“What I Remember (17)” – Nayana Nair

those who spent their lives
wrecking their hands to mould me into something better,
tried fruitlessly
to break me without pain,
to break me and make me into something
that would be accepted by this world.
they showered me with love
so i won’t know, won’t remember
how much it pained me or how much it hurt them
to have gifted me
this painful self-critical view of myself and this world.

while they are growing old, weak and distant
my love for them looks like a failed seed
that never grew nor flowered.
the years that i spent with them
has made me ungrateful.
i have become the fish that never thanked the water
that kept it alive,
thinking that is what water is meant to do.

with time
as a fail to become what i thought i am,
as i realize that doing or even knowing the right thing to do
becomes more impossible as you get to know this world,
i begin to understand the enormous love they must have had for me
to hold my hand and walk with me in a world
that they had never seen
only for my sake,
knowing that their courage and their tears
are destined to be forgotten (or worse- questioned).

and my love?
my love,
it grows in opposite direction of sun,
my love for them grows into the soil my heart
in a world where they won’t see and won’t know.
i will remain cruel and indifferent even in my own eyes.
so i hide my muddled feelings
and walk around those
who have made me what i am
whatever that may be.

“Unnoticed” – Nayana Nair

Yesterday, a line etched on my hands
slipped away from the skin that once held it so dearly
and still I lived on as if the the fate I lived now
was the one I was destined for.
I like to call it yesterday
for it is easy to suppose that we always knew what was coming,
that the things we lost didn’t entirely go unnoticed.
When in fact most days we wake up remembering
details about things that have gone to places
where they no longer have to care whether they are still forgotten
by people like us who do such a poor job of caring for anything.
We are always too young to know or too old to bother.
All that find a way to us through this forest of sadness
are disappointed to see what we are
and try best to stay, to lurk around, to be of some use to us,
till we drop them from our mind,
and they stare us in face and try to digest the excuses
that we didn’t even care to give.