and hope shall play on the beaches that you drew. it will run along the cold melting lands, holding your hands, smiling with lips that curve like mine, that opens like yours. a song shall arrive in the air a laughter, a tear will arrive in our hearts again to knock, again to let in life. we will look at our skin that breaks in the same design and we will rejoice. we smile about something that was once insufferable. we will hold each other laughing about how nothing can make us let go, nothing can make us give up on this.
After all this, all this that I am supposed to lose again, again with a smile I don’t mean. I am confused what it means to let go. I am confused why only I am not able to do it? Why letting go comes so easy to everyone I love? Why do only I look selfish if i don’t?
You told me of love and what it does to your heart and how your heart wants to see me and love me alone. But it is too hard. A harder task than you imagined it to be.
You loved me for my silence, for my grace of letting you go, and for the tears in my eyes always, only for you.
You stand outside my heart, filling my insides with your shadows, with your hopes. Becoming my only light. Asking me to step out of myself, asking me if I am up for another search of your heart- that you have left behind in someone else’s heart tonight.
You kiss my hand and tell me you like this better- me being your hope, your home rather than being your wretched love- the love that that leads you to your worst face.
I close my eyes and again I try to forget what I wanted you to be, what I hoped you would be for me. I try to forget the wretched love you have become.
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.
strangely even there, even on the canvas of my imagination where I get to act the god, even in that world where you are nothing but my creation, even there I can’t imagine a happier end for us.
-o-
because i can edit our photos on the cities we never got to visit and i can write you some words, give you some hints on how to make me want you want you back. but even when your puppet hugs mine back i know it’s only me, my hands, my heart, my body, my hopes hanging onto something that would never be you.
-o-
“so let it go“, i tell myself. “let’s stop calling every ache by the name of love. let’s put our ego to rest.“
Do not scribble thoughtlessly your name on these walls. Don’t make yourself at home if you don’t plan to stay. I am not someone who has learnt to let go of anything I value. I am not someone who will close my heart only because it hurts. I wear my insanity in glittering colors and that is how I will be even after I die.
–
So before you take my hand and tell me the words you have told to a thousand girls before, know that though I am not crazy enough to ruin your life if you leave, but I am crazy enough to ruin mine and my misery and my pain will make your heart bleed. (I turn out to be pretty lovable even when I don’t look like it.)
–
There is a reason I don’t speak much. There is a reason I keep my distance- it is to save this world from few more sad poems. I travel from exhilaration to distress, to new deaths in matter of minutes, don’t take my hand if you can’t tag along.
I look at you and I see myself.
I see my weakness, that is you.
I see my failure, that is you.
But if I put it like this
it may seem that you are
just another darkness in my life,
but you are not.
There is a reason that even when my mouth recites
sad stories and bitter words about you
my eyes, my heart only looks for you.
There is a kindness in you
a love in you, for me,
that surfaces, even when you try to hide it.
In your imperfections I see the imperfections of my own love, how I cannot love all of you even when I want to. I wish sometimes I was not this person that I am. Sometimes I wish you were a little less lovely, a little less lovable. Maybe then it would have been easier, been okay, to walk over this love that I cannot let go of now.
Will this river
that runs between us
loose its taste of mistrust,
if I take up your blood
and let go of mine?
I wish I could do that.
But a part of my mind,
that is yet to be corrupted by love,
rationalises and prefers
my loveless and homeless state
than to entrust my dreams to you.
It tells me
that if I can easily give them away
trade myself for a hope with an expiration date,
that if I don’t care
you won’t too.
Can we become better that what we are?
We dream of better future.
But we become worse, become bitter
every time our life runs into our worst dreams.
We hope to forget, we hope to let go.
But become restless, become hollow
looking at the parts we are missing
the parts we took from each other
that we have fed to our ego.
Can we become better that what we are?
You sit beside my favorite book,
after you hand me a cup of tea.
Though I want to know what you’ve been up to,
we just look out
as we have done numerous times,
when we had too much to say
but didn’t want to.
Knowing that silence of this room
we will make us forget all of it,
one by one.
The struggle you had to had to face
on your way here,
with streets flooded with monsoon rains;
the fact that when the doorbell rang
I was just about to immerse myself
in sleep that had evaded me for so long;
how I sat up and wondered
would it be you
and dismissed it as another dream
that would not hurt
until I go back to reality;
how you almost wanted to run back
the moment you pressed the bell;
how you looked around my room
and felt pity and relief
at same time,
for seeing that I have not changed.
I would have made you a cup of tea
if not for my fever
and I knew you’d make me one
for you are here to say the goodbye
that you couldn’t say all the other days
just like this.
You’d ask me if I have someone
to look after me.
And I’d ask you to stay
till the rain stops,
till the water flooding the streets recede,
till we can let go,
either of each other
or our pride.
it rains in my heart 