“I can bear truth only when it is a figment of my imagination” – Nayana Nair

.

Had I climbed up that mountain
I would have probably seen farther than anyone else.
There would have been roads
that clearly go somewhere.
There would have been an eroding edge
to this globe of loud wrecking dreams.
There would have been a faint hint
of a beautiful eye crying behind a rising cloud.
I would have looked down and searched
and in not finding myself
I would have been happy for a while.
But in a moment that is spelled
with the same frustrated relief
as finding my glasses at the most obvious place,
a peace in me would also have come to an end.
There is the roof where I wrote my life in chalk,
relying on the rain which never came.
There would be a shadow of trees, a group of animals
who refuse to call themselves by a collective noun
and they would have looked happier (probably).
There would have been a monument of marble,
the last pride and plague of ego,
taken down by the masses who moved like landslides.
I would have definitely looked for you.
After all it is what I have done most of my life.
And I would have seen you building yourself again
with your broken tools and shining blueprints.
I won’t know if you were sad or happy
and you won’t know that it mattered to me.
It would have been such a perfect distance to look at you.
A perfect distance to exist with relation to world.
But I won’t climb up there.
Just as I know so much of all that I have never seen,
I also know there is not a particle of me
that has a taste for truth.

“love me all your life” – Nayana Nair

.

as his goodbye, he said to me,

“i don’t want to be yours.
but never stop being mine.
never forget me.
you promised to love me all your life.

be my happiness.
let your tears,
let my shadow reign over your heart.
be my happiness.
never chase away the rain that i am leaving in you
never look for another heart.

be my value, be my worth,
be my pride.
you don’t have to be my love
to have a place in my life.
you can be nothing to me
and still be my treasure at the same time.

i don’t want to be yours
but it would heal my wounds, my ego
to know you will be broken without me
your brokenness will make me more complete
than your love could.”

“Earphones” – Nayana Nair

.

I cannot paint

your silhouette moving through the rain toward me-
all the blue that lingered in the light rain, on my skin, in the wait for you.

The color that fills my mind when I recall
how your cold hands met mine, my frozen shivering love hungry hands,
and nothing was cold anymore,
nothing was insufferable,
as long as you and me stayed like this,
accepting the ache that comes with staying.

The song, the familiar and strange tune, that became beautiful
by the time it played for 35th time, by the time our cola lost its fizz,
by the time the untouched food looked comforting,
by the time I found that knowing you and your everything
was as painful and liberating as putting myself into words.

The tension
of the stretched earphones between our head and our aching necks,
a moment of sadness, of a great love, of a great end
played itself before us again and we promised ourselves- we won’t ever be there.
And yet as you mocked the world for its weakness
I cried for the same weakness you and me hid in ourselves.

The cold wind that went through me, as you walked past me,
my pride- ground and powdered, spilling out of me,
blinding and confusing people around me,
making me look desperate, pitiful, and empty
as I chased you through streets where we were never supposed to be.

I cannot draw them, so I write.
I write
how we stood together
in every room,
on every patch of earth
for the longest time
and saw within our reach
something that was beautiful and fragile
and no one’s to keep
as long as we saw each other only,
as long as we could smile at what we saw.

I remember you as you stayed still,
breathing carefully
as we let fate make something out of us.
I remember your eyes
asking me with a smile to confirm the reality of what we had,
of what we are.

I wonder how you remember me now.
Now that we are living our lives trying only to prove
that we have lost nothing of ourselves in losing each other.

“5 mins away” – Nayana Nair

As she places her coffee cup on the table,
her eyes sting and ribs hurt
to see the beautiful vase of her life
dearly holding onto the oldest withered flowers of her life.
Flowers were not meant to do this,
she knew.
She also knew
she need not be like this,
things need not be this way.
The market is just 5 minutes away.
When she has enough money to buy new gardens
why lament on handful of roses,
why think about people she can now never love.
But the decision to forget or remember
was never in her hands.
And now she cannot step out and face the world –
the same world who witnessed her pride and confidence
in another human whose faults she refused to see till the end,
the one she called her love.
She felt she owed answers to every one-
for loving the wrong one,
for loving the wrong way,
for seeking a new love,
for saying yes to someone better than her,
for her dissatisfaction
that eats through every heart she tries to love.
She didn’t want to go out and apologize
for wanting.

“notes to myself/words i never follow” – Nayana Nair

travel light
and don’t get your heart broken
no matter what you are promised in return.

don’t try to make another’s skin yours.
the cold won’t kill you, but the search of warmth will.

you may cry, cry, and cry.
you may think you will cry for an eternity.
but sleep will still find your exhausted eyes
and you will learn to dream somehow.
but do not have the same dream again.

do not seek forgiveness
for what you have done to yourself.
seek a doctor, seek a friend,
seek a way to live,
seek a way to see yourself as victim also
even if it crushes your pride.

bury your heart
only in your own chest.

“What do you know?” – Nayana Nair

why is it so
that i can only choose love if i let myself look weak.
it should have been easy to look weak and crumbling,
when that is what i feel all the time.
but it isn’t easy.
maybe because the weakness of my heart has never made me look incompetent,
it just made me look cold and aloof.
being good for nothing is more tragic than being broken or being hated.

how hard i have tried all my life to be good at something.
so that i am not useless, so that people don’t leave me behind on purpose,
so that i can at least look like someone capable and not be embarrassed of myself.

after all the years of running around
and making myself believe
that soon, soon i will become someone i can be proud of;
instead of finding myself, i find you.
i find the in myself the want
to let go of this control, that hurts my hands,
but letting go hurts my pride.

somehow i can’t stop blaming you for asking me to live as me,
for asking me to stop hurting myself.
what do you know about the life i have lived?
what do you know about the things i have sacrificed for living like this?
how can you ask me to break what i have built for years?

i cry, i push you away, i cling to the what i am supposed to be,
asking you why you can’t just be what i supposed you would be.
again i am asked to choose between me and this world.
again i know i will choose myself.
(by choosing to please the world rather than choosing myself?)
but you have some nerve to declare that i won’t.
i hate you for your stupid confidence
and your disregard for all that i will lose.

“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.

“What I Remember (10)” – Nayana Nair

I want to write about the boring,
about all that is insignificant,
about the trust that lasts,
about the promises that are kept,
about the things we don’t have to beg from god.

I belive there must be some things in life that goes as we wanted to,
that didn’t take our effort, our prayers to go right,
that fell into place so naturally
that we didn’t even notice the ease they gave us.
The boring that is neglected, that is mocked
must be a dream for a person I don’t know of.
The days of charity and donation,
the realization of the lack that we don’t experience
hits us only briefly,
gives us only short lived sadness or gratitude
and a bit of pride (that has a little longer life)
in ourselves for venturing out of our boredom
to witness the lacking of others,
to distribute a bit of what we have in abundance.

But I am not that changed,
I am not that affected.
Tomorrow when I wake up
I will forget
about the stomachs that are never filled,
about the dry glass and throats,
about the darkness that night brings,
about little curious eyes that will never see a book.
Tomorrow, again I will shamelessly
write about my need for love and acceptance.

But that is how I am
and with time I have learned
not to feel guilty for being like this,
for that is the kind of human I was made to be.
I will only be bothered
by the small bruise on my face,
the small cuts on my hand,
even if I know the existence of greater pain,
for that knowledge is not an anesthetic .
I am a petty creature like that
and I can only really feel my own loss.

“Love?” – Nayana Nair

I wanted too little
and yet you who speaks of all the riches of this world
you could not give me the little that I wanted.
Not because you can’t
but because you would rather not.

…

I am poisonous.
I am the worst,
the one people should avoid.
All my sorrows are my punishment for not being what you wanted.
All my weakness is something to be ridiculed.
I should be okay
or even rejoice when you question my mental stability
everyday as a joke.

This is what your love has taught me.

…

Can it still be called love?
Am I still obliged to love you back in a kinder way,
when all you have done is to take pride
that you loved someone twisted as me
as if you have made the biggest sacrifice of your life.

“Saviour” – Nayana Nair

This sad heart of yours,
this heart that I love the most,
I wondered once
why it couldn’t rise above what it is suffering from
even when you have me.
Why as I sit with you talking about myself
you smile as if trying to contain the tears
that you won’t be able to explain.

x

I have always felt that even though
we were meant to go through everything together
it was just me
looking at you
fighting someone who I couldn’t even see.

x

Every drop of love that I bring to you
end up being just another drop of expectation
that helps you drown that much faster.

x

And when I am done being disappointed with myself
for being insufficient,
for not being able to make a difference in your life,
I end up thinking that maybe
sometimes love cannot exorcise
the feelings that we have for ourselves
and maybe I just need to learn to see the you
who is able to smile instead of all that you suffer from
with pride
instead of taking pity on you
and trying to replace you as your saviour
when you are doing a fine job being one yourself.