“Why doesn’t anything break me” – Nayana Nair

.

now that this was happening for real

i wonder why isn’t it like

the ground breaking into pieces too small to support any life,
why the all the dragonflies weren’t dropping dead?
why all the butterflies still exist in color?

why isn’t it like

lungs filled with tears or the dramatic beautiful drowning into myself.
why am I able to keep track of time?
why am I stapling and stacking papers with a preciseness i never had?

i accept everything way to easily, i suspect

maybe even the love that almost took my life was not that deep.
maybe my limits were just as harsh as the room
with broken air conditioner on the day of perfect weather.

but why?
why then don’t I remember

the days of perfect weather
where there must have been something
worth crying for, breaking for, killing for. why doesn’t anything break me.

why then

are there open windows filled with light still stuck on the walls of my heart,
why is there music in the world sadder than my own self.
why do I envy everyone who gets to have a real grief, real love.

why is it so, that

it makes sense for the color of end to be my favorite.
it makes sense that i am left with myself and i still feel safe and i still know hope.
i wonder this numbness or cold heartedness – what it will do to me?

what will it do to me?
what will i end up as?
(i am avoidant and anxious and selfish and cruel and “never yours” already)
what/who will you end up loving instead?
(if you die before me, in the arms of someone who could see you better than me,
should I cry or not? would you be still expecting my tears?
when should i stop keeping count of what i owe to you?)
what new thing will i learn to run away from?

i hear such words from my mouth a bit too frequently, for it to be just a mood.
sometimes it all adds up.
that all i can do is think of myself
and end up doing a bad job at it
just so that someone else wants to do it better than me
it so looks like love. but it makes sense that it isn’t.

“Another Round of Wrong Guesses” – Nayana Nair

.

In that room
seated along with my anxious heart,
my crumbling forevers, and my noisy pen,
was you.
You are now more colorful than ever-
more real, more present.
You are more you that before,
more of a person that I ever could be.
I envied you and loved you for that- that I remember.

I realize there other things that I don’t remember well,
as you put on the record
of “50 greatest pointless questions of all time”,
as you sharpen the edges of your weak hollow anger,
as you ask me to play a harmless game,
another try at the precious once-in-a-lifetime love,
another guess, another stab, another cut,
another laughter echoing and tearing
everything that almost made me human,
another try, another guess, another endearing laugh
at the sight of my tears.

I had decided that won’t flinch, that I won’t cry.
I looked at the paper again
that said that I am not actually hurt,
that everything I suffer from is a making of my mind,
that I am just too scared,
too lonely to think straight ever again.
I looked at it wanting to believe it
but also knowing I won’t allow this paper to fix this for me.

For even to this image- this violent beautiful ghost of you,
even to this- I felt I owed something.
I still waited for you to give up.
It still mattered to me – this confirmation-
that what I loved
also loved me back in some twisted way.
So I nodded yes to another rounds of wrong guess,
to this game I won’t ever win.

“Unconsumed” – Nayana Nair

I hear sweet laughter
from far away (from the floor above).
Leftover light from that bright world falls on me.
But it is not mine.
and it seems I am not allowed
to love anything that is not mine.

It seems no one can be mine
until I constantly try to please them,
chain them to me, make them dependent on me,
do their chores, worship them,
read their minds and say only what they want to hear,
be only what they want me to be.
Is this how I make this person mine?
or should I wait for someone else
to put me on a pedestal for once?

I don’t think that would be love though.
But what do I know?
I have tried doing things right every time
and look where it has got me-
passed out on floor,
yearning and envying another’s happiness.

“All the talk about survival” – Nayana Nair

I walking around this planet
talking about survival
as if I actually lived to survive.
I didn’t.
There are many who do
but they are not the ones who are filling the world
with papers filled reeking of envy and tears.
The ones who are really desperate,
who really fear extinction-
disappear as they fear
without leaving a trace of the hurt
that had so engulfed them.

~

I think I have it better.
I know I have it easy.
My pain though has become my life long mission
it only drinks me up sip by sip,
never finishing me in one gulp
but to leave me alive and thriving in the illusion
that the only one suffering in the world is me.
If it does nothing else
at least it feeds my ego
to think of myself as some lost cause
and I think if it was not for this belief
in my great suffering,
I might have seen my life for what it has always been.
Realizing the reality of my life would have been greater tragedy for sure
and maybe that’s why I held on so tightly
to the illusion that I was already in one.

“Collecting Myself” – Nayana Nair

These four walls that cuts us off from the world
puts me again in that same position that I dread.
My weakness that I once thought I had cast away
is holding onto my fingers again.
If only the world had not abandoned me here with you.
I could have found some comfort in its words-
“you are worth better” or “you are happier alone“,
then I could avoid this hurt that has already risen in me.

~

As usual you look out of the window.
You have always been good at ignoring my presence and my feelings.
I have always envied you for being like this,
for being able to stand your ground, being sure of hatred
and not looking back at what didn’t work out.
But not me.
I believe too much in second chances-
the second chances that I never got.
I am again that person
who is thinking up of words to say
to make you stay,
trying to find a promise that I have not uttered yet
that will make you realize that I cannot be replaced in your heart.

~

But there are days that you have let me down
and days where I have not been enough for you-
the memory of which all my tears have not been able to wash away.
So I collect my belongings and myself
to get out of this painful isolation with you,
this fruitless attempt of our hopeful friends
who wish to see us happy and together again.
I no longer believe love
to be an effort of one person
to latch onto the other who wants to leave
who always has a better plan
and a better person in mind to move toward.
I no longer have the heart to love you anymore.

“Scroll” – Nayana Nair

I scrolled through
and then scrolled back again.
I did this too many times
comparing each picture with another.
I knew I would not remember even one of them
and probably edit out
all uncomfortable and evident pain
but carry only the image I could see in all.
That all who were struck by lightning
carried that lightning on their skin
but the skin remembers only the darkness of that hour.
Sometimes it felt I am looking at an unlucky individual
picked out by nature to brand the helplessness of our species.
Sometimes I was in awe of the life that refused to leave the heart
even when it stopped,
even when the brightest death called for it.
But I knew that it was one beauty I do not envy
and I don’t want to be in their shoes.
I probably wanted to remember proofs
of when human and nature were
at their weakest and their worst
and how magnificent the scars of it are
to the eyes of a person like me
who was not there to suffer.

“Hiding” – Nayana Nair

The noise of the crumpled tissues walked upon
fills me up again.
Without the colors of reasons or pain
that once made it unbearable,
I envy that me who could be so passionately
sad for the someone else
or even for myself.
Now the the rivers of concern run beneath the surface of my heart
almost lost, in hiding.
(Or am I the one in hiding.)

And now I can finally be almost happy in life.

“Divide in Two” – Nayana Nair

This day of unimportant advancement
will probably be the one that we will first forget.
Our hearts will pretend to be sad
to have forgotten all such beautiful harmless days.
We move into the next coming second,
dividing ourself in two.
The one left in past
always has the best,
always suffered the worst,
always surrounded by enviable beauty,
always the hero, the victim, the matyr.
While we go on forward selfishly
only taking what we really are.
Selfishly leaving the parts of us
that can be made glorious
only because if they are left behind.

“Close these windows” – Nayana Nair

I continue to live in the light of my own making
knowing it is the only light I’ll ever find.
For a moment I wonder, how I look to you.
Loosing my sorrow.
Loosing my frown.
Loosing my mind.
One by one
I close these windows
through which your eyes prod me,
to see what’s left behind.
This growing envy, this show for sympathy
these broken words with drops of blood
is all that you would find.