Once I Will

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple" -Jack Kerouac

Once, there was silence. The next time I tried using my voice. For the last time, I threw in a few words. But they weren't responsible because they couldn't carry the strength of all the emotions that queued up, brimming on my forehead. Eloquence stood precariously. When my words couldn't deliver every instinct that the questions sparked within my fingers, it scattered into echoes which bounced off our bedroom windows and walls. I'm blaming it on the nerves. They stood up in my throat and shook their head in disappointment, blocking the way for clarity. It would've made it a lot easier for you to comprehend otherwise.
Now I'm chalking up a plan. It's supposed to be grand. I've built a brand new shelf. I'm sifting my words with powdered sugar. When they fall through doubt and manage their way past these tunnels of approval I'll dust off the specks of immaturity and inarticulacy. They will be polished silver and brushed with simplicity. The shelf will hold all of them one on top of another, close and clean, in symmetrical piles. One day, when days and nights will suffice, my collection will stand tall, immaculate and complete. It will be enough and there for you. I will leave it for you to pick out the ones that suit you. When you put them together, you will finally know and everything will be as it was supposed to be, as we would have liked to be. They will tell you why I stayed back for you and eventually couldn't anymore. The fog will slowly lift itself off your apprehensions and you will see that it was never fear that held us from spending the rest of this life as one but it was our time together that left us fearless of the time to come.
Set up, ornamented, my words will tell you the tale plain. I will let you know all you couldn't hear when you left the room and shut the door behind you. They will finally make you understand what I failed to in all this time. They will help you understand that intention was not enough to give us what we wanted and that it's hardly ever about what we want. It will be perfectly clear to you that what we let go of was made to be left behind. It was meant to be left unfinished so that we could part ways and yet live. Some day all of this won't be limited to a glance or a social gesture. We won't just pass one another in the street. My words will hold all the loyalty and promise time always demanded too much of. They will take us past guilt or remorse, or nostalgia or need. One day it will be only my words and they will belong to you. They will explain to you that it was meant to be; be just as it was when we stepped away and gifted half of ourselves to memory.

Rant: Uncategorized

Enough of my vague attempts at prose. I've been trying to cook something up with what goes around me these days but today I'll just be and give an excerpt of what goes around in my head. Simplistic. Not very developed. So here you go, here's a rant for you:
Of late... Oh well no. That's a very drab way to start with this. Once more!

I don't like people who don't like people. I mean I've had quite enough of that. Fine! I understand, you don't enjoy the awkward silences, the self-doubt but that's us! Rarely any of us appreciate a dinner date seated beside an unfamiliar face. It takes a little stir up there and in here to really start a conversation and familiarize yourself with a stranger. I think that's a lot of fun. Honestly! And that's coming from a person who's very near to attaining the official status of a recluse nowadays. But yes, meeting strangers is healthy! If you want me to be cheaply analogical about this I'd say let's compare it to exercise. Those lazy bones and muscles kill you for the first two nights but a little consistency and practice and you don't want to give it up 2 weeks later! 

It doesn't take a genius to pass a snide remark. Moronic, hard-to-please behaviour is not witty and neither does brutal honesty make anyone smile. I am often 'accused' of being too "nice" or too "naive". That makes me think if I really am and then I wonder why. Not a long while ago, a friend lightheartedly hinted demanding a little bit of love. Mostly all of us would come up with something witty, mean-spirited, punny, something that would give her the exact opposite of what she obviously demands. I didn't feel like doing it. I gave her exactly what she wanted as a reply. I declared my immeasurable love to her, let her in on the fact that she's the best I know. Nothing that pompous Persian cat didn't already know. Am I really that nice? Do I let people walk all over me? Do I make myself sickly sweet? I thought about this. Maybe I am actually that nice. Maybe I am genuinely like that. I don't want to be too sure but maybe it's the fact that things have never come easy to me. At mostly all times of my life, I have had the exact opposite of what I wished for. And I feel that irony all too seriously. Maybe I take myself too seriously. Of course, everyone has to work for what they want. I really believe that things never come easily to anyone. Don't mistake me for a self-centered one but it's only that when I weigh out my life so far, I only keep myself, my deeds and misdeeds on the scale. And perhaps I enjoy filling the gaps. But I don't allow anyone to walk over me. Giving in to obvious demands, giving in to feelings, requests, jokes and making a hilarious spectacle of myself; I like that, you know. I knew it but in speaking terms, I've finally figured out the difference between being affectionate and trampling over yourself to do something you don't feel happy about. I don't offer people fake charms. 

Somewhere, I think I enjoy compensating for the hard, earnest work I have done (both willing and unwillingly) by sparing others of it. Something somewhere grinds in too solidly. I detest moaning over a mistake that cannot be undone. I'd like to believe I compensate for everything I did and didn't, did receive and did not by offering it to the people around me on a tray of gold. A beautifully decorated tray at that too. (Aesthetics matter!) I prefer displaying my unconditional love all too openly even when I think someone's life doesn't lack any. I want to try. I want to make a person laugh unreservedly with that embarrassing snort, eat with the chomp-chomp noise, slurp down Coke to the last sip from that ugly disposable bottle without feeling they're being judged over a lot of hooey we call etiquette, fall asleep with a smile and feel that they're never alone just because of something I said. Maybe I just feed my ego but, well, I love being selfish like that!

When my mind wanders to the dark corners, I often try to prod and question what is that one crime I'd commit and never be able to forgive myself for. My answer after nineteen years, now, is to intentionally make someone, anyone, go through any one of the unpleasant experiences I have ever had.
Yes, I'll never be able to purge myself of that guilt. Quite sure.
On another note, I'm perfectly smitten with this Barbra Streisand song! I wish men were like songs. But more about that later.

Set-me-down mirrors

You know yourself
and lose control
You call yourself old.
Tear out another sheet
from an imperfect diary,
and drive conversations
with mirrors and window reflections.
Suited and tied,
shake hands, nod, appreciate.
Your third furtive glance,
clutch empty glasses,
shift in your shoes and twist one arm around another
struggling
to be a man you never were.
If reflection were
not a trick of the eye
I would have believed you.
Some of us tremble while we speak
but you refuse to look at me;
and I'll never know
if it's another reflection you see in me.

Tomorrow.

It's been 5 years. Yes, we've stuck with each other for exactly that amount of time. My two girls have held my hand and put up with hale and storm, through summer and winter, just when I thought the day would never arrive again.
 Turn left or right, I had two shoulders to lay my head on.  And tomorrow, one of them is getting engaged. She's officially stamping the bond she has developed over one year with a man who makes her sift her words like gold from the dust. She's declaring her love to the world and the three of us feel we've never felt completer in each other's existence.
I've seen that look. That gleam which shoots across her eye within seconds, leaving everyone around her with a sprinkle of that out-of-this-universe dust; that trust. I've seen that look and I know she's sure which is what leaves me as happy as she is.
We always crack up over an absurd joke together. We've always had this thing. Synchronized. In Harmony. Now we smile together when she does. Tomorrow, we might shed a tear or two together too.
Sometimes I think we would traverse galaxies together if we were challenged to. At other times I think we're a little like whisky.

Half-a-measure.

How do you hate too much? Or even love too much? How does one feel anything too much, or even too little? Don't you simply hate, detest, loathe with all the negativity you can muster? And when you love, how can you love too little or too much?
Do you measure it in cups? Or do you use spoons? And if you do, how much do you take? Only half a cup? Two spoonfuls?
Maybe you tailor and stitch the seams until it just fits. 3 inches deep hate. 7.5 metres long love.
Do you not purely love? Untaintedly. Or do you weigh your feelings, like a chemist, with precise milligrams of O2 in your lungs as you breathe-in her scent? Or like the head-chef, checking your love for the right amount of salt and your hate with the exact seasoning of vinaigrette that stores like Poison-Blue in a dubious bottle that's labeled, 'Drink Me'.
Don't you love with all your heart? Every energy! Don't you run with the breeze? Stride across the streets?Don't you let your feet sink into the earth? Don't you want to swim along and leave every limb, every bone, every thought awash with one single current? Not too little or too much. Just one word. Pure hate or 100% love. Every capacity; fill every void, scotch-taping the gaps. Sans shades. Sans loopholes. Without the synonyms and complications, the entanglements and doubts. Without fear. All faith or none. Not one and a half. One whole. Only one. Make an exception right now and tell me the lone truth. Don't you want to?

Only the beginning

Trust. No, I am not talking about lovers breaking apart. 
Trust would be one of the many faces you show off everyday. It has been with you since the day you were born. It is the belief that you wake up with every morning. It is bred by your bedside every night. The belief that helps you rise up and the conviction that makes you step out. In fact, it is you. 
She laboured with this belief everyday for this belief in her. She laboured relentlessly to engrave it in this relationship just like her name was engraved in golden letters on the pen you gifted to her when she was 12.
She worked the hardest. She toughened herself up. But if this belief is born and bred at home, and you have failed to offer it to her in the warm spaces she always returns to, she has not failed along with you. 
There is a particular sort of liberation in the realization that the ones you have tried hardest to convince were never worth the hard work; the realization that the hard work was only you all along, the work that has made you strong enough to let go and set out to conquer the world on your own two feet.
The golden engraving has become hazier over the years. The rusty air is eating away the glossy letters. If she hasn't convinced you enough in 19 years, she might not be able to convince you in the next 19 at all.  Somewhere during all those years, I think she engraved those letters on her spirit. This time, it holds permanence, even with the leaden air. Above all this mist and beyond these man-made doubts, she learned to trust herself. Today and tonight, she feels, she need not wait 19 years longer. She need not wait at all. She is almost ready to let you go. Ready to leave. She is almost herself.

...

Dull eyes. Hunched backs. Swinging half-doors.
Stunted thoughts and a half-awake self.
The thin coat of cheap paint is peeling itself off of these half-funded walls. A lot buzzes and hovers around with the intent of cloudless clouds over our heads. Little goes around without us knowing as we wait for something unconsciously. Amidst whispers and knotted fingers, creating out of thin air, spinning unknowingly. Waiting till all comes around again. Waiting to rest. Waiting to wake up again.