“the constant part of love” – Nayana Nair

i remember your hands and their warmth
like i remember
the versions of me
that were easier to live with (or so i think).
the colors, their unnatural brightness,
the scent of acetone always lingering
on the tips of your fingertips,
always hiding a sad rainbow (just my type).
always a star that you forgot to rub and break,
shined on your skin.
under my lips, they shined brighter than my world.
i swam to them as they stood in a world of darkness
in the shapes of you and me.
it is so odd
that in my constantly breaking and building and growing
brain and its images and meaning-
everything about you meant love.
i loved your flower hairpins and fake bullets
and the magazines of the the people you would rather be
and the window you glanced out of when didn’t want to look at me
and your back against mine.
it is odd
that i could love you so
even when i didn’t know why?

“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.

“The wind is picking up” – Nayana Nair

The wind is picking up.
The white sand unlike water
sinks everything too slowly.
And so the shade less trees of eucalyptus
become shadows that I learn to love.
They become compass that knows no direction,
but just piece this world to hold,
the silent assurance
that I am not yet lost, though my eyes can’t tell.

***

The wind is picking up.
In the middle of this small storm,
my careful hands writing the date on black board
suddenly realize the need to be held.
And so I fold and create a crease
on another part of my face-
the part that shows my heart too easily.
Someone yells out my name
and unknowingly they moor me to another violence,
another need that I don’t want to carry in me.

“easy way” – Nayana Nair

the easiest way to live,
the one that hurt the least
was to believe
that something is wrong
with me.

“All the crowded corners of me” – Nayana Nair

I learned another new word today.
It describes nothing in my life
but still I keep it under my tongue.
I stuff into corners of my lungs
that have never known what air is.

‘cerulean‘
I find this word tangled in my ribs,
crying over my skin,
trying to escape me,
to find a better place,
a better someone to describe.

My heart again becomes a shackle
for everything
that is beautiful.

“Hello?” – Nayana Nair

hello?
can you help me?
can you tell me which way to go,
which part of me to burn
to reach the dumping ground
where lay all the skins
that humans have ever shed?

i have been living in my dreams
for quite some time,
where i am the old-me
surrounded by my old-family,
old-friends, old-strangers.

dreams that i can no longer have,
now that i have been led back to reality,
now that i am almost sane.
i realize i am missing the life that never was.
medicated consciousness is not enough
to make me forget
all that i should not remember.

i have heard that here i would find
the lifeless skin of mine-
the ‘me’ who never knew what lacking is.
want to join me?
never mind.
i was not looking for company anyway.
thank you for not helping,
for telling me to grow up.
thank you for making reality
more disturbing than it already is for me.

“Worse than Imperfect” – Nayana Nair

You were the most imperfect person I ever met
and have made me believe that I am worse.

Or maybe I saw too much of you.
so much
that you made me feel sick of you,
sick of myself,
and sick of whatever they call love.

You stumbled around
walking over my feelings,
drunk on your pride
and your sense of entitlement,
threw away what I treasured
because obviously you knew better,
called me insane
called me names
when I called you out on your hypocrisy.

Waking up next morning
expecting understanding,
expecting obedience,
expecting another day of a convenient love
with this inconvenient woman.
One day, that day won’t come.

“Better Ways” – Nayana Nair

So much of
what I have and what I like
becomes
a statement of who I am,
that now before liking anything new
I am looking only at my own collage
and where it fit in there.
There is too little space
and too many eyes.
I am too small to take in all this
and give home to all that I love.
There are better ways to exist
and better ways to love.
But not many ways to embrace life
while keeping myself and my image intact.

“Indifferent Green” – Nayana Nair

The indifferent green around me
soothes my heart.
It has nothing against me
and I do not have to be wary
of all that it can do,
and all that it can say
to shift the levels
of what is tolerable and
what I should put up with.
I can already hear them saying
that I am hiding.
I can hear them saying worse things.
Do you know what I find scary
that even in hiding, I know what they will say
and I care for what they will think,
even if I don’t care about them,
even if they don’t care about me.

“Absolutes” – Nayana Nair

From my grip I lose
yet another word-
now alien to my lips and life.
From the corner of my eyes,
I watch it die the same death as me.
Now the stories I told myself have become
a little more unreasonable,
when the words and ideas that
I took as absolute
turned out to be just shape-shifting feelings,
the echoes of my lives I could have had.
Is it possible for a voice to be a mirage?
Can it sound more real
than the world trying to get rid of it
Could it be that my hands,
my eyes were always empty?
Or were they just filled with wanting,
a wanting only for things that cannot be obtained,
that cannot be denied,
for they do not exist?