No titles for the lost.

Look. Turn around. Take a step back and pause. Just for a moment.
I look for him every day. I search for him all day long. I try to pretend all day too so that they know I'm still searching. I try to pretend as if I found him for their comfort to remain unperturbed... But then how is it a 'he'? Who decided to associate the masculine to His name? I just capitalized the 'aich'. Does that mean I believe he is out there? Is there a difference; difference between the fact that I search for him and the belief I have that he is out there? Or is this temporary cynicism as I am told? Cynicism that will be swept away with one blow; a tragic blow, they said. It must be tragic, and full of regret and remorse. I don't believe it. But I have felt it. The fear of being completely and absolutely unaware of what may come. I am not ashamed of owning up to my fears and never was. It's my lack of ability to display it all too animatedly unlike the immaturity I put up on display every moment unabashedly. I am not afraid of being called shameless or immature. I am afraid that might be too right. Too much than I know it to be. And just like them, I fear too. Sometimes people are blind to the difference between unabashedness and fearlessness. You want know where I think the line is drawn? Perhaps, there is a transcendental quality to fear, that is unlike the very humane shade to shamelessness and unabashedness. I rarely feel shame. I do however fear if that's all right.
Not that I was forced to think today. In fact there isn't a moment my head stops talking these days. I don't think it stops talking even while I'm asleep. But here I lie, and here I sit. With my palms stretched out beneath my eyes and I simply stare and try to win the staring game with whoknowswhat. I barely stand. Here I sit, angry, unable to do, unable to stand. This ability to speak, write, type and express! Express this anger coupled with this inability to act. A disastrous pair. A situation sold to hopelessness. Anger for naught. Corrupted. Maybe he was just joking. But I know he's right. It did hit home when he told me to take a long look at my jokes. It was a stale joke too. Then again, I guess all those jokes always were. Maybe I'm just trying too hard to get a sense of humour about all of this. But I hear that tone every other day, that glare, that sigh that indicates a critical case of worthlessness. Their expressions that suggest and perhaps, just maybe even mock the dormancy and aimlessness of this time of my life. And I know there is truth in it. It's a little scarring.
Perhaps it's all right for us to carry scars. Shamelessly. At this point, when my friends' return to their moving lives, their lives that are much ahead with speed of purpose and momentum of cause, I try to calculate and recall my worth but the figures say zero and I spend another chain of hours doubting every part of myself like I have every day of these two years. Slipping. Tastelessly. Losing. Slowly. Every hour, every day. Doubt scraping at these walls that have set themselves up over these two years. Screaming. Screeching it's sharp, tormenting nails down these bare, chipped walls.
It's just another day when my anger will not let me sleep. Another day when it can't stay unspoken, unwritten any longer. I don't even think this is anger. Anger is supposed to be productive. I say something clever and then the utter futility of it hits me. The fact that those 'clever, well intentioned, carefully thought-out words just dissipated into a vacuum-space. "Har waqt bolti rehti ho par kuch kar nahi sakti." It's frustration but it's all in vain. I contemplate him, contemplate my search, contemplate if even this search holds some meaning. I try to stand up but fail to find my position in all of this. I don't know what this is. Out of the 24 hours of an average human being's day, the averagest of our kind probably spend 20 blinking, lying awake with exhausted eyelids that want to retire but do not know how. I don't think crises have homes to retire to. They just die. Die down, die out. Like those epidemics we hear of that take hundreds of lives in one day, out of nowhere. Gradually we stop hearing of them and forget about the whole thing all together.

Wiping off the fog my breath forms on the looking-glass, I look at myself and then I realise how much all of it is nothing and might never be anything. I look but I don't see what I'm looking for. I don't see myself.

No flowers for the dead

GazaMassacresDronesU.S.AShootingsDelhigang-rapeBalochistan(Bangladesh?)ShahzebShot
What is WRONG with us?
This year ends in 2 days.
Does that even mean anything?
Does this blogpost help? Does it do anything?
Where does it all go? Where is this going?
Look at us.
Law was stocked in the market and subsidized. Then banned.
Society is the prostitute you married to destroy her face with acid.
(How does one sleep tonight?)
Do
What?

Irrational.

If perfect sense came with the explanations for everything that happens to us, to the best of us, we would all of us write our lives out page by page, purging it of all skeletons, all guilt, all anger and every regret.  It is the questions that swoop, curl and move in concentric circles inside our head, the ones which keep us lying sleepless all night that knead our sense of contentment, coerce rest into near elusiveness and make space for anger. We stare into empty spaces, look through glaring windows, stop amid sentences and twist knuckles. We search for an explanation. We demand familiarity. In it's most basic, intricate workings, the mere human mind is taught to assume that familiarity is knowledge; that only if an idea rings true to the common nature of what we have known so far, which is assumed to be everything, only if it molds and slips easily into this frame that has been constructed over the years, it maybe allowed the privilege of recognition, and into existence.
And if in one of these seconds and minutes that tick by relentlessly, we manage to throw our hands out, wrap our fingers around and clasp an explanation tightly that refuses to fit into this shape, we reject it. An explanation now exists but does it make sense? It doesn't fit. The questions that ensnared our senses are now in the company of rejection and refusal. The noose tightens. Spend twenty more sleepless nights and silent days.The demand grows and sweeps in the first of its guests - desperation
 Some how, we feel that like all building blocks that we put together as indifferent children, our thoughts owe us the logic and pattern of those toys too. We do find answers, but when we fail to find all sense in them, we hold onto the questions like a stubborn, ignorant child.
While we involve into this unforgiving pattern, we also fail to realise that time really does wait for no one. There comes a time when this shapeless, homeless notion grows out into a monster and grows bigger than the man who sheltered it in the first place. For every question we cling on to, every explanation we try shake into sense, we lose the time to step ahead and the opportunity to look further, to attempt and stretch this frame wider. Hollow, dark crescents beneath the eyes, scaly hands, disheveled strands of hair. We begin to resemble the monster.
To stop life in its shoes, we tie ourselves down to the mercy of explanations.  All the while, the sand in every hourglass continues to pour down in submission of gravity, the world walks us by and nothing stops unless we stop looking into empty spaces.  In seeking answers, some of us, unconsciously mine deep into Anxiety. Unlike the outside, all halts within us until that one day, we hear the alarm trill beside our pillow; the shrill call that carries us back to a time of movement, a time with life. Until we consider stepping outside our own authority, our own cruel limits and consider for one moment to simply walk the shore, count every wave that kisses our feet and forget to demand. 

"Mirror, mirror ...for I have sinned again."

Many a sentence nowadays begins with Ifs. 

But beyond these conditions we place, and the words we choose to express them is the extempore present. The exact spot of light we're standing under; all that is, as it is now. It needs to be embraced for a certain sanity, for a future. Not rejoiced and celebrated. Simply accepted and learnt. But rarely do we ever learn. 

She steps in and steps out. Dabbles a foot in. Only a little. A stir. To err. It matures into sin.
Sin again. Err as a human. Sin as a woman and sooner or later he joins you as a man and begins to be, behind the curtains. Sorry, pretends to be. Before veils and walls, it is never more than meets the eye.

 For every sin, she steps back, reprimands herself, talks to herself, gazes into the mirror, explains & repeats one sentence ten times too many and stares back-- but there is an enjoyment in the enactment, the display of a role, the sheer entertainment. Oh, to entertain and to please! Pleasure! Pleasures beyond the juices that dribbled down her chin from the crisp apples she dug her teeth into, every season. Fresh! Ripe! Right off her mother's farm.
[Looking Glass!] She smears on a wine red, smacks her lips, pouts to be Monroe and feels like the woman who becomes one while playing all that is necessary to feel like one.

[Lights...] She struts in this time, and he bows down before her. [and camera!] He calls the Name, he claims he worships her, every part of her, every moment that they relish together. To cut them out like shapes out of coarse pages of his diary, preserve them and live in them forever to be trapped in them, is his sole, deep desire. 

[Mirror, mirror...] But god forbid it should come true! Only a performance... to be true. A thought sends waves down their spines.

[Exeunt] She rubs it all off memory. An undoing, with every stroke of the make-up remover she presses, wipes across her face, just as unsuited and sinless as he returns to the one he has planned to spend his entire life with. 

Definitions.

You want to define your life? Go ahead. Use one word. Use one sentence. Add another. Add several.
Go ahead, construct a definition. Write lines. Write paragraphs. But don't limit yourself.
Definitions help. They add coherence; they add essence. But if I believe in sticking to a little bit of direction, I believe equally in discretion. I believe in perspective. A prism was always so much interesting to inspect than measuring flat triangular surfaces.
So you've peopled this puzzle board with your solution. You've completed the picture? Shake it up. Put it together again.
Look around you. See one angle. Then tilt your head a little to the side and look at another. Then look at the many other. Nothing in life should come one except a kind of human being. Keep looking. Keep definitions but not one. Keep many.
Go with what you believe in. Stand for what you know but keep revising what you know.
There is always one perfect word but even this word has synonyms.
Who wants to spend their life in a house with one window?
The day you decide to lock yourself up in such a one, you have come full circle. From here, know that you need only travel this circular path to come back exactly to the spot you started from.
I read once somewhere, "Strive for progress; not perfection."
And then I wondered if perfection exists.

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.