“Something Simple” – Nayana Nair

.

The evening melts into my drink.
“I must burn something of myself here.
I must burn to remember this, to remember her.”,
I keep repeating this to myself as I stand beside the dying fire.
Suddenly my teeth ache for something cold to sink into.
I remember the orange color that used to spread on my tongue
as I drowned myself in the glass bottles of artificial citrus,
running away from the summer that I had waited for.

I walk away from the fireplace,
putting a bit more distance
from the monster that ruled the mantle,
relived to have found something simple to talk about.
I sit beside her and speak in my human voice.
I tell her of this small thought,
this small honest flaw of mine she can play with.

She asks “was that how your childhood was like?”
I could have answered “that’s how my life is and will be”,
but it was more easy to ask “what color was your tongue then?”
She recites from memory a poem.
A poem on the beauty of transparent things,
on the cruelty of everything
that own you without leaving stains,
without giving you a chance to scrub them out of your soul.
She smiled and thus handed me something
that I can consider hers for a while.

“What do you see?” – Nayana Nair

i sat on the cold melting ground,
my hand filled with what would soon be me.
“there is nothing to scavenge here,
there is no hope in such death”,
you said as you placed my hand
on this face that you no longer called yours.
“what do you see?“
(you asked this so often)
“what would you like me to say?“,
were the only words i could say back.
“disappointing isn’t it? we come all this way,
we almost became good enough to live in our dreams
but at the end the only words
we could say with sincerity was sorry“
(it could have been worse, it could have been goodbye)
now that my hands were trapped between yours.
now that you are finally okay with giving up.
my black strands of hair learn to cry,
my shirt learns to turn transparent,
i learn to not love you for your sadness.

“what do you see?“
-a love that would be never returned.

“what do you see?“
-a love that needs nothing in return.

“what do you see?“
-a love who cannot not return back to me.

“Through our hands” – Nayana Nair

Through the the hands that
seem like transparent net,
we see all that we are loosing,
what all just is brushing through us.
Left us in pain for
things, people and feelings
that were never ours, nor will be;
but forever in our sight.
We see all the blessings
that fall through our hands.
And when we are left with
only drops of beautiful ache
born out of love,
we keep what we can.