“For Now” – Nayana Nair

There is no “my type of person”,
“my one and only friend”, or “my only hope”.
There is too much of you
that is not for me,
that I won’t take
even if you gave it away for free.
Because for every word of yours
that I find beautiful,
there are thousand other words
that I have not heard yet
that would hurt my ears,
hurt my notion of what you are
if I knew the complete truth.

-x-

That’s why I hate complete truth.
I detest it, in fact.
I do not want any part of it.
The lies – they hurt ultimately, I know.
But till that suffering arrives
at least there is a brief moment where
we are no longer preoccupied
with this hopeless business of finding a place to belong.
Sometimes a brief moment is all we need
to make sense of this life.

-x-

This life where
there is no complete understanding,
there is no complete love,
only this nameless feeling
that this is all we have got
and nothing will get much better.
That it will be easier,
maybe painful down the road,
but surely easier for now
to find our happiness
in everything that we don’t want.
To pretend that we are not lost
and pretend the best we can.

“Wrong Way” – Nayana Nair

They forgot to teach me
the most basic thing-
to know which side I should take
to keep a check on papers, to see sense
when someone tells me what is politically right
and to agree when they tell me that identity is everything
not only mine, but of all those who live on same piece of land as me.
They forgot to tell me to fight and argue
in the name of and for the sake of people
who didn’t care about the fight,
who were fine living the way they did.
I ended up believing
that I could just exist without belonging to any shore
and maybe make my own
and pray that no one joins me
and turn my life into something to live by.

How could they have overlooked this ,
didn’t they foresee how I would sit awkwardly
midst strangers and have nothing to say
about how the world was run.
Would they consider me silly,
would they think that I am shallow
if I was thinking about the fictional character from a story
and his conflicts?
Would they judge me if the story in question was not about
wars, rivalry or mid-life crisis
but one of romantic ones with cheesy lines
that everyone seems to detest?
They should have told me to memorize lines from papers
and opinion columns
and pass it as my own,
when I was not interested to form opinions
on topics that seemed to be of grave importance to others.
I should know better than to write poems on love and sadness
when people are dying around me.
But I don’t.

I think I may have been brought up the wrong way
and there is nothing I can do about it now.
But I am not even sure whether
I want to fix the things
that I asked to feel ashamed of.

“Blue of our Minds” – Nayana Nair

The strip of land
that lies in the midst
of the blue of our minds.
There
shall we sit face to face and talk.

We could talk of many things
you could tell me
how your hands throw away
every trinkets and prize,
only because they don’t feel as
you thought they would in your hands.
How they are too heavy on your soul
that doesn’t want to be dragged down.
How they are just things that can be lost
and are found again and again
by hands that will surely loose them again.
And you don’t actually care where they end up.

I could tell you
of my world
where all of these cold things
that your hand detest
have kept me alive,
where my hands brush away
care of others
because I am calculating
which piece of myself I would have to give away
as the cost of the kindness.
(Yes, every kindness has a cost,
even if it is never demanded.)
Because everything that has a warm heart
has a furnace of fire inside
that burns everyone equally.

But I am here sitting opposite you
and I am ready to get my heart broken.
Trust me when I say-
It takes a lot to break me.
And only when it comes to you,
I am not looking for an easy way out.