“The places where I am not” – Nayana Nair

.

Across this glass,
across the tired melting clouds of mist,
on the other side
there are trees and homes and forests
that are just like places on this side that I rest.

The places where I am not
look as sad as all the places I have been.
Everywhere, on every road there is always a person
who knows a way to break my heart,
and I always end up thanking them for it.

There are rooms where I put up
lights and posters and curtains
and lovers and music,
those are the rooms I want to die in-
with some beauty, with some consolation of meaning .

But always I find the reason for my end outside these walls.
Those reasons live under the brightest light on the darkest road.
And because I was told that the light that I don’t know of
is the one that saves all, even the hopeless ones like me.
So my legs forget how to stop,
my hands forget how to let go,
and my blood glitters for a moment under the light of lost hopes
before it turns black, before it invites in the cold
that I always thought belonged to the inanimate world.

I think of the room I won’t reach,
and the songs and the faces and this world
that I will not be given a piece of, to keep.

As the sky fills me up, pats me down,
and tucks me in the snow
across the white,
I feel someone stir from sleep.
The wail that my throat cannot make,
finds a home in that other world, in the other me
that unlike me
knows how to cry and how to be loved for it.

“Portals” – Nayana Nair

the wafer breaks and crumbles
my teeth find a red muscle to kill
again my mouth bleeds
but no iron strikes my taste
so i wait for it
i wait for my imagined pain
to become real

i look at my hands
my unsightly weak hands
they are portals to my past self
how they weighed its emptiness even when they held you
how i knew that you won’t last, we won’t last
and i hated myself for knowing it

i wonder if my skin, my lips
gave you a premonition similar to that
did you know that we would end up sharing every hurt
and that it would never stop
that the we would continue to run even when the dream
ends
every cut mine, every drop of red yours
everything painful – only ours

“this how i want to be frozen in you” – Nayana Nair

wave after wave of cold air,
of sad premonitions
reached us, tried to convince us
that this was a really bad idea.
that on a cold day like this
there were easier ways to find warmth,
ways that would take away no part of us.

and frankly i was afraid.
i stopped maybe a million times on my tracks.
i waited for someone to call me
to remind me of something really urgent
that needed my attention.
i almost prayed for you to give up.

but you kept walking.
you kept repeating that this would be fun.
so even when your hands were shaking
and even when your eyes were red,
i chose not to notice it.
i chose to believe that your heart is stronger,
that you would get us there.

you were always better at pretending for my sake.
you pretended to know all the answers
while i shamelessly hid behind you
when doubts barked at me on streets.
so when we walk on the river that could melt any day, any moment
i wanted you to lean on my heart for once.

my fearful weak heart was the only thing i could give.
i knew my love would last only moments and yours would last an eternity.
but selfishly i held onto you.
so when i kissed you and you smiled,
i want to say i felt sad and guilty,
but i did not.
i was just happy, probably the happiest on this planet
to have touched this sun, this spring, this filler of all voids,
to have become the reason you will break.
i really am the worst.