“What I Remember (19)” – Nayana Nair

there are mornings
when i have forgotten how to forget.
i open my eyes
only believing the dream just broken.
there are mornings
when i hate myself for waking up
and my body for needing reality so much.

“i cannot give my heart to you”,
i remind myself to say this
as i gulp down a glass of chocolate milk,
in case someone decides to fall in love with me today.
it is unfortunate
that i have to force myself to say these words,
when it is so much easier to utter “yes”,
especially when i have hunger only for love.

as i untangle my earphones
i almost step into another puddle of my previous life.
there is something odd about finding my tears again.
i stand there, wanting to be of comfort to myself
but the one who is still drowning, drowning for years
i do not want her,
i do not want to catch her disease of hope.

there are days like these,
when taking a step forward is the most cruel thing to do.
when being human is risky, is the first step towards defeat.
when healing comes with a downtime, time that I must answer for.

on days like these
i find myself losing my sight,
and it is in that darkness that I find you.
how lucky you are that you will stay like this
stay beautiful, stay mine
only here,
only in my moments of madness and helplessness.

P.S. i am always amazed
at how easy it is to give up on myself
that to give up on you. even when you were the worst of us.

“Ready to Break” – Nayana Nair

We are the mediocre television soap
that no one wants to see.
We have learned to gulp down bland food, bland life.
The books that get us jobs, get us friends, gets us love,
we have learned to pay for it without bitterness.

We adore the mania, the depression,
the moments when we don’t want to think clear-
that makes us feel alive,
anything like that,
we are ready to call it love.

In our small hands we carry
whatever meaning we have left in us-
the offering that no gods want.
We are ready to break for anyone
who is ready to break for us.

“Soft Soil” – Nayana Nair

you are now
just a butterfly
in the unruly garden of my life.

you were once the laughter in our home.
your hands were once as warm as mine.
you were so many things,
the one who knew how to make everyone smile,
the one who could soothe my heart
with a kind understanding glance,
the one who never cried
(now I guess you must have cried,
knowing how you left us here like this).

they told me
you were too weak to live.
i gulped down their answer
even when i knew they were lying.
i was afraid of knowing the real reasons,
i was afraid of knowing what I had overlooked.

the soil was so soft in my hand,
the day they buried you.
i cried through my meals for days.
no one consoled me.
no one told me things will get better.
no one told me to grow up.
and something told me
i would never grow up.

“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.

“New Organ” – Nayana Nair

All the words that I have gulped down
are still inside me,
never digested.
They have found a space for themselves-
A new throbbing organ that I cannot name,
since I have never named my organs,
someone else always does it for me
(does it for all of us)
and tells me through fading words
of second-hand textbooks
how is it supposed to feel to be a human,
how I am just a complicated machinery
and why my heart can’t possible think or want.