“it is about getting a bit too much in life” – Nayana Nair

.

so why the long face?
what’s ailing you today?

i am confused.

about love? again?

no, about me.

about your skin?
about the directions your eyes take?
or about the growing all wrong feeling?

about “me in love”.
about “me” and “love”.

so is your skin cracking like mine?
has loneliness finally figured out how to hurt you best?
is it about why there is so much of love in this world
and why only you aren’t getting any?

no, it is about getting a bit too much.
about finding love again and again,
and being loved back again and again,
and before you get irritated,
it is also about love ending again and again.

so do you hate them for the end?
or are you still loving them when you shouldn’t?

i haven’t figured out that yet.
sort of don’t want to .
i am already depressed about not having that “one love”.
now the sunset reminds me of one person
and the rains remind of another.
i remember them all, not with hate, not with love,
but with fondness.

is that a good thing? or something bad?

i don’t know.
they are taking too much space in me
i was true to everyone so it feels rude and thankless
to get rid of things that were once my only joy.
but i feel it is all making my heart bigger.

don’t people normally want?
a bigger heart?

but it making my head a mess.
my immature and desperate want
of having that one person, only one person in my eyes
is lost cause.
i can give my whole life to one
but they will know, always know
that i am missing so many parts.

so
since the desperate and immature past you has given up
don’t wait around for another immature person
to count and complain about your parts.

but i am still the immature one even now.
i have always been that.
i wouldn’t be worrying over
my own split attention, if not split heart,
if i wanted to be the bigger better person
that life i forcing me to be and to have.

don’t worry
life is long. you will grow.
you will grow to fit your heart.

what if i don’t?

then we wait, till it does.

“Oddly Enough” – Nayana Nair

.

Somehow I feel that
the ropes that we walked on
for each others sake
were never really ropes
but figment of our imagination
stretching from your mind to mine
connecting centers of chaos
and wanting and hatred without direction.

Once I thought we stood together
against everything else,
against every force of reality.
But now that my sockets have grown eyes
and now that we have moved so far away from
our self-indulgent blindness
that we could never separate ourself from.

Now every glimpse of past is sad and pitiful.
Looking back why does it seem
we were just clinging to each other
as if we were each other’s last hope.
As if we let go, we would never know happiness of any kind.
As if we held on, we could change each other
and find in each others changing a reason to smile.

But thankfully or regrettably, I have not grown much
cause sometimes I feel thankful to you
for sharing all the dark moments with me
even if you caused half of them.
I feel oddly grateful to you
for sharing my pitiful fate, my mundane days,
my cycles of planned and impulsive destruction,
for walking with me to our day of separation.

I hope that we find happiness in future
without pinning our hopes on the ruin of another.
I hope we see the ruin when our hands begin to create one.
It was not all bad. Or maybe it was worse than I remember.
Oddly enough I wouldn’t change our fates.
But I will never wish for it again.

“Understanding freedom” – Nayana Nair

.

He broke my shackles with his blood
and took my hand,
my weightless hand, my almost wings,
and held them in the warm embrace of his own prayer.

As my hands created ripples for my own amusement,
as my hands broke the bread that I would now get to eat,
as I looked at flowers for hours at leisure,
and sang wordless songs without the fear of being heard
-he cried.
It was beautiful and sort of silly – his tears.

He cries at the smallest things
yet is unfazed at the moments that require tears.
Like this farewell, where with a smile
he recites his memorized list of wishes,
he recites the feelings of hope he has for the ones before him.

He looks at me. He looks at us all
and says “you are free. this is now a game without masters.
this is now a world where you are as good,
as deserving of respect
as anyone you stand with or stand against.
you are free. live. live such that
you would need no one to remind you of that.”

As we cried, he told us that
disappearing is what he always meant to do
that wanting his shadow around,
seeking his approval, and following his words
would undo everything he has done in this world.
Yet our tears won’t stop.

We didn’t know if these tears were of desperation,
of relief, of love, of being abandoned,
of being left without directions or heads that could
do the work of seeing and thinking for us,
in return of our submission.
He told us it is sometimes okay not to know.
He said it is okay to hate him
if it helps us to find a way that is our own.

It broke me to hear that because
he spoke as if being okay with being hated for saving
was an essential part of being good.
It was sad that he had to smile when he said it
as if he was not free to cry or complain for something like that.
Or maybe I have not understood freedom yet.

“Without a reason, in this world” – Nayana Nair

.

I sat in the shade of a tree that had no fruit,
no yellow buds, no promise of any spring.

Some broken ants with their broken sense of direction
crawled to me, and stared at me
as if their answers lay in my broken being.

My being, they say, are just colors-
the brightest colors of everlasting longings.
They say I am not even a half of a being,
so I cannot wish to complete or be completed
as long as I am me.

But now that I have stopped waiting,
stopped begging for a use in this world,
I feel that it is okay to exist like this.

I feel I can look back at the ants,
at the ones I can never complete
and tell them I don’t have their answers.
I feel I can tell them my truth
without wanting to “not exist”.

“The Light of White Tulips” – Nayana Nair

.

From the lowest branch
of the falling tree
I looked up
and heard someone laugh.

I have been reborn thousand times after that
but still
as I walk on the charcoal roads
lined with white tulips
that never light up,
as my foot slips
I hear that laugh again.

I hear it
when I cook food
and end up staring a bit too long at the flame,
when the smoke that kills, coats everything
that fills my stomach.

It is stuck in my heart, the violence of the end.
The bluest sky, the sweetest wind,
the flying songs, and my muffled cries-
crystallized as one.
One tiny map, that tells no directions,
forever stuck in the corner of my eye.

It plays like a record, plays hide and seek.
It is a play that ends
with the stories breaking into me.

“The thought of losing you” – Nayana Nair

Today you are silent
and you don’t care.
You have changed
without changing anything about you.
You don’t want to be concerned with
should-be or could-be
as all that matters is what is.
what-is is a fact that needs no forgiveness
from what-didn’t-come-to-be.
You beg me not drag you down
into the waters of the past, “They are ugly
they are hard, they are things that we can’t have.”
is all you say about the life we once had.
what-didn’t-come-to-be is an ocean I must swim alone,
an ocean that just grows and grows deeper and wider
cause I can’t seem to stop hoping from you.

In the forms of “Renewal and Hope”,
in the forms of “Happy Married Life Again?”,
you fill the reason as “wandering and its joys”.
So I burn up all such papers
where you won’t look me in the eye
and tell me the truth
or at least some believable lie.
I burn away this life
where you wander in every direction but mine.
Where I am not wrong for you,
you just don’t want me to be the right.
“It scares me”, you once said, “the thought of losing you.”
How well you have grown, how far you have strayed
from your words, from yourself, and from everything
that you once happily called fate.

“but the waves run away from me” – Nayana Nair

the trees sway behind me
they tower and droop and die
above the cold parked cars.
i hear the sounds
that i couldn’t till last night
it is music to my ears
and “warnings of ruin” to my mind.
the green monster, the metal carriage,
and their lonely helpless master
face the direction of ocean.
if we were bigger,
if everything before us could melt,
if i could understand distances,
if i could drive
we could have met a love by that ocean,
we could have called ourselves friends
in that molten world,
i could have told them about the human dread of dying,
we could have laughed over it,
and the tree would have held me and my broken and beaten car
in its motherly gaze
and we wouldn’t worry whether this happiness
could heal us or not.

“Is this what this distance, this decision means?” – Nayana Nair

With my back to the my cold family name
the metallic alphabets printing hard on my clothes,
I stand
with my feet half out of my pretty shoes –
with my painted nails still hidden in the skin of another animal,
my hands revolving the beautiful replica of Saturn
around the plastic heart on my elaborate key chain- a stage of its own.
I stand and wait for you to open your door on the floor above.
I hear a faint click, a phone ring, footsteps running away from the world
(why do I feel such sadness when I hear that?),
a door left open (to everyone but me)
I sit in the middle of my living room floor
staring up, at the underside- the creeping mold
of the stage where I played your lover, your nemesis.
It is cruel and incomprehensible that we can still live,
take calls, make jokes, eat, and still have the want to live.
After hurting ourselves and the world for the sake of love,
after all that, is this is it?
When you find your room, your world without me
which direction does your heart turn towards?
Do forget from time to time that we are supposed to forget each other?
When I find my loneliness becoming greater than me,
when it starts spilling out of me on dinner table,
when it makes me lose my mind, am I allowed to let go of you?
Is this what this distance, this decision means?
I hear your window open, I hear your excited voice
(why do I feel color of anger filling me again?).
I wonder if you have really found your new life
or is this an act you have put for my benefit?
Your kindness could only be in my head, as was your love.
TV drowns your voice again
and I thank all the accidents, all the things out of my control,
everything that moves us away from each other.
Otherwise, I never could.

“Inversion” – Nayana Nair

When I stand near you,
I want to believe that we are standing together.
That our hearts being mirror images
means something more.
Mirror images…
‘Lateral inversion’ they called it, I recall.
We feel similar only when facing each other.
But when we talk of this world,
when we eat from our own broken plates,
when we tell each others directions,
when we see each other from afar
we are nothing but strangers.
We are nothing but proofs against each other’s belief.
But still I want to believe
that there is something I cannot see,
some argument in favor of “us”.
I want to believe you are my medicine
even as my skin cuts and bleeds in your embrace.

“The wind is picking up” – Nayana Nair

The wind is picking up.
The white sand unlike water
sinks everything too slowly.
And so the shade less trees of eucalyptus
become shadows that I learn to love.
They become compass that knows no direction,
but just piece this world to hold,
the silent assurance
that I am not yet lost, though my eyes can’t tell.

***

The wind is picking up.
In the middle of this small storm,
my careful hands writing the date on black board
suddenly realize the need to be held.
And so I fold and create a crease
on another part of my face-
the part that shows my heart too easily.
Someone yells out my name
and unknowingly they moor me to another violence,
another need that I don’t want to carry in me.