“Always, Only” – Nayana Nair

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.

“Your Skin, My Words” – Nayana Nair

I took my rusted pen, my useless words
and tried to write something beautiful for you.
Words filled with my love,
words that tasted
like all your favorite forgotten dreams.
But I found myself tracing
the only words on your skin.
I ended up rewriting your sorrow.
I ended becoming the face of your fears.

“Gray Crowd” – Nayana Nair

There is only this life,
that is made by imitation of stories.
Stories that told me
how to feel
and what to say,
told me to cry and ruin myself
if you turn away,
told me to leave my everything for your sake,
never told me how tedious all this could become
and how much frustrating it would be
to have a love that doesn’t give me back
all that I was guaranteed to get.
What to do if I am no gentle virtuous princess
or even a woman of strong heart and character
but a person not even worth a mention, let alone a heart.
What to do when I am indistinguishable from the gray crowd,
when I am not so special and not so deserving of all that I want.
What to do when my clocks have stopped in that one moment
that I let myself down
and every kind lover is separated from me
by this distance in time.

“Looks Better on You” – Nayana Nair

You have left your reflection in my mirrors
and now I have no choice but to dispose them.
I do not want to see you
tainted by anything that is mine.

…

You may not know this
(and may you never know)
but I love you
because you are nothing like me,
I love you
because you cannot understand me.
You remind of what I could be
if life gave me better circumstances
or if I knew how to choose better.

…

On you this shine of happiness,
that life stole from me,
on you
they look better.
If that is how the world works,
if happiness is a fixed constant
I’ll gladly let you have my share.

…

Though you are always holding my world together,
I do not mind everything falling apart
if in all the breaking
you are the only one kept intact.

“For Now” – Nayana Nair

There is no “my type of person”,
“my one and only friend”, or “my only hope”.
There is too much of you
that is not for me,
that I won’t take
even if you gave it away for free.
Because for every word of yours
that I find beautiful,
there are thousand other words
that I have not heard yet
that would hurt my ears,
hurt my notion of what you are
if I knew the complete truth.

-x-

That’s why I hate complete truth.
I detest it, in fact.
I do not want any part of it.
The lies – they hurt ultimately, I know.
But till that suffering arrives
at least there is a brief moment where
we are no longer preoccupied
with this hopeless business of finding a place to belong.
Sometimes a brief moment is all we need
to make sense of this life.

-x-

This life where
there is no complete understanding,
there is no complete love,
only this nameless feeling
that this is all we have got
and nothing will get much better.
That it will be easier,
maybe painful down the road,
but surely easier for now
to find our happiness
in everything that we don’t want.
To pretend that we are not lost
and pretend the best we can.

“Effortless” – Nayana Nair

On the other side of this puddle,
where my feet is caught,
is the ocean of joy
in which I wandered
only to be caught in the hook of the sadness
that slips into my wound so effortlessly
that the pain felt like love,
because it felt like the only thing that I could call as mine.

“Sparkler’s Trail” – Nayana Nair

The duration of time we speak of as days
is just our stories breaking and bleeding
from moment to another.
The fragments of our memories
are just bookmarks to pages
with words that has been long erased.
And all that we are left with
are threads of time suspended in our eyes,
that really isn’t here
and yet it is the only thing we have
and the only thing we want.

“Return” – Nayana Nair

The cry that was stuck in my throat
turned out to be my name ,
that I had forgotten long ago.
Probably when there were too many of me
for me to hold,
to make space for the all other names
that I must never forget.
How often have I let go of my own hand
to hold the hand of others?
How often the part of me that threw away
never wanted to return to me?
How often I have been left empty handed
and alone at the end?
Yet I go down this same road
only for your sake.

“I remember you waiting” – Nayana Nair

The momentary happiness
of the warm embraces.
These gifts of few seconds
have become our only curse.
For this life never lives upto
the beauty of those seconds.
And now we can only live on
in form of secrets in our books.
These seconds, these pages are where
our story stopped.
I remember you
sitting under trees
waiting for the your tears to melt,
for your vision was frozen in a past.
For you knew too late.
You found who were yours
only when looking back.

“Held Down” – Nayana Nair

Though I want to write of you
I find myself incapable of that.
Cause I have not yet learned the words
for the kind of person you are.
And all I have written about you,
the only thing that
can live in those lines,
is my heart that doesn’t yet know
how to love you.
The ‘you’ who cannot be held down
by any love.