He should better, I stressed. His wife was fine and the two sunshine daughters were growing up alrite, he said. I asked if the older one was resembling their mother more by the year, he stayed shut.  I didn't ask about the younger one then. It had been long I had forgotten their names, but their childlike faces stayed framed in my eyes. The younger one, who looked like her father was more my favorite, though I never had the chance to say it. Whenever he took me to see a doctor when I fell sick, or picked me up from the train station, saw me off for holidays. Or the once or twice he took me out for dinner with his resentful wife. 

A few years from now, he would be more open about the falling apart of his marriage. The people in his life who may have demanded an explanation would be long gone. We may meet after another lost decade of his life, on his face.

Then decades afterward, real decades i.e. he would come visit his daughter for winter in the hills, the younger one. Flip through old albums, pictures of his children in their school uniforms, purple water-bottles hanging from their necks. Pictures from the few vacations they had cared to take. Right then, he would close his eyes and regain his lost flamboyance. 

Breaking Out

Stout diabetic man. Staring at a lunch of boiled vegetables. In the corner. The smile in his voice. His nonchalance. His apparent lack of fear, wants me to break out. The strings of gerberas hanging from the walls. In bunches, between leaves they don't belong to. In dim lit wedding days of previous besties. The angst in their voice when we understand. How bad time is tricking us. Into believing that it's running slow. When it's not. When we are losing so much and so fast of our quintessential past that seemed like nothing more than average. Until now, when suddenly we are beginning to feel that we are growing up faster than we can handle. So we pause. 

For a while, hold our wrists between our thumb and the index finger. Merely to feel the pulse. To realise the restlessness of all that blood, flowing for no purpose. Chasing something that may in the end not be. Like running toward a mirage. Wasting our destiny, erasing scratched fate lines on our palms only by worrying. Worrying that we are getting nowhere. 

When that pause ends, we decide to make our deal more peaceful. Our thoughts more legible. With more foresight. Such that we chase things that only matter. Matter more. Such that the blood through our wrists slows down. Our temples don't sweat. We sit under trees of silent thought, holding love close to our chest. Like real tight. With a respect for our own self, that we don't shy away from the mirror every time we try to look at it. 

Because, in the end, we all become the stout diabetic man staring at a pale lunch alone in the corner. And then, all that would matter is did we have courage in our soul, that absolute lack of fear. Did we stand up when we should have. 

Love in the Afternoon

He recognized her from the other side of the table. They were aware, that they were both there. But then there always is that head nod. With the warm familiarity of an old lover. Yes, warm. There was a hint of a smile in her eyes. It has been years.

Hasn't it been? Years. Just three. Two years and ten months. Nobody kept a count from the precise day they had quietly to decided to call it off. No fanfare. As quietly as they had begun. Between the occasional clinking of glasses and passing of salads on that lunch table, they had met again after a couple winters had come and gone. Their host that afternoon, was a common friend who had thought them to be a couple until he announced that he was to marry another woman. Someone else. 

Someone else, another person, who didn't have her finicky fingers or her roving mind. A third person, out of the sphere of her imagination was going to be with the man she had loved the longest. Loved the deepest. Everything after l'affaire felt only lesser. The news of his wedding had crippled her, that they were expecting a baby, not as much. By then, the hot air had passed. Her blood rippled less often. 

And now she was just a distant person, sitting on the far end of the table with a lot of strangers but one. That lunch stretched long, he walked with her to the parking. Their baby was due in July. The child that could have been hers. Only it was not. Only they had drifted far apart even when they were with each other. Still in love. 

On a similar afternoon, long time ago, he had been plucking out stray strands of white hair from her head. Fishing them out from amongst bunches of black as she lay on his chest. In another world, yet on his chest. Feeling his heart beat. But that was a thousand afternoons ago.

The Seamstress

Once a young girl started sewing a dress for her best friend's wedding. She bought the piece of cloth with assumed measurements. But ran short of time, largely. The stitching couldn't finish before the night of the wedding. So she left it unfinished. Then about a year later, she decided she would wear it at another best friend's wedding, and picked up the work where she had left it. But that friend's wedding also came and went by, largely due to how slow and amateur her stitching was. Now that dress felt like more than a dress.

She began embroidering upon it, threads of various colors, chain stitched with curled bunches of roses in between. She stitched a little for each man that broke her heart, a little for those who she loved nevertheless. A little for those who she had left estranged unapologized. A bit for the mundane hassles of life. More across each of the nights she felt ugly and worthless and abandoned. Even more when she felt she was turning into a good for nothing though she had so much talent. So on and so forth, she embroidered for growing old. A circle of threads for each wrinkle that appeared on her face. For each child she bore. Child of hopes, child of new beginnings, child of last chances. Sewed in sleeves when her one and final love discarded her for another woman, walking away.

She stitched until blindness. And then died. They dressed her in that, in her coffin. It then looked complete. Just about adequate. Dressed in the stupid coagulated pain of a lifetime.

Closure

Closure is very necessary. Haven't we talked about this in the past? Oh yeah, hell lots of times. We only talk, never make it work. Women of words not actions, we seem to be. Because we have no clue how to close an episode and move ahead. Forget it, or atleast learn to live with it. We don't know peace, any peace, as a result. We bury the same thing numerous times, but then the grave opens up and zombies start walking all over us. God, why is this so hard. Letting go. Moving on. It's probably because our minds are like semi-solid right now. Very unsettled. Don't we truly believe in what we are holding on to for dear life. We do, but we want everything. Insatiable ghosts we are. Hence the bygone keeps popping up. Decent burials don't work anymore. Do they. God, I don't believe in resolutions. But please would you help me walk through this one. And get a closure and shut the chapter for now and forever. You see, I am a decent human being. A closure is the least I deserve. So let me just walk away. Because I am not getting away with anything else. Enough already. It's been fuckin years. I don't wanna add another one to it.

Scum of the Earth

Dear Hemingway,

Midway reading The Old Man and the Sea, I paused for a while to look you up. Pardon my negligence about before, but I found out that you had killed yourself in the end. That book, is now lying somewhere, unfinished. I am deciding, whether to pick it up again or not. Because, through out that book you write about how we fight till the very end, struggle against our environment. Stand up to anything that confronts us. Like the old man does. But what does it all end up to if you push aside all the optimism and shoot yourself in the head?

Hey, I ain't judging. Half the time my own ass is on fire. I am brooding so much that I might just evaporate. Hit something and go up in flames. I respect the dignity in death, the liberation it begets you. I admire the courage to die. Nevertheless. It just doesn't fall into place.

Plath killed herself when she was a few years older than I am now. Like Chekhov said - Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. I find this chase of day in and day out, what seems like a pointless struggle against invisible forces, obnoxiously nauseating. Virginia Woolf just walked into the water and vanished. It does feel like it is too much to take.

But you Hemingway, you? Of everyone else alive. And dead.

You should have read this poem by Bukowski:

The Secret

don't worry, nobody has the

beautiful lady, not really, and

nobody has the strange and

hidden power, nobody is

exceptional or wonderful or

magic, they only seem to be

it's all a trick, an in, a con,

don't buy it, don't believe it.

the world is packed with

billions of people whose lives

and deaths are useless and

when one of these jumps up

and the light of history shines

upon them, forget it, it's not

what it seems, it's just

another act to fool the fools

again.

there are no strong men, there

are no beautiful women.

at least, you can die knowing

this 

and you will have

the only possible

victory.

Because, darling, we are, darlings. The Scum of the Earth. There is not much need to get ourselves killed. 

Doppelgänger

When they were young, they had fallen for the same man. Those were not mere infatuations; but full blown affairs. It is believed that these affairs happened not simultaneously. But who can say? The foggy boundaries between being in love, the ache of a broken heart, the patch up et al are not for anybody to govern. So sometimes, those three, the two women and their man in between formed three vertices of a triangle. Isosceles triangle. 

They must have been similar, somehow-somewhere. Given a man, mostly may choose an approximate prototype of the opposite gender each time he gets to choose. With certain common traits. But these women were far from same. A had a docile exterior and a blatant inside. B, on the other 'and, was uptight on the outside and all gooey within. A was the submissive in her relationship. B, was obviously the insatiable dominant in hers. A was shy, fearful, a poetess. B was very vocal of her needs, her frustrations, even her dreams. But once unclothed, each woman turned inside out, i.e. behaved like the other woman was on the outside. The man switched his roles between the two. Such chameleons they are. 

Sometimes the median vertex of that triangle vanished though. The man, I mean. It was like he wasn't there. The triangle became a well meant straight line. A and B lusted for each other through the man who was like a membrane of mist. And like someone poked a finger into it, he disappeared. Sometimes they felt like prototypes of the same woman. Sometimes they felt like alter-egos, despite their cardinal differences. Sometimes like lesbian lovers. But mostly like doppelgangers.

You, Me & Vacuum

# This blog is full of someones. Each post is obviously about someone or the other. But some have an alarming majority, like I am screaming their bloody names out. I am not aware of what they did to deserve this honor, but anyway they don't know a bit, so it's no honor anyway. But however still.

# Life is so not well rounded sometimes. It takes you all the wrong ways and then makes you choose. What you feel you are meant for. This too, is one rare case. So, you're lucky if it happens with you. This is exactly where that bitch called life, squares it off. Pros and cons.

# As such, there's a mess. Irreversibly fucked up imbroglio. There's choking traffic. Mails to be sent, asses to be kissed. There's internet that has issues of its own. Very frustrating. Handicaps of our own. Secret debilitating humiliating handicaps of our own, that we don't have the balls to deal with.

# Also, a past of broken hopes, meandering routes to happiness that never practically ended, there's dresses that don't fit, nails that are bitten, beauty that is unattainable. Fear, trepidation. Shame, some more fear.

# There is no time. No space. No continuum.

# Sometimes, Virginia Woolf may not have been that wrong after all. Walking into a river with pocket full of stones. What was she thinking. She knew whatever she was thinking.

# But for you. You are at the other end of this line. Did you realize that what I just wrote could have been one of my those endless monologues about how everything is doomed? You would say, 'Stop, Stop!'

# I see myself through this tortuous day, because it ends with you. A means to an end. Sometimes you make me feel. Like I am floating in a gravity less vacuum. And one happy vacuum that is. 

Negociación

It's french for negotiation. Err.. Spanish actually.

I watched Before Midnight. I mean, I did finally. For the uninitiated, I claim that Before Sunset has left some pretty strong imprints on my mind. I have been quoting Celine and Jesse (well, mostly Celine) for years here. And after such a tireless wait, Linklater gives me this. I mean this. It's almost like a lover's betrayal. 

Wait.. I am kidding. It's not betrayal exactly. But then, somehow the sequel to your favorite movie can never be good enough. Mostly, I had been delaying watching Before Midnight for so many months probably because, I did not want it to touch my perception of Sunset so much. 

Call me a fanatic, but there was a time I used to watch it every Friday night. It has made me stand through the most disastrous of heart breaks. And helped seep truth back in. I used to say their lines along with them. Their accents intact. Yes, I was crazy. Still am. Whenever things go dull, I watch it again.

Before Sunset did whatever it did to me because a) it stood by the fact that love mostly is a transient feeling and b) once in a while, one deep conversation with its share of non sequiturs, does help. Our rusted soul, our breathless mind. 

I am not averse to everlasting love, but the truth is there might not ever be such a thing. We are on the same point here. Know, things fade. Passions overflow for a while and then. We get really cranky. Irritable, messy beings, who forget what it was like to be young and deep in wet love. 

Also, there is this association of romance with angst. I mean, it stays raw in your head if it falls apart. If you keep it from falling apart every single time it has almost gone off the edge, by your enormous patience and fear of dying alone, you leave it to die a slow death. 

In Before Midnight, Linklater makes you see Jesse and Celine in such crisis. Like they are barely afloat. There's a tonne of issues. There's kids. Oh my god. Responsibilities, money. And suspicions of infidelity. A lot of screaming. I mean a lot of it. Tempers catching fire. What beasts life has made of them. It's fearful watching them as it is. 

The love is now faint. Tied by a multitude of constraints. They euphemize constant fighting by calling it negotiating. Negociación, as Celine said. Accent intact.

Endorphins

We are little children, writing names on dusty windshields of cars

Our fingers reaching up, running through layers of grey powdered powder

Parting clean lines, forming letters for the first time.

The sun smiling on our faces in return,

Our bare muscles just don't know how to rest

Because there is nothing that is forbidden.

Our memory, ethereal

Merging reflections of now and then

We ain't bound to remember or abide by

There's stars above, glittering..millions of those

Scores of unnamed galaxies

And the mystery inside us, you and me, Un-unravelable. 

A sea sits calm beneath our settled feet

And the stars see themselves in it and smile,

Creating a new sky underneath.

We, utterly sandwiched between two skies

Move so on and so forth, 

Gathering love, momentum, rhyme 

Our hearts leap, 

Glee, in the corner of my lip;

The endorphins in my head. 

Loving like a Woman

She did not run away with all your money. Any of your money. Neither did she cheat on you, nor break any promise. There were no promises anyway. She did not say hurtful things. Things people say, when the love turns bitter. Never wanted any bit of your skin to change, or your eyes, or fingers. Or toes. Or your heart. Because, once she had fallen, with you, in love, you were her boundaries of beauty, noone outside of you, could be merely close to being beautiful. Love wasn't any poetic supposition, it was a real thing. Thing.

It is once and for all said, very difficult to love like a woman. And even more convoluted an impossibility, to marginally understand that love. 

She had gathered you in the pores of her skin. Saved you like rose petals like in a school girl's diary. Loved you like not like a mother, but close.

Very close.

What did you know?

Now don't feel bad already. She took hardly anything away. Except for herself. As one last resort.

Let her go, now that she needs to. For good. Her skin, eyes, fingers, her toes. Her belittled castigated soul. She wronged nowhere else, except but for now. When she, in a trifle probability, broke your heart. A man's mighty heart. 

Remember now, you did that too. Didn't you/.

Hotel Room

Not those dingy ones you take up once you have suddenly eloped because there was no other way for love, but that. But those ones to which you have to come back to, once every night. When you're travelling alone, and for work. Alien city. That same elevator to the thirteenth floor. Clean white sheets, the faceless housekeeper. Who turns your pillow cases inside out once in a while, places neat sachets of shampoo in the bathroom, packets of sugar on the coffee table. You wonder if she's a woman or a man. Because she is the only human contact you have had in days. Is he a pedophile, does he touch your underwear that you might have left out to dry. Each night, after you get back within an exhausted body but your mind is sleepless, you wonder if the view of a sleepy city going to stand you any company at all.

Whenever I told Him that I was a loner by default, how I felt lonely no matter where I was, whatever I was upto, there was always this shallow meaningless void in my head that no one could fill. He would quietly absorb my metaphysical unstoppable three minute of a lecture and then retort, softy with a remark. That in that hotel room is the loneliest you could be. And that I wouldn't be able to realize how completely abandoned he had felt each of those nights across those months and months he had hopped among a multitude of such rooms. 

I was not a fool. I knew. Sometimes I was relieved that the man wouldn't in the very least, take my being with him for granted that he knew how absolutely painful loneliness could get. But did that work for me? Not, I guess.

I would often imagine him. Loitering around on those tiled floors. Taking short quick steps to the closet, or leaving his shirt and tie on the bed before he went in to take a shower. Adjusting the temperature of the water according to the place he was in. Too hot, hot, lukewarm. Hot showers did well for mild insomnia, he would say. Or just picking up the work on your laptop where you had left it at in office, helped too. Sometimes logging on to Skype, seeing his mother would work. Or calling me. 

Night & Day

The night sometimes makes you feel safe. Protected from the madness of the day. In the quiet hours post 12, your soul chooses to unclothe. Or cozy up, and just be. Unlike in the day when you adorn a dozen faces to please a dozen people. No compulsive pang to constantly please everyone around. No routine, timed existence. No urge to run, go breathless and perspire. Pointlessly. 

I am so glad, each day has a night. Someone I trusted once told me this, because I believed in praying. Don't ignore it for its childlike ingenuousness. He asked me to pray before the day began, asking God to protect me, knowing very well that I would also have to try as hard to protect myself. And then say another prayer before I went to sleep, saying that, now that it's night, my defenses are down, the thrust solely falls on Your mighty shoulders. I did that, for as long as I trusted him. Even do it now. Anyway. 

Multitude of nights, this way, slept away. Curled, saving the warmth in my belly, dreaming, running, chasing, looking. In the various rooms I have lived in. Mostly alone. Sleeping alone, spending the night alone. It amazes me, that though I have spent days together, shared mornings, afternoons and even nightfalls, I have never particularly shared a night. And that makes me feel prenatal in ways more than one. 

Unforgiving Realist.

In continuance with numerous dawns of awe, has come an afternoon of a multitude of mirages. Sand and water, water and sand. Only merely sand. Quiet dunes of them flattening, then disintegrating. Shaped like breasts, those coagulated collections of time, blistering, giving up to the loveless casual breeze. Making the road ahead shine in illusion. With quite a few lies that we tell each other and ourselves. Now, no story can be untold. Or shameless truths reversed. We hallucinate and see the tiny feet of fair little children and hear the gurgles of their laugh. Distant, fast merging with their echoes, reflecting from godforsaken walls. There is no tearing away of tireless sleep from such eyes. Fabricated lies, conspired existence. Unending prose, epilogue prologue dialogue. There is no getting anywhere, because we are wired to come back right to where we started. So, we'd rather be where we are. And not move. Life is pointless, anyway. Is it not. 

The Lack of Motion

The further we go in life, the more we cancel out our options. As a child, I would stare at the stars and imagine I would go there someday. In afterthought, it sounds silly, now decades and decades later. But it could have been true, except that it didn't. Except that that option itself cancelled out on its own. Left alone, we all begin to walk the street most of us have walked, leaving all other streets untouched. Our stars are too dim. 

It's not the beaten topic of following convention and not chasing the illusion, as we may. It's not that, I think I have beaten the shit out of that topic already. This is something else, some other flu that just caught me.

One of the boys I schooled with is a millionaire today. He owns the mines and stuff. That way, mostly your fortune is waiting for you carved out on a plate. People, check in at rich holiday destinations almost everyday, on Facebook at least. It's not the happy pictures. Oh please, once a friend and I assumed that curvature of the smile on those faces must be directly proportional to the mess in their lives. Let's face it, most of us are a mess (feel free to discount yourself, please).

Despite that mess, however, some of them have managed to become flawlessly pretty. Some have kick started their own businesses. Some have well, checked into those airports, God bless them, 

So, irrespective of the sham that living has become, people move on and accomplish themselves. 

Sometimes, I, though, feel like falling into a bottomless abyss. With absolutely nothing in my fucking mind. All my options cancelled out, without my knowledge. During the rest, I feel stagnated to my molecules, perfectly deathly still.  

Date

She removes her sunglasses and shoves them in her bag. He catches her eyes, for the first time. Looks away before it gets uncomfortable. She gets into his car. Her red heart, is about to burst. He says something about the other car, the one he couldn't get. Instead, he had to get this one. The older one, the crumbling one. Some excuse. She's not listening. She is floating on cloud 9. He throws a bunch of chocolates at her. Nonchalantly. The ones he had gotten from his last trip. With no particular girl in mind. But he knew he was going to fall in love that summer. Hot summer of 2003. She was eighteen. He, twenty-one. His bloody hyphenated existence. 

They walk into some restaurant, after a little dialogue over choosing that place over another, and another over someplace else. In the glass walls, they see each other, side by side. Juxtaposed human specimens. Pretty divergent. In their corner table, he orders pasta. She asks for a coke. He says she should eat something. But hungry is the last thing she is. Her stomach is full of butterflies, already. 

Waiter comes back, says the guy that makes pasta hasn't come so early in the day. He chooses a pizza from the one page menu. She helps him pick it. Suddenly they have nothing to do. Their heads are empty. They talk of the heat of summer. And how the roads have gotten better over the years. And other illogical nonsense. 

Later he pours ample amounts of ketchup on her slice of the pizza. Thin crust, strewn with peppers. She takes those few seconds to look up at his downcast eyes. Is this it? Or probably not. 

An hour later, he drops her off at the same place. It's a milder afternoon now. There is no need to hide behind sunglasses. She stands there, smiling with her naked eyes as he pulls away. Knowing that this is it. For them. It it.

They are, dated forever. 

Two way street

Love is a two way street. You love me, I love you back. You break my heart, I break yours right back. Enough said and done about unrequited love. Once unrequited, it stays that way forever. For most people. Those people who never lean. Never understand the mammoth of patience it requires to actually being in love with them. Nobody can change, that is a stubborn truth. It is almost always the more feasible option to walk away. Leave behind. And the comic tragedy is, there is actually nothing to leave behind. You were living in an empty space, and loving a ghost.

Home Alone.

Smell of grapes in the refrigerator, bulbous dark purple thingys, bunches of those stocked in one of the bottom shelves. And that of garlic from our kitchen, of yellowed books in the bedroom. Keeper of our secrets. Scrape marks on the stove. Pots and pans, scanty. Forgotten recipes in our head, saved while watching those shows on TV, in arms. Leaning, laughing. Loudly and then softer. Whispering, should our walls hear. But they are ours anyway. Bricks and mortar. Sand and love. Slippers, a couple of pairs of them, placed astray, near another couple of pairs of old shoes. Belonging to the persons, we have grown out of. That we used to be, but no longer are.

How much fun is that. Honey. How we thought we were inelastic and would never change. But we stretched ourselves, pulled strings, to be here. Now, in this home. Of sorts. Our pasts, those phases when I hadn't seen you, and you me, feel like pulling away into an insolvent memory. And we dwell in a shared history, that our lives began when we fell in love. How naive. Is that. So, pinch me. 

It's not all hunky dory. Yet, it's home. Where we are our honest benign selves. Shelving tiny incidents of our days, me writing labyrinthine passages from imagination, you filling our walls with post-its. Huge, life size post-its. About what was done wrong, and what was done right. 

Struggling with our singular truths. 

Home alone. Home together.

See, if this drags you here?