“They go through my closet trying to find me and maybe themselves” – Nayana Nair

.

He stepped down from his ‘cloud nine of the day’
as I stepped out from my house made of last drops of rain
and at the intersection of fleeting memories
we fell in love.
That is what I tell my friends
when they ask me about the moment
I was tempted to end the sadness of my life.

I tell them about the words I borrowed from his lips,
his borrowed tongue that helped me eat a bit more.
How I taped his adjectives on my mirror
so that I wouldn’t have to look at myself.

They sit with me on the table
I can’t bear to share with my love.
They stare at me, as I ask them what to wear,
how to hide my poison, how to hide the crack at the elbow,
the bruised collarbone, the split lip,
the ache in my heels, my frayed wings,
my broken voice
and all other reminders of what love has done to me,
and what more love can do, if i just let it in again.

They tell me it is all healed.
They tell me it is all past.
They hold their skin against mine to make me see
that the cracks are all in my mind,
how everyone looks just like me,
how everything wrong with me is now the norm.
And they laughed
when I looked at them with concern.

They dropped me at the restaurant
and vanished at the farthest bend of the road.
As I dragged my feet towards another story
that I will never get to complete,
another tragedy that suited only me,
I looked back and tried to think of all the things
that these kind friends of mine suffered
as they hoped and wished and lied to themselves.
The exceptions they now considered normal,
the wounds they cannot even see,
the pain they cannot call pain,
the love they cannot bear to leave-
I tasted these facts
in every spoon of artificial sweetness
I fed to my mouth that evening.

“All the Ends that pass me by” – Nayana Nair

The shoes I am wearing
are wearing thin.
I feel my clothes trying,
trying hard to slip out of me
and I don’t try to hold onto them.
That is how I have always been.

I see an appproaching death,
the sihouette of another ending
that I won’t be able to take
and I order another drink,
I put down the book
that was getting a bit more real
that I expected it to be,
and I wait with open eyes
to witness the truth of every undoing
that is in my fate.

This is me-
the one who cries absurdly
at a broken sole, at my frayed edges,
at a day-long, a month-long, an year-short love,
the one who tries to mean “till the end”.

The one who can only smile
when called cruel and cold-
that is also me.

“Dull Decorations” – Nayana Nair

Today
as I ate,
as I looked around
at the woodwork,
at the dull decorations on the wall,
at the TV show without sound,
as I made way from lifting spoon again and again
swallowing my way through the alieniating conversation,
through the one chunk of time filled with boredom
to the next changing into sadness.
I felt I missed you both.
I am not certain if that’s what it was,
but I recall all the thoughts in my mind,
all their frayed edges,
ending with conclusion
that, “Food tastes better with them.”