“In reaching you” – Nayana Nair

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If we were to meet somewhere not here.
If we are to be someone new, someone different,
for the chance of meeting
to finally happen.
I think
happiness, even then, won’t be of any consequence to us.

You and me – we – would find warmth
just in the vision of our open arms and tear-stained faces.
We would run into each others arms
and not utter any other useless promise.
We would tell each other without words
that we can be fine by just being together.

Yet, we – you and me – will find ourselves filled
with disappointment and sadness
and a blooming bitterness filled with light.
For the ones who fought and cried and begged
and desperately clinged onto the promise of love-
this love can exist only without them.

In reaching you, in finding your heart on the other side of mine,
it feels that I have just been carrying on the wishes
of someone who loved you a bit more,
a lot more than me, a lot more than this.
The hand we hold as we sleep today,
they have held knives. I know the scent of my end on your being.
I move in closer to you,
trying to remember the me who smiled only for you
and you hold me closer trying to waiting for something similar.

The ones who wanted this love have been long been killed.
the ones we want are ourselves.
“Do you even remember where you have buried me?” I almost said
but instead I said soulless words about some love.
Hoping to find at least this answer without your help.

“It took me years, it took me you, to find a truth that was not a selfish reflection of me” – Nayana Nair

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Once she had a bite of my fate
she became a restless ghost.
She looked like all my ugly wishes staring back at me
but she had a beautiful smile so it was more bearable to my eyes
than to wear my own desperate words on my unsightly lips.
She looked out of place, but in a good way
as if she was the invitation to some place where my light won’t die.
Even in her voice it was my own words
that asked me to leave, that told me to love for the last time.
As my shrieks danced in the empty corridors
she planted a seed of eucalyptus in my palm,
she covered my hand with hers,
and covered our hands in dirt.
She told me how, for years, only the smell of eucalyptus
could calm her mind,
it made her believe that there was a gentle cure
to every disease that hurt her heart.
As she spoke such words that were not extraordinarily sad
I felt my spine become soft.
I dreamt of her leaning against my back
relieved of her every pain
and maybe it was the only beautiful wish
that has ever been born from my heart.
Once I touched the shadow of her heart
I grew and bloomed and learnt to be the one
who waits, heals,
loves, and breaks without bounds.

“Before Alphabets” – Nayana Nair

Before knowing the alphabets
of your name or mine,
I learnt to make you smile.
I pluck another flower that makes me sneeze every time
but the silly pathetic me smiles as you smile
as I crawl to you
losing balance,
losing something similar to heart,
as I dress you up in a mountain of petals I clenched too hard
hoping you would never move away from me.
How you dozed off as I made myself sick with my ambition.
How you were still sleeping as your mother took you in arms
brushing away every piece of my care.
But it is better than the days I woke up
with only the traces of my feelings, my cradle of flowers
without you in it.

“My Pretentious Love” – Nayana Nair

i am delusional

i feel that i am broken
when i am not

i feel that one of these days
i may finally cry for you
but i don’t

i am in love
with being broken
with being out of place in this world

you are again losing
against my obsessions

today again i am planning
to visit my past without you

today i am again writing about, talking about
things that unnerve you

you are becoming insignificant
as you always feared

my pretentious love runs deeper that your real one
but i didn’t want to let you know this

fearing that you might get hurt
fearing that you might hurt me more for that

of all the things i have loved
i have feared you the most

“why am i hurt by your hopes?” – Nayana Nair

i thought…
i wanted…
i am always looking for…
i am nothing without…

must i fill these sentences?
is it compulsory
to tell you where it hurts and why?

the pencil bends and breaks
in my hand, but my voice won’t crack.
i think a bit of my cruelty shows
through everything that i do.

“have you ever wanted to be a person like me?”
when i ask you this, you avoid my eyes.
the often-spoken-and-never-meant words
surface on your lips,
“i love you for who you are, i want nothing more”
sadly followed by
“it is not too late to change”

“Another Birdless Cage” – Nayana Nair

please don’t ask me how my friend is doing.
we broke up.
we broke up the most decent way friends can break up.
without deceit, without betrayal,
without cruel words or bloody knife on our backs,
without stories to hurt each other with,
without attempts to patch up things,
without deleting each other’s number that we never bothered to memorize.
i do not remember her till someone says her name
and when the sound of her name finds me through a stranger’s lips,
i do not feel bitterness. i not miss her.
a part of my heart is glad that life didn’t turn her my enemy
but a part of me wonders how she turned out to be nothing in my life.
when i see facebook notifications with her name,
when i get a reminder of her birthday,
when she calls me up once in a blue moon
to ask a favor for “her friend”
without bothering to ask how i have been,
what is it that am i supposed to feel?
i think it should hurt in some way.
i am waiting for it to hurt.
i am waiting to realize the meaning of this loss.
i am waiting for the day I miss her.
i want to miss her so much.

“This is where we part” – Nayana Nair

It pains me to say this
but I can live without you.
So remember my cruelty
and forget me as easily
as I have cast you aside.

-x-

You look better without my shadow
and my life is easier without your light.
Not everything in our life is about love.
We are more than what our hearts want.
We are more than whom we find.
I will give you company till the night ends
but that it where we part
there is nothing to us more than that.

“Questions on Eternity” – Nayana Nair

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The winter rains
have found me again
but only without you.
They ask me of I still believe in eternity
and I choose not to answer
because I am living in one,
even if it not the one I wanted.
Your sweet face and words,
that are no longer yours,
is the only analgesic sleep
I get in this tiring and painful existence.
I am promised
that there is only one who will look after me,
there is only one who is mine.
But can I actually believe in one love.
Isn’t it too tragic?
For there are many that will never stick around
in spite of their love or mine.
There are many for whom all this is nothing more
than the time they have spent on strangers,
to run from themselves.
And if I find myself
alone at the end,
am I supposed to wait for all those who live to leave?
Am I the only one who is supposed to wait and suffer?

***

While the whole world scratches out their own words
realizing it as idiotic and impractical,
but still wanting the weight of this ideal
to be carried by others.

***

They want to roam the world
and come back home to find food and bed made with love,
not minding the responsibility of waiting
that they have put on someone else.

“Closest” – Nayana Nair

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The cracking ground I kneeled on for answers
have become riverbeds where I’ll drown,
have become
the reason of my tears,
the reason of my broken voice
that travels along the lines
of the words I mutter
without knowing,
without meaning anything more
than to put my mouth into use.
I scratch the walls of the dreams I once painted
till the petals of colors cover my ground
only to reveal a the nightmare of empty hands.
I hold the petals, the chipped away paint
and feel the closest to my dream,
the closest I will ever be.