“How do I reach there?” – Nayana Nair

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I am 90% chaos.
I am also the protector of my chaos.
I am torn between the ideas of
freedom and perseverance.
I am still doubtful how I can save myself
if I hate the thousand parts of me
that have a mind of their own,
if I try to silence the rising waves
to save this one piece of land that I can walk on
and if I wanted more, maybe even reclaim whatever now sits
in the windows of museum submerged and lost in past.
Past is a point far ahead and deep beneath.
How do I reach there?
When will I reach there?-
that is all I think.
How do I save myself from a mind like that?

In my mind, present is just seeing the lacks and absences
materialize into new shapes, into my new arms, into my new stomach,
into the new hole in my heart, into a lungs made of holes.
In another world I am maybe breathing in happiness with each smile,
but not here.
Here I hate myself for forgetting, I hate myself for remembering.
Here I hate myself for speaking too much,
here I hate myself for never speaking out and standing up.
Here I must still protect what I hate-
each living and dead molecule of me.
If only my hate was truly hate
and not just love waiting to happen.
There are easier answers for hate.

I wonder if I learned to look at sky
and learned to yearn for it,
maybe a point far ahead and up above- a future
might exist for me as well.
If only yearning and wanting could be assigned values.
If only looking up and finding a simple sky happened that easily.

“Beautiful broken railings” – Nayana Nair

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I have eyes only for you.

I have broken railings,
I have erased all the warnings,
I have planted the seeds of wanting,
wanting more of you.

I have learnt to give into
the feeling,
of hoping to see and breathe
and live through
whatever it means to be with you.

Even though I am of this world
and hence hateable because of that,
guilty because of that.
Can’t you love me
as if I am the same as you?

Do you really know what I feel
when I say
I only have you.

“no colors, no flowers for me” – Nayana Nair

.

“he left me”
this is where I would have wanted everything to end,
at “he left me”…simple and clean
and yet carrying a sadness that can be forgotten
or remembered as something that just exists.
Exists not like floods but like rain.
Exists not like a story of love
but a story that had a possibility of some meaning.
“he left me” could have existed in me, in this world,
how words of no significance and no power exist.

But it didn’t end there.
What he did was simple,
but what he didn’t do
those are the things that exists like flood, like pain
that can exist without him.
He left me a leaf
and not a flower.
And knowing this, even if I forget him,
it won’t end
the pain I feel at the sight of flowers,
the anger the green fill me with,
the feeling of being wronged
at seeing everyone who gets both, while suffering less than me.

He left me a life that I am capable of living well
but a heart that won’t ever feel at ease
as long as I live wanting love for myself.

“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.

“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?