“Often I am ashamed to cite the reasons for my hurt.” – Nayana Nair

.

I cried only because
I knew I can be easily loved
if I gave what was asked of me.
And everything asked of me was simple.
I was, after all, made to love like this,
made of love like this.
It was an easy game, that I was designed to win.
And yet tears didn’t cease to dance on my lashes.
All the easy reasonable ways of living with others
were a wound to my ideals.
I couldn’t get over the dealings and the transactions,
the sick rotten give and take.
I couldn’t get over the conditions,
the changing shallow terms of affection.
But in all my loathing
even as I held back things that hungry eyes sought from me,
I couldn’t stop my own hunger from showing.
I also tugged shamelessly at the sleeves of another’s heart
asking for something simple,
a minor sacrifice, a cheap gesture of love,
only to forget it all in the next attack of doubt,
the next demand for more.
I waited for someone’s endless sea of virtues
to change my shabby heart that refused to believe.
My heart meanwhile
counted for, waited desperately,
even prayed
for all the seas to dry up
rather than giving up
the ideals it didn’t even deserve to hold.
This is how I stand guard to the happiness that
I won’t let anyone, not even myself have.

“how it pained to part. how beautiful it is to meet.” – Nayana Nair

.

the eyes made of glass stare at us
with its kind open clutches held out.
the eyes made of forgetfulness
and remembrance in equal measure –
they are beautiful.
they sing of the most beautiful fear,
the most hurting hope.
and we sing back.
me and my brothers –
we sing like we have never known death
as we hand over our hidden skin folded in half.

folded in half, we sleep in its arm
and we invent love, invent warmth,
invent meaning.
we hear it breathing.
we hear our lung collapse.
we have brought something to life again.
this machine of fear and ends –
it breathes, it tears up and cries.
i feel an ocean flowing into my eyes.
the suffocation ends.
and just like that there is
nothing of us left with us.

somewhere we will open our eyes
and stare at lips that sing of giving,
we will feel our hollow insides echo
with the memory of our own lightest steps
we will look
at the saddest sweetest children of this world
and we’ll know ourselves through it again.
we will know of the ocean in us
when it leaves our eyes.
and just like that we will be all that
we couldn’t bear to live as.