“flow towards me” – Nayana Nair

.

your hair coils into a nest,
into a snake, into a rope
that has not decided yet what to do
with its life and with the life of the one
who holds it…what to do with me.
let me hold you.
let me find your soul.
let me see your love
whatever it looks like.
of all the things you could do,
of all the miracles you are capable of,
gift me the tiniest speck of sunshine
that is about to die, give me that little island
of light that floats in your eyes.
i want you to live.
i want to hope.
i want to be a part
of your most tender happiness.
i want to know what it means
to be closest to your heart,
closest to your breath.
come here, let your hair down,
let it flow towards me.

“Goodbye to all the warm things” – Nayana Nair

.

The white curtain, the whistling wind
doesn’t vanish,
no matter how many times
I close my eyes.

The chill under my feet
slowly turns into the ice within my bones.
The hope within my heart
blinds me a bit more.

For every step I take
another cold molecule of my sense of self
breaks away from me.
Every step is an unavoidable mistake.

All warm things are now resting
in the rooms of past-
the melting summer and the stickiness left by
the kiss of ice cream at the corner of my lips,

the one tree that I burnt for three winters,
the big windows, the big dreams
that almost burnt a hole in my heart
as I wrote down hollow words recited by my teachers,

the warmth on my skin
as your eyes fell on me,
that whole minute for which you were
the closest star to earth, my new sun.

But every step is an unavoidable mistake.
Every step is a goodbye.
Every sun that my eyes create, falls
too easily from its branch.

No matter how many times
I close my eyes.
it doesn’t vanish-
this world that now I can no longer love.

The light that will never fall on you
is the light I will never see.
Isn’t it beautiful – this cold
that takes me a bit closer to you, even if like this.

“they took my name and handed it back to me” – Nayana Nair

.

Every time
I fell into the void.

Every time
I have been kindly left alone.

Every time
I was allowed to walk in light,
in the world I clearly didn’t belong.

Every time
they took my name and handed it back to me
without poison, without hatred, without tearing it into pieces.

That’s all I have to be happy about.
That is the closest I have felt to love.

“Closest” – Nayana Nair

The cracking ground I kneeled on for answers
have become riverbeds where I’ll drown,
have become
the reason of my tears,
the reason of my broken voice
that travels along the lines
of the words I mutter
without knowing,
without meaning anything more
than to put my mouth into use.
I scratch the walls of the dreams I once painted
till the petals of colors cover my ground
only to reveal a the nightmare of empty hands.
I hold the petals, the chipped away paint
and feel the closest to my dream,
the closest I will ever be.