Splinters

"It gets easier with time," you assured me. And maybe it does. Only thing is what is this 'it'? The way you look at it is a completely different way I see it. More and more, every day that passes, I am overwhelmed with so many lessons. They say it's dangerous to keep looking back, and I see the logic in that. Only thing is, the more I look back, the more I am apart from it yet the same. I see the tiniest little moments where all that emotion hid. Where your heart was breaking and you kept quiet. When we were so in that particular moment, that we couldn't possibly comprehend the many ways that our souls were becoming latched together and how the strength of that attachment could somehow render it apart.

The more I step forward, each day, the more I embrace the many million moments with the world, the more I am overcome with the absolute realization that no one could ever be you. The infinite ways that each individual interaction would have been different if it had been you. The ways that home was and could only be completely and utterly you.

My moments are interspersed simultaneously with the infinite boundless joy of this knowledge and the abyss of destruction in its loss. A certain green will remind me of your eyes, a certain line in the clouds the snug curve of your rare smile. An abstracted feeling of exhaustion reminds me, like a phantom limb, of the strength of your arms. It is in this way that I am constantly reminded of the splinters, planks, bricks, the scaffolding and shelter that make up home.

Starved

Isn't love a bit like parenting? Especially a love like ours; a relationship that came into the world without really knowing of its own existence. That could not tell, not in words for the longest time, what exactly was its place and function—it simply was. And it was in that newborn joy of exploration and discovery that it shone ever more. The way it was nurtured, the many falls and skinned shins, the many tears, the yearning for something that wasn't explicable in any language, and the quick appeasement in putting our heads down, holding each other, in peace, together.

These days, I wonder about you. Every little thing makes me pause. I've cooked this meal; maybe he would like it. Maybe he would remember, for example, the way he learnt to cook alongside me. The encouragement and sidelong support that went both ways, not only one. I'm not sure if it is too late to say this now.

But there were things that were thought impossible, but I believed and then so did he. Maybe, like his greatest relished dish, this belief would also come to be. I don't know how to mourn this loss—is there even a proper way?

I have no appetite these days. Yet I am almost perpetually hungry. But I can't eat. I pause at each morsel, wondering what you're eating, if you're eating, what you're cooking, if you are. Instead, I reward myself with something more than my usual ration on the rare days I hear your voice. It's not what you want to hear. It's not what you want to know. But this is how it is, and I can't help it—maybe not more than you can.

But even as it's a child, love, it too is a parent. This love held me up when I wasn't too steady on my feet. It drove me to places that I didn't think I had the effort to go. It stood on the sidelines and cheered me on, motivating me to keep running even when I was hurting so much inside.

The way I am hurting now—angrily, anguished, forlorn, hopeful. And starved.

Wingspan

Yesterday I finally looked at the sky, and realized there was a moon up there. As obvious as it may sound, the fact that I had to notice at all told me a lot about myself; mostly that I have forgotten to recognize the things that have always mattered to me when I was most alone.

The very long treks I have made this winter had been accompanied with a deeply internalized grief, so internalized that I failed to look outward, at my immediate surroundings. The cold, the uniform white and gray which melded so seamlessly with the uniform gray sky surrounded me like a cocoon. I was suffocating and choking, and my breathe froze almost before it had even left me. Sometimes I was frozen dry, brittle and ready to shatter, and sometimes I discovered rivulets of tears joining the falling fat snowflakes that fell, the way I had fallen.

Nevertheless, the moon had remained aloft, the way it had always been, and the way it always will be, high above, it, too, was alone. Maybe it took the rays of a setting sun, or the blowing gales of snow from roofs, or even the glint of shards of moon to adorn a cloudy, starless sky, but I remembered.

Even from the cocoon, the butterfly eventually emerges.

"Hmph"

His love was a quiet one. He did not say much; that wasn't his way. He sniffed and sighed, muttered and huffed. He whispered and drawled. But somehow, it was enough.

I never knew what this ambiguous, arbitrary capacity for enough was. Not until the measure I had dwindled to nothing and then, relatively, that little enough became it all.

His love was a quiet one, and it was not about words. Though it was silent for the most part, once you had it you could not doubt it was there.

Until it was gone.

Soar

As much as I strive to absorb all the knowledge that is out there, however much as I revel in how this knowledge makes me here with my feet on the earth, the more I learn the more I realize that there is that one thing I could never really know: the measure of 'how much' there is to love. Even the oceans start and end. Even the sky starts here on this very earth and expands to a certain distances above before it ends. But this...even I don't know how to start to comprehend it, I don't know where to place the ruler to its beginning - how could I know where the end is?

Bereft

I hid in darkness for fear of tainting the world with my poison for as long as I could. I felt it almost tangibly, a black inkiness extending its tentacles glibly and fluidly in all dimensions, temporal and spatial. The hooks embedded inside of me tugged me apart violently yet still holding me together. Pain had no realm, dancing over physical and emotional and blurring the lines so much I no longer felt the pain because of the sheer numbing agony.

There were too many people who cared. Who shook their heads sadly. Offering tissues. I don't need help.

I have gotten off the train before its left behind the past for too long, just so I dont break down in the crushing claustrophia of the scant crowds. It didn't matter if it was one or a thousand. It was too much. Instead, I walked the two hour commute back, lost and rambling, and in the newly arrived cold.

A child patting my hand to tell me it's OK only reminds me of the child we have lost. It's not safe to talk to strangers I tell her with my eyes. She's just learnt to walk, how has she leant to decipher pain?

Small steps, he said. Small steps. But I've fallen. I'm down. I'm walking. But where is home?

Caryatid

Love: a feeling, promise, or contract?

At the very simplest form, we understand love to be a feeling. What else is love if it weren’t for feelings; what is felt; experienced?

But it isn’t just quite that exactly. The feelings itself is exclusive to the other party: it’s all about the personal experience even if stimulated by an externalizing factor.

As a promise, love takes a step up: it could be still purely personal and isolated in giving all to the sentiments of the feeling, but more often than not this signifies a transfer of something from one to another.

And yet a promise - could that also be a contract? A contract implies an agreement between two (or more) parties, and somehow there is something being exchanged – a two-way connection is developed.

But what happens when circumstances alter the very entity of that love? When things cannot be the same, when the exchange of that something isn’t exactly as dynamic as it once was? Is that still love?

Does love mean you abide and adhere to that something no matter what? That you hang on just because of something that existed in the past, and in anticipation of a tomorrow that would provide rational for simply hanging on today?

But what if every today keeps adding up, and soon all the weight of the past todays accumulated suddenly outweigh what once used to be the past? What if every today is hanging on, alone?

Suddenly this contract, be it signed in blood or tears, seems null and void. Even promises break. Feelings disperse. Even blood and tears dissipate into nothingness once again. Maybe love does too.

Grief

What do you do when the one you thought was your lifelong companion forsakes you? Had swept away without a backward glance, dropping you like a fragile glass to smash into infinites shards, and in leaving you behind, trods upon everything that once was: hope, honour, dignity, consolation, love.

When you are left with echoes of your own voice calling and calling them, only to return to you empty and cold...what do you do?

When this love that once filled every thing so much that gold could not outweigh its riches, why now do I feel like a homeless begger sitting on the street, craving, hungry and thirsty for one ounce of your notice?

Originally posted on my private personal blog on Friday, 21 August 2015. Re-posted with my own heart's permission. 

Summer or Love

Sometimes I forget that it is summer. I keep waiting, but it's an ambiguous wait. A wait for something that is not yet definitive and without definition remains unfulfilled for the very reason that when it is had it will not be recognized.


Instead, time tiptoes by. The clouds hover low and whisper winds that deny warmth. We hide away in our darkened rooms, backs turned to the glaring brightness of heat outside. We hop tentatively into air conditioned units thwarting away what we spend most of our year craving. And suddenly, we turn it off. We are perplexed to find that we don't need it. That suddenly, summer passed, but it was as if summer never came. The leaves change colour, die, and fall.


What were we waiting for? Why did we not embrace it while it was there? Why did we fix our gazes to our futures and ignore the moment that we actually had? How was it possible that we keep waiting for something that was in a future that we had already trodden on and left in the past?


Everything we are waiting for, maybe we already have it. Maybe it's there and has started before we even knew it begun. Maybe we should stop waiting for something that will never be because in waiting we forget that it is here now.

Enduring

Sometimes in the middle of this everyday life, while everything is bustling about, carrying on, a pause comes over me, and I remember.

When you've been with someone so long, things tend to settle. Settle down, settle in place... less of the tremulous, less of the hovering and less of the unknown.

It peeks out at me sometimes, a memory of the thrill of falling. When things were new, and unknown, when the merest presence, the sensation of meeting, was beyond words to describe.

Feelings relegated to memories. And yet, not entirely gone. Sometimes in the middle of looking across the room to you, something stirs. It's partly memory and yet partly something still new.

Sometimes my breath stops, and my heart quickens. And that's when my mind tells me this is so familiar and yet --- when I inhale it feels as if it is not air that is filling me up but everything that is you.

Why should I write a story? A different story, that's not you and me?
Why shouldn't I just let down the gates and let the words flow; so much more that has yet to be told
What more would there be in fictional characters, giving them a happily ever after
Giving them a story that's something we wish we had
But we have it all.
This is our story, our story we keep waiting to happen
When things are finally better and when things are finally calm
This is our story; a story of waiting for our story to start
But in the meantime we have been apart
If I can open my eyes today and you can close yours
If my sun sets to your sunrise, and the distance remains this far
With the hours stacked up and yet clocked in synchronity
The world keeps turning   And the heart keeps beating
Your heart
Then mine
Your heart
My heart
This is no silence. What are we waiting for?
Our story has already begun.

Free

I have found myself wrapping myself around the idea of you. Around the idea of us. Why, I am not really sure. Yet; because suddenly I have only realized this. Perhaps it is to wrap up close what this you and I is, so that nothing escapes, nothing floats away.

But in this I have become so molded in the frame of you, in the grooves, valleys, chasms, hills that are your landscape. Have I changed my own to better fit to yours? Have I lost something that was myself in becoming myself-with-you?


Why has it become my responsibility to wrap us up and protect, why has it been me that has settled to walking a steady pace instead of flying, soaring wildly, to ease your fear of heights? And it is true, you did not ask:

Maybe it is my fear that has always been at fault. A fear of losing what may be lost. Maybe holding on so tight is already the cause of having now lost so much.

What will happen if I unwrap this gift? Let the air flow, and let us fly free. What if I make you stand on the edge and open your arms and fall; maybe you too will fly with me.

I Am Dying

In these countless moments so many tears and fears have been, and so many have they fallen and arose that I have lost myself. So deeply the tears have rendered me apart, gaping wounds so raw and rot. So disfigured my visage upon reflection blurred in shattered glass that sightless I have also become. Inward this gaze, total oblivion yet pulsing pulsing a pain undeterred. So often have these sorrows breathed that they have burrowed deeply embedded under my skin. Deep in the marrow, in the breast, these sorrows keen softly, yet growing, growing. Oh mother these lumps have lost you to. If I don't die of these too, I shall die of my sorrows.

The Conditions of the Sun Shining

Out from my palms my blood flowed, but it was without pain I had let the wound open for you; it was after all straight and genuinely from the heart.

This was the heart that beat quietly in pursuit of you, in the rhythm fulfilled by the existence of you. And so the constant flow dripped off my fingertips to give and give and give.

I lived this far with the knowledge that you would be mine. Somehow and someday. And to do so I have navigated these uncharted paths by living as good a person I could have tried to be, all things considered, because somehow, someday I had to be worthy of my desires.

My desire was you, and to love you the way ki have alwaysmdone, before I even knew you and before we had ever met. Constantly and unconditionally.

My belief in you existing solely for me has been tried and tested in more ways than even you could know. Even in the knowledge that everything was shared as we became one, I shrugged off the layers of scar tissue and scabs to better embrace you and be stronger for you. And though I has hurt to attempt to remove, these same scars were blessed with my gratitude if only because my strong belief that they had to exist as a test of fire in order to endure and experience the obtainment of you.

My belief is that you are for me and I am for you. But stronger still is that you be eased of all pains and burdens, and at peace of mind; with or without me. Because, this my love, is without condition.

But you don't want my beliefs until they safeguard yours.

If i have asked of you to alter or amend, this too is in belief that you would be better off. Health and emotion so intertwined they have fed off each other, eating and eating until nothing was left except the raw, rotting and bleeding. To prevent and heal, I have asked of you may things which my prayers alone have no been enough to assuage. And my belief in you recognizing the goodness of my requests for the sake of our love had to withstand the powerful resistance to change.

My heart has waited, in all the heartbeats it had lost in waiting, and with each beat sighed the unwavering prayer that was you. Then to spend each moment in fervent hope that each moment of yours was better. To give each waking moment to praying for your state if being, instead of mine.

How is it that this blood, pouring steadfastly from my palms has started to turn from red to black? That this snow upon which I have tread so as not to stain it from its purity now betrays my footsteps, seeping cold and unmercifully into my skin, burning my beliefs with icy cold acidity? Why now, the fulfillment of loving you comes at the precipice of your rejecting the very same power which brought me to you?

Perhaps from henceforth I will not pray that your every moment is fulfilled to your own wishes, perhaps now I will not pray that you hardships ease and that the sun will shine upon you in you on darkness or for the things you yourself want for you. I will pray that you learn to believe in your own stead and believe with as much as I did in you, that you learn to believe in yourself without me so that you own prayers will come true with the same faith we had in mine. Instead of the amount of energy I have spent in your smaller things coming true, I will pray that you own come true, so that you will no longer need mine, nor me.

The blood will continue to flow. Black or red. It will not abate, nor is it possible that I can stop it. It flowing for you has become the definition of my being, so much that to press down on the wound, to stitch in up, will sooner choke me as if my breath itself has stopped. But thus, my beliefs, they have crippled. I continue to walk despite the frostbitten soles, but only so in a direction far away from where I had left my heart.

Flamenco

 In the middle of fall,
 as the autumnal winds caressed the edges of leaves barely holding on to their parent trees tinging n tinting them a multitude of oranges, hazels, burgundies, bronzes, saffrons and mere browns, in the middle of the doom that had instilled itself upon the leftover green, in the middle of fall, spring came back. The sky suddenly paused and a parallel universe descended on reality, empowered by the multitude of nostalgia, wist and reminiscence  that arose in blankets, layers, a dark unplague swarming itself upon the ethers of consciousness and nature. It ascended in resemblance to a thundershower in rewind. And it happened in a millisecond, not even in an eyeblink or heartbeat. Before we knew it, we had awoken, expecting gloom, and found ourselves stepping into hope. Off went the scarves. Off went the jackets. On went the melody of life. Out we stepped,
but did we dance?

Fractured

There were those days, there was a time, when we spent hours laughing amidst trivialities. Friends, like no other. The silliest jokes, the randomest conversations, about the absolutely most mundane of words, yet amidst friends.

The lukewarm sun upon our heads. The waxing and waning of the moon through our days and nights, together.

We felt a peace, of belonging, and yet to each this was something to be a passing phase, because within we craved. We longed and waited. Our hearts were beating for something else, something more. Someone else, perhaps.

Because, after all wasn't this the ultimate destiny? Love. We were bereft and waiting. Waiting and waiting for that absolute that would finally complete us.

 And so we gave ourselves to our temporary moments of friendship-filled fun, without ever completely giving ourselves. We were adamantly alone amidst the crowd. Our eyes were steadfastly held to the edge, a horizon, where we were certain our destiny lay. We condemned ourselves to a permanent state of solitude because we wanted to remain whole for that which would make us whole.

Where did we go wrong?





Thanks to song: Sab Bhulake - 3am, Raethe

Incongruity

Suddenly these days, I have detached myself from the hanger labelled with my name. I'm not sure if I remain who I am...or rather, who I was. This incongruity remains the common denominator amidst every other filament intertwining to become this semblance of being that is myself.

'You are so unhappy' having markedly resounded the past weeks, maybe months, a proclamation that broke the hearts of two most definitely, and perhaps even more than two for the fluttering effects of the butterfly upon those whose lives are so interconnected. But two, it certainly did.

I am not sure what this state of being happy is, not quite so well as I once believed I did. What, I ask, as the snow furiously falls and gusts in the middle of April, when the month was supposed to bring us rainshowers to usher in the warmth of blooms and blossoms anew, what is happiness?

For I had in my hands the shattered remains of what I had believed was happiness - and I was not entirely unhappy. When we break our happy, is it ever truly broken? When our happiness has joined the shadows of darkness, is it ever truly and completely gone? Can this phantom really be something ever entire devoid and separate from us?

I am in another process of metamorphosis. At times, I feel a throbbing heaving sensation to sob, and sob, and cry - and yet, I do not know entirely why. And at times, I feel the most incredible sense of peace. Of oneness. And contentment. And for this too, I could not fathom a cause or reason.

In one moment, I felt, I could have lost it all. And yet, I am still here. And to merely exist - what could I say I had really lost? A momentary release of overclutched desires - a stubborn refusal or a longstanding habit, it made no difference. My dreams I felt had burst in billions of pieces and I could not tell whether it was a celebration of confetti, or piercing shards of glass.

And I felt nothing.

To consider the magnitude of the process. The actual thing itself - it was in effect the thing I felt that would kill me. And to this moment I remain. To consider that these numbers, so many of them, so much that they have enumerated a sum that could cause a prolonged state of disillusionment simply by itself - are the many years that I have led myself along a leash in belief that my happiness was such.

My happiness, I believed, or had started building in belief from a very young age, was firmly and thoroughly founded in love. All else in life I felt were mere trivialities for without love, I could not be complete, nor fulfilled, nor happy.

And then I found love. And I died every death I had died in those many long years - the pains, the hardships, the aches, the wounds, the tears, the sorrows, the anguish, the torment- they surged upward again and again in the throes of my fallen state, and they healed. 

They healed because the simple cauterizing effect of love merged all pains into one huge ball of fire of what defined the 'before' and submerged itself in the cooling waterfalls of cascading love to reemerge no longer inflamed but defining the 'after' by the mere juxtaposition of proven endurance.

This is a story that will be understood those who have truly loved.  Or have loved, somewhat untruly. For what is or is not true?  That we only decipher, somewhat haphazardly, in the whispers between the heart and mind.

Now I feel our moments are slipping out of grasp. Like an infinite cascade of sand particles falling, and falling, and falling, I feel that they are all slipping away, and that I had been the only one trying to catch them all before they were lost. And it took me awhile, but then I realized that it was just me, only my two little hands that were trying to keep this from totally slipping beyond our grasp. And it was not both of us.

And now I have let go. Let the cascade go wherever the hell it wants to go; because  I should not be the one to hold on so tight to what is meant to be held on by two.

It is falling. But it is still there. I do not know where they go, or if they run out, or if it ever stops.

We don't need to try, your voice says, because whatever is meant to happen, will happen.

And for some reason, I am learning, even as the tears fall, that happiness is still there. Even despite the tiny ways the pain shoots through in spontaneous and unpredictable ways, I am curiously free. I have given up on holding on, and yet holding on has not given up on itself. Giving up has not tendered itself for attendance.

Happiness does not really need to mean the absence of sorrow.

Forgotten

It's like, once I had you in my life, all the other things faded away. All those 'small pleasures' of life which kept me company, from moment to moment, just paled considerably in comparison to the great happiness of your love.

It shouldn't have been that way, it should have been the other way around. And it was for some time: all those little things shone even brighter with the capacity to enjoy and share. Then somehow, the importance of you started to grow and grow, and everything else became negligible, unremarkable, fading to the background, there but unseen.

You were the sun that shone so greatly; all the other, smaller, happinesses were those stars which were there but unseen; their light oushone by the light that was you.

There is a beauty in loneliness; the smallest things are ever more pronounced, more treasured because of the dirt they are mired within. And I am rediscovering them.

Reckoning

The sun was shining bright. Brighter than it has in a long, long time. So bright, it envelopes the entire room with its glare; hot, blinding upon my face.

This is the way I've wished it could have always been. The way I'd been waiting, and waiting. Enduring the coldest, bleakest of days, the torture of frostbite, the days made more tired in waiting, and waiting.

The weather never looked upon my unhappiness and told me to get lost. I had no choice, and I had to endure. I waited and waited and today it shines bright.

This is the day I have waited for, and the sun shines bright. But to enjoy it, I do so alone. More alone than I have been.

Is this my decision, or is this yours? I have been giving, and giving. Waiting, and waiting. You told me I was unhappy; you showed me the door. You never considered for a second, with love, that you could do something to try to take it away; you said take me as I am, and if you are unhappy, you know what to do; go.

Easy for you, to leave the decision to me that way. So today I go. And the sun shines bright. But today you've shown me the door, and the light has left my eyes; the light has left my heart.

JB

I found myself thinking about you at odd times. There were stray bits of conversation, or small observations that I had remembered, those idiosyncrasies of yours that made you you, I kept reminiscing. I found myself looking forward to the next day simply because you'd be there.

I remember the first time we met. You came straight up to me, while I was in conversation with someone else who was explaining things to me. You looked me straight in the eye, with that amazing huge smile of yours, stuck your hand out and that was it, I was taken in by you. The warmth of you, the confidence in your grip and smile, you were someone I knew I would really like.

There were so many things I had wanted to tell you. Things I have left to tell you. The many hours spent in small random conversations to fill a regular day; they remain with me. You made me laugh, made me smile, and impressed upon me this sensation that life was so much more supersized, because you filled it even more with everything that you had.

Then the phone rang, and that was The Call. And now you're gone, and now you are missed.