“Minimum Limit of Thirty” – Nayana Nair

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And when we had run out of pleasant things to talk about
I asked him things he didn’t ask me,
things he didn’t want to be asked.
But I was bored of the all this peace,
all the ants that crawled into him, into me
maintaining separate lines,
to reach the places in us
we both didn’t want the other to see.
I guess I wanted him to be different,
I had more than enough people
who wanted to love me without knowing me.
I guess I wanted to be difficult.
For once I didn’t want to be the easy conversation,
the easy way out of pain.

I asked him
when the waves of life try to reach his foot,
what does he do?
Who does he think of?
Whom does he drown in his mind
every time, every moment
to avoid knowing what he really feels?
Does he almost hold that hand,
does he almost save the one who will kill him first,
who has always killed him
without hesitating?

He seems to be the type who would do stupid tings
on repeat at least thirty times
before giving up on the one
whose love didn’t surface
even after the thirty wounds, or bloody hands,
or hundred considerations.
He looks so breakable and so happy
I wonder if in the hollows of his heart
where his anger and disappointments hides,
are there flower beds of daisies,
and a heart that can never be broken?

Is this how I look-
like him, plagued and haunted by beautiful dead thing?
Is that why he smiles at me without saying a word?
Is that why I can’t smile back?

“Running Barefoot” – Nayana Nair

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He was somewhere upstairs
running barefoot on the dusty floors
of the broken house.
I could hear him
even when I stood waiting in the backyard
staring at all the rusty memories,
feeling the stare of people who will never leave this place,
who may never leave me again
now that I fear them for never actually dying.
I tried not to love him
as I stood alone waiting for him to get bored of all this.

I was too afraid to be with him
when he was like that.
when he read aloud poems
about death out of the blue,
and read them as if they were the only true declaration
he could make to the world,
the only true word that he could say to his life.
I would only later find out
that they were written by someone else –
someone who lived in a difficult to pronounce country.
He loved things like that –
taking up the clothes of emotions of others
and wrapping himself up in them
as he walked into all the unknown lives
that oddly had a room reserved just for him.

And always, I would be outside
waiting for the sun to set, for his heart to ease,
to be there when he decides to come back to reality for good.
I didn’t realize that footsteps had ceased long ago,
and so had his breath.
So I stood there letting my heart run barefoot
on the floor of delusion, in the world where he exists.
I waited for my love to give up on him.
I was afraid of being me
when my love stop, won’t look back at me.

“But more than love” – Nayana Nair

But more than love
I needed to feel that I am human,
that my heart and its pieces
and its tentacles struggling to get a grip on me
are a story everyone’s bored of.

I needed to know that I am fine.
As fine,
as normal
as the person who doesn’t meet my eyes.
That I could look up from the sinking ground.

I needed someone to place me in the sun,
to water me, try hard to keep alive,
to make this
small me
the center of world
for few seconds.
Someone who could grow and bloom beside me,
because of me.

But more than love
I wanted you to be the one
who does that for me.

“Keep Peace” – Nayana Nair

I could be anything I wanted
but not her.
She thinks too less about wanting the right things,
about wanting things that are lying around in
the debris of Lego buildings broken by
hands of a small gods who gets bored easily.

If she really wanted to feel
what fulfillment feels like
she could have walked through the gardens
that were made for soul like hers
(or should I say gender like hers).
It is better, I can vouch,
better than wanting to go to places
where she is not wanted,
where they would ask-
“why can’t she read the situation?”,
“why can’t she keep peace?”,
“what are these demands that she must have
when she has lived without it all her life?”,
“how is she any different from others
who know how to take the equality that we are offering
without wanting a share of ours
wanting to be a bit more like us?”.

I can understand all that
but she doesn’t
and there is no way that
I can make her see the pain she is walking towards,
make her hear the names she will be called
just for asking what everyone else wants to ask
but fear being in wrong terms
with the people who run this world.

“Hobby”- Nayana Nair

My hobby is
to find an unclaimed space in myself
and then try to color it.
Because I am bored.
Because I have trouble
that are taking up much more spaces
and this is the only space left for me
in my own life.
And here I create,
I paint my desperation, self-doubt
on the whites of my eyes.
Again I create a monster,
again a little more space I lost,
again I lost a little of my life,
and I wonder why do I suffocate myself.