“Last Kindness” – Nayana Nair

.

“You were almost my whole world”, he said,
waiting for me to say something-
an excuse, an apology, a lie that would make him
as important as I seem to be in his words.

His belated words are always beautiful,
his love always drips at the corners of every end
that I try to carve out of us.
Once it was an assurance to know all our ends are fake.

Once I was made of dreams,
once he was made of songs,
and now we are back to being mere flesh
that we can’t accept each other for.

Now we are pretty sure
we can live without dreams that hurt
and that there are other songs, better sounds
that won’t cut us up before we are dead.

Yet he tries to care for the one he no longer wants
as I try to stay silent for his sake, for my sake,
for an end that doesn’t drag on.
Or is it to look pitiful and arrogant in his eyes.
His eyes liked me best when I couldn’t be wavered,
when I seemed something more than just a needy heart.

I wonder why we try to look humans even as we part,
why we must show the faces we have grown to hate ourselves for
and act like lovers in pain, like this is the end of our lives.
When love was the last thing we needed,
seeing it was the only thing we were ever ready to give up on.

“A New Hate” – Nayana Nair

.

Surely, I love you.
Why else would I need to find a new me?
Why else, after all these years, would my jagged ends
and my fearful heart
bother me, when I have finally learned to look at them
with the kindness I was not born with?
But do you have to necessarily know of this-
these messy feelings of mine?
You are making me change.
You are making me learn
a new hate towards myself , just by existing.
Just the possibility that I might be in your heart
kills me, makes me come alive, makes me want to
undo the ties that I have held me safe,
made me safe for the world.
As long as you are here, I can never go back
to the life where I exist with ease.
It is ridiculous how I am convinced
that I will be never myself if I am apart from you,
even when I know it is a lie.
Today, I carve another need in my heart,
that I once could live without.
Today I hate you a bit more.
But you don’t have to know that.

“Carve a Chaos” – Nayana Nair

Let’s move closer
into each other’s pores,
move into each others mind,
where we are bound to lose our way.
Let’s blame each other
when we miss the chaos of our own mind.

Don’t ask me how to return to normal.
Normal never existed for us.
Our life together has no place for normalcy.
How to put a knife on an already bleeding wound,
and smile when the pain seeps into and cries out my heart-
I learnt that from you.
Like I learnt to confuse anger and possessiveness with passion.
Like I learnt to bear your frequent silence
and occasional disappearance.

Let’s move closer
into each other’s absence,
carve a space for our needs in each other’s heart.
It is not love, I know.
But dear, we both are not good enough
for this thing called love anyway.