She had asked me for money that day. It was sudden. I didn't know what to say. I said nothing. But the silence could only be a negative. She went away

I never saw her all these months. I dont know what happened to her. For me, the days which had stretched out before me unfathomably, like a summer vacation, suddenly picked up pace, like a regular school week. Between getting the house ready (a perfect house is never done) and learning to be newly married at the ripe old age of forty; between negotiating my rights and freedoms in an unexpected merger, and soothing the wounds of decades of solitude, and learning to hide the ugliest of scars; and most of all, tending and hiding the embers of the call to return to the wild. Between all that, and somewhere in my spare time, trying to keep up the pretense of fighting what was fast becoming a lost cause - my career

Calcutta Edinburgh Halep ... So homesick but I suspect the places I long for don't exist outside my memories. Home is just a fast fading snapshot of someone who has changed beyond recognition since you said goodbye

Cal sick. There is a rubber band stuck between me and my city, my lakes, my gariahat and the grins and horns and tragi-comic-melodrama-for-fucks-sake and through it all incessant passionate and pointless debate, of living less and thinking about life more and when it rains in Calcutta wherever I may be, the rubber band pulls back

Where I am from, sometimes its okay to make fun of people - even those you love, especially when they are trying hard. Somewhere humor crosses over to ridicule and mockery as we desperately struggle to avoid sounding naive and corny. this is often saddens me but especially now.

Like most indians, I am desperately proud of my athletes, how much they overcome and what odds they face. Growing up in a privileged world one cannot even imagine what life is like outside that bubble; And moreover what a vast chasm there is between someone like him and the elite, who may even be his neighbor and not even acknowledge him as a fellow human. The oppression of caste, class, race and the english language merge to an insurmountable wall between people.

What makes a posh-society-crapwriter who makes a living out of vile gossip and dirt, and not even honest well written funny gossip - who writes books that most people would be ashamed to be caught reading - qualified to call anyone a loser?

I know that this was not about that. I am conflating issues. But to me they felt related. Its as if in this fierce competition for resources you have to qualify for everything - even to try. But effort is not wasted, even if you do not "win". We do not waste money on these people - we could not "waste" enough money on . We waste money on the clubs and schools that nourish this system of pseudo-superiority

The land of dreams. The imaginary home. Where we come from. And where we are headed. Where we are as innocent and brave as children. Where happiness and belonging are not blamed. Where we live without thinking and think without censor

What is love but an excuse for verbal gymnastics and dancing on the hyperbole 

age is just a number. and a number has nothing to do with it. but there may be a point in your life when it sinks in, that time is passing. for me, it is now. life, always a kaleidoscope, in the hands of a capricious child, is falling into - perhaps not final - but bolder strokes. i have come past my friendships of my childhood. food, alcohol, and almost nicotine. but most of all what i miss is prviate leisure - and about it, the sense of time sprawled out seductively and slumberously, a million possibilities sparkling in her eyes

How do I do a seven hour commute? I take the train - it runs along the coast. Whenever I look out of the window, the water and the sky seem to be playing with each other, and all the debris of humantity - rotting pier stilts, abandoned tires, a decaying iron drum, they all seem to be toys. The sun shines on the water at a jaunty angle. The world glistens. The skies are bluer than robins eggs. And there I stayed, temporarily lost it seemed.

I never fell in love with California. But I was struck by it at first sight. From the first moment I set foot here I knew there was something about the place. It almost felt like destiny. That first time, I was spellbound and speechless. From the beginning I felt a nameless comfort here.

But I have never felt like I was in love with it the way I fell in love with edinburgh. Words of praise and poetry don't trip off my tongue and dance in my brain constantly. I don't ache when I am away. There is no madness, no passion, no expectation of self-destruction and abnegation. Most of all, it is not cerebral. I dont think about it, argue with and about it constantly, drive myself mad thinking about how and why it is. It just is. And I am. It is a friendly comfortable feeling. Tame as a middle age affair.

But California is not tame. As time wears on, the false comfort of familiarity wears off. I realise this is a strange land. Underneath the sweet smooth smiles, its more hard hitting and edgy than anything I probably encountered before. And the weather changes every inch of my mad new city.

For my morning run, if I turn right to Chrissy Fields and the Golden Gate bridge, it is broody and fog shrouded. You cannot get to know him there - you can only gawk in wonder and run back. And marvel at the gold of the sun that breaks through. But on my right, is the Bay bridge. As casually sharp as the Grand Prix and dizzyingly urbane. And in between it is chirpy, suave and frilly - earthy and hippy.

Far from Eden, that did not want me and that I could not accept on fallen terms (whoever killed whomever may it be), I am finding something different from love and passion in the Bay. I am finding a clue to myself

six cups of green tea and 6 miles at 4AM for health. 3 cups of coffee to wake up. 6 glasses of water to stay hydrated. just one cup of childhood-flavoured orange pekoe, for me

It's a mad mad world from a dystopia novel. The news seems more surreal every time I look around

we almost always fixate more on emotionally salient information. That is the whole point of it. The salience may vary depending on how much we can discount - not just delays but also indirection

Everything is like sand. you cannot to hold on to anything. and even your grip weakens. you cannot hold on even to holding on. those who love their work, their work slips away. those who find solace in friendship, their friendship slips away. and love, that morphs every day. those to take pride in who they are, their self changes. even memories fade. nothing remains. to try to hold on is madness. we can only live in the moment, because to hold on to past love becomes like gripping a corpse when the spirit has fled.

But the same time that brings destruction also recreates. like the form of sand dunes that perpetually dance with the wind, the universe is forever recreated.

and yet something remains. forever changing, but never dying. some essence. and the fact that that it was: life, love, achievement. And empire destroyed in the present still lived in the past. a perfect love, that was foolishly lost still "was". and you and me we were, and will always be, even if our lives are gone and all traces wiped away.

and yet, life is beautiful

Whats love got to do with it. All of these years we live; all of the things we do and the emotions we feel. It all feels so fragile and so pointless. Relationships that are so deep they become your core - eating your skeleton and growing its own inside you - can dissolve into ether in seconds. Leaving you an empty shell, walking talking laughing loving, and yet vacant. And nothingness and empty as the mist can sneak in as suddenly and become your whole life before you notice it - so you suddenly wake up and all your days are filled with things that suddenly feel so important, though they mean nothing. And it does not make any sense. It does not make any sense. A loss can be so crippling that even the restoration cannot rebuild you. Heartbreak can be so corrosive that even the beloved is rendered impotent - and then nothing can do any good again. Not time for sure - because every year that passes only lays another layer of fossil and rock on my petrified heart. Yet above the surface little wildflowers bloom everyday. That mean nothing. And yet everything to someone. I am torn and broken and bitter. Unable to go back and unable to move forward. hysterical. And I resent your calm

hell is a place you go on forever with a broken heart
they lie who tell you that you need a warm heart to survive
you can limp along just fine
and spout bad poetry occasionally if you stumble

Everybody said I should forget

I fell in love with a strange land.

One day, it went back to its people,

And I was banished

I wandered, in my heart,

I was happy with my mourning and memories

And when I closed my eyes,

I roamed its streets

And whoever I spoke to, I heard its voices

So I told myself it didn’t matter,

Reality, and other trivialities.

But then they said I should forget.

And I felt cold and lonely

So I left my mind, and stepped out

Into the world

And now I have forgotten
the memories of Eden
My heart only remembers there was something:
a sound, a sight, a feeling without which i cant bear to be 

And the needs which the world cannot replace

Still throb; sometimes a glow, sometimes a fire

In misunderstood conversations

In books that are undiscussed

In jokes that dawn a strange look

In fights and debates
In every day, in every second
in unremembered memories
and disowned desires.

In dreams. In wounds and scars of a secret beginning

In the unrequited admirations for forgetful fathers
In the evening news. In the morning breeze
In neighborhood gossip. And deep reflection

In ambitions for greatness and purity

In humble simplicity
If the heart has danced with the devil once
can it be saved
it just dances on in the moonlight

Alone

distraught and distracted as i have been about my father the last few days, i heard the news and i could not help compare the feelings i had. my sorrow versus your sorrow versus some strangers sorrow - it's strange and bitter, the ways of the heart.

but it also makes me think that there are at least two kinds of love. there is a selfish love - the people we "love" because of something we need from them or think we get from them - and there is the love of affection where you care about someone else's well-being and want them to be happy. and they are not necessarily dichotomous

Somethings in life I knew I should not have done, and that I would pay for l them terribly - but I did them anyway. And had no regrets - because I had really wanted to do them, and besides I had felt in no way capable of not doing them, of walking away.

I chanced upon a book with a girl who felt like that. She"married" a man and followed him across the world, though he was married once already, and had a child, though she would have to give up everything - her whole world - to be with him, though he didnt even really care about her - though I wonder if she realized it. But he really wanted her. And later when he was done wanting her wasted life felt as inevitable as her falling under his spell. Her love was like cancer. It's not easy to cut off a part of yourself. Yet once you do, you do not 'regret' it, though it hurts in so many ways.

I think I lost track of my own metaphor ...

Other things I did not want to do, but I did them anyway - for a multitude of silly fears like hurting someone or being unemployed or bored or just feeling to lazy to deal with the alternative - and I have never stopped regretting them and feeling trapped by them.

Here, it is still raining. It feels surreal, so much rain in a desert, in the drought. Glossy leaves, shiny grass. When I woke up this morning, it was still dark, but the sky was a polished bright sparkling cerulean. As the morning light grew, the sky was soft and glowing with a silver fog. It had rained all night.

But I stayed

It's not hard to tell the difference between what we must do and what we feel like doing. Yet sometimes we so badly want the ride, we close our eyes to road and hop carousel. Without the heady rush of emotion, life is meaningless. A life spent as a slave to feelings is wasted.

I've explored both sides now. I'm looking for a sweet spot in the middle

I talk to you in my head all day
Are these real conversations,
from some other world
Which we perhaps cohabit
From the moment I wake up,
till I fall asleep, I keep telling:
I cant go. I cant go. I cant go
I just cant go away
I wish there was a way
To go and also stay

in the past I never thought about writing on the blog - I just wrote, and the words just came. But now that I have stopped and I think about what to write, its so hard. I cant think of anything - its just like when you want to talk to someone - there is nothing absolutely to say

It's been raining since yesterday. In a weird way it makes me homesick, the rain. After all those jokes about the Wetlands. I dont feel like working - I want to go home, hide in my room and read a book, or stare at the sultry sky.

random rambling - thinking out loud

I had some bad news last night. First a mini-personal tragedy - a broken tooth - which seems silly in hindsight. And then at four in the morning a message from my mother, about my father's health. I remembered a early morning conversation with him on a couch behind my house. He was in one of his early morning good moods - chatty and funny. We talked about the existence of God - he said that there can be no God. I asked him why then did he ask random people to pray for things he wanted. And he said, there is "Something"... and we laughed. I love it when he laughs. I love how we get each others jokes. Over the years, we spent a lot times like that - main hued like a glossy bubble; as random and fragile. I cant wait to see him again.

But he is so far away now ...

When something goes wrong, I sometimes look for a reason. I feel like I am being punished - and I think but why - I was so good! I eat clean, I wake up early and run and then I do my work - till I am tired and I pass out. I help people as much as I can. don't drink. I don't kill insects. I barely lie or cheat. Was it that one phone call, or chocolate, or half-lie ... But it doesn't work like that. There children dying everywhere for no fault of their own. There are accidents where someone just died for no good reason. I cant go looking for a reason for things and I cant expect everything - or anything to go my own way. I can only do my bit - because I want to do it, not as insurance, protection tax, bribe, or sentence. And I can try to ignore how I feel and focus on how others feel and what I can do to help. I can just try to be the best person I know how to be.

But sometimes it gets so quiet ...

And yet despite all of this night comes. And the whole world becomes peaceful and still. If you look out of the window, the moon is indecently bright; the orange tree and the jasmine bushes gossip together and the spider spins a large gossamer yarn, as the ants sleep dreamless in a corner, too exhausted to ask pointless questions, and too full of plans for tomorrow to care.

memories

I feel like I have three lives.


Every now and then, in my present life, a memory from the past floats up to the surface of my consciousness - unbidden, and unformed. I don't know how to describe what I mean by "unformed". I spent a lot of time there trying to think of the right word, or metaphor - but nothing just right came to my mind. Perhaps what I meant is that it is not a whole memory - it is a snatch or an essence - like a half remembered smell or a song - that teases me from the edge of my awareness.

The first life is almost wholly buried. I see pictures or hear stories from friends, but they don't seem like my stories. They second life I remember somewhat, but even that is now fading.

Is this partial amnesia? Or am I just growing older. But it feels like  lobotomy of the spheres of my existence - would it, could it, be so sharp if it was just the gradual aging of brain cells? Stroke victims I heard - and I heard it in my second life - can lose one language and retain the other completely. Anyway, these are the ways I usually remember my second life. In stories. And characters and ghosts. They were stories that were told to me. And they woke into my own memory so casually till I am often unsure which one's are my own memories and which ones are someone else's.

Some of the memories are like that - like faded like sepia photographs of an immigrant to a new continent - he hordes them obsessively as the last link to someone he used to be - someone he used to know how to be, and yet he never dare look at them for fear of drowning in the storm of emotions they arouse. They are like a scene abruptly cut from a movie - no beginning no end. A loose page from a book that doesn't fit anywhere on the new bookshelf. Like my mother asking me if I really want to go away for seven years - and matter of factly noting she would not live that long. Or the strange shape of the lock in a small swiss hotel. The madness and immaturity laced into the first poem or letter of admission I dared to write and send out to the world outside - but then my chest feels funny and compressed and I cant breathe so I tuck away the photo in the back of the suitcase and move on again.

Other memories are innocuous. The peculiar taste and feel of Kwalities Strawberry Stick ice-creams - I have never found that texture anywhere again. Or the burst of colors from the first time I printed out a slide film - on my first independent camera.

All the harmless things are the ones I liked, but did not love too much

Aritra Part 3

there is faith and their is disappointment. and there is a vast chasm between. As he sat on the rock, Aritra thought about his constant crisis of faith. What did it say about him, he thought, how frequently he vacillated between the lust for good and the familiarity of evil. He was happy when he was in the sunshine, when he was working hard

Perhaps in a dream, Or in another Universe

perhaps in a dream
or in another universe
we will, once again seamlessly take up
the life we once shared
like a book, picked up at bent page
will will fly back to norway - where I had never been
where our story was so rudely interrupted
nothing was ever quite the same again after that time, was it?
and then, on rambling and aimless road trips
bickering about music and politics that belong to neither
we will pick up the music from the pause
we will watch the moonrise
and count the stars
and fight about an election somewhere
and then I will tell you about the book I am reading
and cry because I got carried away by how rousing it was
and you will be torn between loving me more
and telling me romanticizing the emergency is such a dangerous affair
sooner or later we will dance to our favorite songs
fathers and fear of death
and laughing or crying, as the mood takes us,
we fall asleep

then the sun will rise
and wake me up
and i will wake up,
wash my eyes
say my prayers
and walk away from
dreams of dancing
with the devil in the dark
and go back
to the Temple of Vesta

Scotty, beam us up, fast!

Its been a while since I wrote something publicly

I feel like someone who sits on a bicycle after a long time wobbly and unsure confused about what to do next, and confused about why I am doing this scared of falling and scared of looking foolish and

And yet something about the memory of sailing through a wind feeling the breeze in your hair or being set free from something, and connected to something else

Perhaps that was the greatest lure of the blog-revolution - atleast for me
It was a device that allowed All the Lonely People, or all those discontents who,
for Some reason sought Something, outside of the Ordinary Everyday World, a way to escape into a shared Galaxy far away.
An illusion of a chance of finding friends who are a bit more like us

But we never knew quite what we meant by any of those Words - or atleast I did not

And we never thought that maybe like in the Lord of the Flies
we might find exactly the same things there that we ran away from,
because we carry the seeds within us

fading life

Is it possible to feel alone as urgently as an excruciating stomach ache; as imperative and all consuming

Is it possible to feel alone constantly and insatiably.

Is it possible to feel alone
In myriad shimmering shades

Is it possible to feel alone,
Terribly alone, when one is not

when i was a child it seemed strange that
one day you are so alive, and then suddenly you die
but as i grow older i realise,
you die one day at a time

like a lonely kingdom
time and again the heart falls
conquered by emperors
or eroded by termites
or laid waste by time

Love Is

Love is a sudden pause In life’s voracious ambition for itself Love is an awkward pause Pregnant with mysterious illegitimacies First a comma, then question mark and then maybe a semi-colon Jan 20 2015

Sulking Words

Now that I have the time. And I head is full of things I could write about, I can’t find the words. My heart is bursting with so many things, none of which you can tell a soul. Is that when you feel you have drifted far away from all your friendships? I used to have people I could tell things to, and eel resonance. Because that’s what we crave isn’t it? Resonance? What does that even mean. And caring. No one really cares about any thing anymore. We are all so caught up in here and now. Pointless trivialities and meaningless banalities Actually those are not perhaps the right words to express what I feel. I suspect I know who is this monster stirring again in my soul like a long assumed dead volcano. But I dare not say the words for fear of raising him: not even in My head. I don’t dare open that box. I don’t even dare take it out if the suitcase. But he just grins at me from inside. With beady X-ray eyes I am scared. I am bored. I am sad. I am excited. I am amused by myself. I am growing. I bump into my childhood self in the mirror. I am realising things I had buried out of my consciousness for years. I am hiding new monsters and bones away. I am dreaming of sin. I am praying for salvation. And dreading the boredom. I have danced with the devil in a dark blue room. I have chased the shadows of the sun, heedless of the world of men. I have drunk secret wine hidden in closets with brooms and dusty suitcases. I have been ridiculous. I have been drunk. I have been exhilarated. Now I’m bored. And I’m petrified FEBRUARY 5, 2015

Of Wolves and Dogs

i dont know what hunger or tiredness feels like to you i can go for days with little food or sleep you dont know what boredom feels like to me it makes me desperate – like a corkscrew turning in my soul and this emptiness and this city of normal people peacefully slumbering trapped in the middle of all this normalcy. desperate howling half crazed there is a rabid wolf hidden inside my soul and he is seething in hate at your comfortable cage February 5th, 2015

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

somewhere between my last desperate attempt to reach you and your last shrugging off an opportunity to reach out i let you go. i set you free and now, every now and then when you wander back i don’t know what to do with you it’s strange i have let go i never thought i could or would but the fever has left me atleast, in as much measure as it could the passion is now a remembered master and a phantom addiction i have a vaguely sad memory of remembrance like a echo of a shadow but the memories even have faded this is the other side of your who killed whom story i have truly moved on i am sorry and i console myself only with the knowing that you couldn’t really care given the last two years or so there were so many opportunities you didn’t take many and i missed more but whats done is done you cannot newly break a thread that time has gnawed so bare so even goodbye seems like empty words but farewell But with the fever, the poetry left. And the words dried up too. Apparenttly, Lisa was right – if not being, it bore a gift. But what is an annoying wicked mother in law who brings a box of home made fruit cake – however divine, right? better off without. Besides I like saving the calories. And think about diabetes But I miss reading fiction, or poetry, or music. Or anything that makes me feel. Or old friends. Or personal conversations. Or gestures of random affection. I miss feelings – sometimes. Like a amputated limb, my limbic centres sometimes remind me that I dont feel, really anymore Though that is a lie. I feel. Thirst. Exhaustion. Boredom. Unbearableness. Hunger. Laughter – pointless jokes – Outrage, sorrow at macro levels. Sometimes affection at the young and old and dogs. I laugh and play. And the other sorrows of Faiz I dont even remember your face. Or how your skin felt. Or where exactly which mole was, how you hair … or the colour of your eyes. As I go about your day things you would have said or done had you been there play in the back of my head, or an occassional innocuous memory – but that is just the habit of almost a decade – and besides I am like that with all my memories – of every beloved friend and other family. But sometimes I have a dream. dont remember you at all. Not the constant moving. Not the passionate debate. Not childlike laughter. The boyish crying or even the constant twin-like resonance. Or the lies, the betrayals, the injuries Most of the times, I feel fine: comfortably numb. And unconcerned. “Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;” September 4th 2015

why are we so turned on by birthdays. and by new year days. and mondays ... is beginning again so seductive? or are we so repulsed by our mistakes, our dark side

There is nothing more lonely or more novel than a broken heart because everyone breaks in their own special in identifiable unsharable 28 July 2014

love. raped at the alter. harnessed and put to good use caring and nurturing and always being there love. sold to the deepest carer 19 August 2014

Ambition

Is it mans greatest shame to accept a life without a purpose greater than himself, or is the aspiration his greatest hubris. Or is it his greatest bromide, disguising his lust for immortality

its just stuff

i have been terribly upset, for the last few weeks. ostensibly, the reason i have been distrubed is because i lost a couple of things. the days were crazy. i flew across the ocean to india, met my family after a long gap of time, tried to adjust to the new house they had moved to, tried to cope with the vague sense of loss of the old familiar house, a lost symbol of a semblance of a root - of special and twisted significance to a disinherited exiled gypsy like me, i met my boyfriends family for the first time, a host of new faces, a new culture, new values, a new ethos, i met my sister and her new family, i met my friends from edinburgh, my home away from home - from where too i had been exiled a year ago, and in the middle of all this newness, i got married.

in all the chaos that ensued, i felt even more unsettled than i habitually do. i felt like everyday i was packing a few essentials and moving somewhere. to my mothers room, to my sisters room, to the wedding venue, the reception venue, to my new husbands aunts house, to his parents home, then back to new york where i live and then in two days to san francisco, where he lives. 

in all this moving and packing and unpacking, i lost two things. of all the things i had been carrying, they were perhaps the most precious: wedding gifts from my new mother in law, and from my new husband, respectively. i searched everywhere for days but i could not find them. i could not move past the loss. i fluctuated between sorrow and a vague sense of emotionless vacuum.

everyone tried to console me, to rationalise, that they were, after all, only 'things'. it didnt mean anything. when we were still there. they people. the relationships. the living. i got their rationalisation objectively, i understood. but still why did i feel the way I did? 

because maybe i am a person of symbols. maybe because i have always been, in different ways, homeless and alone, and the symbols were all i had to cling to. maybe from the earliest times life showed me that people are fickle and love is fleeting. even the most constant of lovers are sometimes lost to death or chance, and best friends to a trans-continental move.

my parents came from india and bangladesh. i was born in syria, i grew up in india and dubai. i came of age in scotland and l live in america. my life is fractured. every one i loved has been lost. to life, to death, to moves, to chance or mood. nothing has ever been constant in my life. except the symbols. so i learned to cling to them. because they are the only things you can control

but i feel inside that i need to unlearn this. that it is just a false coping mechanism of a child born in a confusing complex whirl. i am now an adult. i have a self and i have a love and i have a life. i need to rest my anchors to these things. to my soul inside me and to my love outside of me. and that is what i connot lose

11 July 2013

a "normal heterosexual male" just said the words "normal heterosexual male" to me in a conversation (about Ulleyses, by the way). And I was struck by the staggering unspoken pride in his voice that underlined the three words ... are "normal heterosexual male" proud of being "normal heterosexual male"? what is there to be so proud of for being a "normal heterosexual male"? OR for that matter, "normal" anything? also, if you did an average of either gender or sexual attributes, wouldnt the statistical normal lie somewhere in between the poles (n.p.i)?

new york blues

13 July 2013

In the end it is such a lonely world. Just us and our unresonated thoughts and feelings. Burning our hearts to cinder. And unseen tears. And unheard cries. It is such a private world, the world of feelings. Why then do we so desperately crave resonance? Why do we fall in love with impossible ideas and dream impossible dreams And break our little hearts againtz the rocks of cold "normal" practicality. Mindless heartless ianane ugly reality. Bye bye sweet Boston. Hello cold New York. The secret to tolerating life is twofold: blindness and fakeness.

"Shine your teeth with nothingness. And sharpen them with lies. That's how you fight it"

the footprints of pain

22 October 2013

my pain, my agony, my angst, my anger, my hatred, my shock at the unfairness of my life and my hurt at its irony, is nobodys problem but mine, but it's leakage & footprint is suddenly everybody's business

heimat

I started writing this on the 24 October 2013 and never finished it. Today it is two years later and I still feel the same 24 October 2013 "Home" is such a strange word Can you feel homesick If you never had a home? Not atlrsst any you remember The Banished or those who have strayed have little, but a dwindling stash of hope, That the pain of exile might one day end And a fading stack of snapshots Of memories But a

loss

24 October 2013

The impact of loss is proportionate to how integral a part of your identity what was "lost" was. And the strength of what is left.

I miss Heimat, as if the places and people were my own. It's an occasional sudden twinge of longing. But I recover

But losing you was losing my whole self ... The third time over. I have nothing left to recover

It's a wound I wrap up in series of bandages, douse in opiates and hide from view. And I can even pretend I'm normal ... Even to myself!

Yet sometimes whenever it brushes against something, or the moon is full, or my old arthritis is up, or the cat walks on the right side of the room ... It rips open and won't stop bleeding

It almost doesn't hurt anymore, or familiarity & understanding has rendered the pain impotent. But still I ave to hide to stop flooding the campus with my blood. My dirty filthy blood

heartbreak

29 October 2013

What is it like, heart break and the loss of hope? Is it like a crick in the neck from looking back over your shoulder? Or a slow nagging numbness that settles into your bones. subtle & stubborn. slow & steady. Almost imperceptible. Except when it flares up in a raging screech against tomorrow, against having to move on ... Against the flying disk that sliced away the corpse

losing

19 November 2013

The season of losing
can be beautiful
Fall prepares trees
For cruel winter

I am tired of losing
And I am tired of losing out
I am exhausted from sucking it up
From taking a hit. Letting it go
Ignoring it

I don't want my life to be perfect

I want one thing to like

I want one ray of hope

And one day that is not worse than yesterday

the softly fading life

when i was a child it seemed strange that
one day you are so alive, and then suddenly you die
but as i grow older i realise,
you die one day at a time

Is it possible to feel alone as urgently as an excruciating stomach ache; as imperative and all consuming

Is it possible to feel alone constantly and insatiably. 

Is it possible to feel alone

In myriad shimmering shades

Is it possible to feel alone,

Terribly alone, when one is not

as long as boy in a metropolitan indian city wants to be introduced to a girl because he heard she smokes and likes whiskey

as long as my best the most allegedly liberated culture is mildly ashamed to tell me she is frustrated because her husband has a lower libido than her

as long as men reading the line above are not smirking and saying i want to meet her

as long as women cannot casually and matter of factly "ask for it", or even heaven forbid, take it whenever they want it

as long as sex is taboo and sacrosanct and not just another fun and relaxing thing to do and a prostitute is not just a service provider 

as long as whore is a dirty word

as long as tomboy is cool but pansy is an insult

as long as you feel slightly belittled when someone calls you hot

 

I'm returning "amores perros" and "the way we were" unwatched. And watching something trashy instead. I find I can no longer watch movies or read books that once really moved me, that talk about love. 

"aisa asan nahi lahu rona

dil mein taqat jigar mein hal kahan"

Have you ever felt like that?

I loved Edinburgh a lot. Leaving it broke me. I rebuilt something. But it's very different from what I was before. Now I want a safe fun pleasant place to live. I don't want to love a city as much as intensely as hauntingly as Edinburgh. I don't want something to take the place that it once held. Let it's beautiful broken ruins stay untouched & holy 

I have come here so any times now. I have never hated it so much before. Why

I feel very trapped and a little bit cheated. Suffocating and desperate to break free. Or drown in oblivion 

Jeene ke liye, socha hi nehi dard uthane hoge

What if my heart, which I dismissed as an abstract construct or an extinct volcano yesterday, comes alive tomorrow and questions me, my right to assume on its behalf it's extinction absence for a lifetime? What if like memories of a child I gave up for adoption, my right to love haunts me? What if life turns around tomorrow & question my signing off happiness & living for as long as I live, for saying I have lived and loved already more than my share, or capacity, on all of our behalf ...

Heartbreak is like a sudden accident where you we're merrily going about your day, when you were hit suddenly by a train for no fathomable reason and you end up without an arm or an leg. Everyone will sympathize, no one will quite get it. The pain will drive you crazy at first then you will get used to. Slowly you will become initiated into the walking wounded club, amongst everyone but never one of them, separated for ever by something they will forever sympathize with, but never quite get. It will slowly teach you to lie, as you realize that no one really wants to hear about your pain, because no one will ever quite know how in what way it hurts somehow they will be resentful of it in a million ways.