I Watch you Sleep

Love,

I can’t sleep; I stay awake to watch you sleep. Do you know this? One day may be you will tell me about how my eyes are loud enough to wake you. But the truth is, I watch you sleep because my tiredness and sleep  is no excuse to lose this moment. Yes, this one. Right now.

Even in your slumber, I imagine your eyes flutter in deep sleep, every now and then halfway opening because you see something more than I can understand.

When you are awake, you sometimes speak quietly, slowly, and with thoughtfulness. But even when you are silent, I can feel you – clear across stadium rooms in the dead silent of a sleepy night and early morning. There is something magical about you that is not a trick.

And then the sun rises, and you are laying next to me. Hours have passed since our last words. I catch you opening your eyes and all I can do is exhale. And then, more than anything else, you are there. You are here. Hello, you always say. Simply. Unobtrusively. As though there were nothing simpler.

Your eyes are black. No, brown. Both? But sometimes I mistake your kind of color for that composite of every color this universe has ever produced. Sometimes, in my hallucination, I forget your name. Sometimes I forget the colour of your eyes. But that is understandable now, especially after my gaze strayed accidentally and lingered deliberately on the not-so-innocent strands of hair falling on your neck and flowing down.

Sometimes I feel like an astrologer looking at  the patterns in the mole-colored specks of life across your shoulder. Believe me, I know: Your eyes are paintings of kindness, mysterious sadness, and a pattern of worship spelled out in cryptographs I have never learned how to read. Your eyes are joy. Your mouth breaking indecisively and then completely into a crescent moon of a smile, is joy. Your fingers reaching for mine in the dead of night, is joy. Your half-dreamed, half-said “I love you” in your sleep, is joy.

Some wake at dawn to pray to the GOD. I stay in bed and worship you.

Some people go to church; I stay back and believe in you.

Some read holy books and recite verses. I clean my tongue with the sweetness of your name. 

Words for Love

Our destiny is so close now that we will exist in all permutations and combinations of twos as one.
Moment after moment I will seize my wrist and beg the violence of my pulse to cease.
I will ask my eagerness to stop spitting words.

But.............

If I won't have the words what would I do with all that I have for you? 
Wd I have to find a dark alley inside my heart to lock them away? 
Wd I have to set fire to myself from the inside out? 
Wd I have to seal my lips until I choked on my own love?

You smell of Love

You smell of the first rain, the mist in the flower garden in a winter morning.

You smell of honey and lemon, the smell of tea in the sleepy eyes.

You smell of a little baby, the smell of innocence.

You smell of tangy sweetness, the smell of friendship.

You smell of Amortentia, the helpless  smell of myth.

You smell of Musk, the ecstasy of the lover’s bodies.

I think you smell of love…………..Which means you must smell of me.

I will show you your other side if you will show me mine.

Your hair is the black magic,

Your eyes are the nebula.

Your neck is the ravine.

Your lips are the squashed strawberry.

Your skin is the Etowah rocks.

You are becoming irresistible each day and it defeats me.

You are my fulfillment and you are my restlessness.

You are why I wait and why I can’t.

You are the eternity, the immediate…..the right now.

You are the silence before and the sigh after.

The beauty, the complexity, the intensity of you occupies and rules even the most mundane chore.

And in my vulnerability, I am your greatest ruin.

I am the darkness to your light.

I am the twilight to your dawn

I am the moist to your parched.

I am the warmth to your coolness.

I am the outside of your inside.

I am the physical to your incorporeal.

I am the roots of your sky.

I will show you your other side if you will show me mine.

You are to be Conquered

If I have to woo you with my wealth.
I won't woo you with my abundance.
I will woo you with my thirst, my hunger & my greed for you.
And I will make you believe that my thirst, my hunger & my greed never ends.

If I have to woo you with flowers.
I won't woo you with roses, not red.
I would woo you with wild flowers.
And I will give you a flower that is not suggestive but blatant.

If I have to woo you with sweet.
I won't woo you with a ribbon tied assorted box of chocolates, not truffles.
I would woo you with hand full of black mounds broken straight from the mountain of cocoa.

If I have to woo you with my behaviour.
I won't woo you being a gentleman.
I would woo you being a cave man, I will hold out a fistful of wild berries broken with juice and staining my fingers deliciously.
And I will ask you to clean the reds, maroons, purples and crimsons from my fingers with your lips.

If I have to woo you with music.
I won't woo you with a compiled mixtape of romantic songs. No i won't sing to you.
I would woo you by screaming, babbling and whispering my heart out to you.
And even my silence will be loud enough to be heard by you.

If I have to woo you with poetry.
I won't woo you with quotes from Shakespeare or Ghalib.
I would woo you by writing  my love on your hand with a pen in the silence of us, broken only by our breath.
And then I will drop words into your ears, one whisper at a time.
I will push love under your skin, word by word, character by character.

I won't woo you with compliments. You are not obvious.
I won't woo you like men woo other women. Your are not other women.

You are not to be wooed. You are to be Conquered.

The Sound of Light

When life becomes a puzzle I become as tiny as I can get. It is as though I want to take as little of the space on the earth as possible. Be the tiniest problem for mother earth. I want solitude, to be unheard,  mostly invisible, and as dim as a living soul can be without attracting any attention. I would gladly offer a firefly the immensity of humankind on these nights. Tonight is like that. If I could I would disappear. Whenever I think of disappearing I think I will end up on the other side of the Universe with other materials disappeared before like the pen cap. 

After work i come back to my room, I put the key in the lock and turn it soundlessly. When the locks click into place, they apologize. No white lights. No just-like-daylight. Daylight is loud and lifelike. Light is loud, I think. Has anybody ever measured the sound of light? Today I read in a book that a deaf lady asked her lover if falling snow had a sound and he lied to her. He said it did. If someone asked me if light had a sound I would say yes, but nobody ever asks me things like that. People just ask me why I look like death, if I am sick, how my breathing is. Well if you can hear me breathing it’s not very good, is it.

I found an old table lamp with a fused bulb in the store room, so I walked across the street to buy a new one. 10 watts. It’s a comfort. It’s a quiet light. It watches me and when I look at it, it very politely looks away.

There have been so many tears shed from places so deep within me, I might have thought I was a cave. After a point crying isn’t sobbing, and sobbing isn’t weeping. It’s just a soundless echo. It reverberates inside your bones and turns your marrow to whey, but it is mute. That is when you know this is not sadness. This is grief. Something inside you says this is how you cry when something dies, except you don’t know what has died. And it hasn’t been long enough for anything to begin decomposing, but inside all is rotten already. You wouldn’t know anyway, would you.

Here is my trouble: I look for my mother in all my lovers and I find her every time. They love, they leave. They love, they leave. Somewhere in the middle they get very angry at me. Some throw things. Most say the worst words you could imagine strung together in a sentence. But the worst is when they say nothing at all. Nothing. You wouldn’t think that in a world as noisy as ours, there could be anything noisier than silence. But it’s deafening. It’s like stuffing your ears with cotton until you gag on it. But I don’t think it is my mother I am looking for anymore. I think it is a mother and I also think I am looking in the wrong places. Lovers have good intentions but they’re not your mother.

I wanted to write today because it is the quietest form of conversation I know there is. I need to be quiet now, but the words are building up and somewhere near my voicebox they transmute into tears and this is pointless. Each time I pick up a book, I wound myself with what I read. Words are the sharpest knives. Faith, and time, trust, and loneliness, integrity and blame, worthiness. It is so much easier to feel responsible for everything you are losing. At least you know where to aim. But when there is no question of blame, what do you do? Well. You sit in a dark, quiet house and tell yourself that this will pass. That maybe tomorrow will have answers. Or that maybe it is unimportant to understand the workings of the Universe and simply let yourself become one with the earth. And if you put your ear to the ground and listen, you may even hear the unbearable lightness of the dark.

Unveiled, Unmasked & Unhidden

I wonder if you know what I am going through since you have been in my life.

You have heard, seen & read the words of longing, love and lust, of desires written on papers for the name of your memory.

You have felt my bloody hunger, tasted the bitterness of my thirst and sensed the continuous vibration of my passion inside your body, inside your artery, inside your blood.

You deplete me. My mind becomes a body that calls to be satisfied by yours.

Your stare hits the walls of my brain. The air you excel become the air I breathe. Your sighs are sparks of imagination inside my head.

Your profound, long pauses are the moments I wait within your skin.

Your hushed, patient opening up, like a placid, is something I delight in.

I enjoy watching you unmask and discover yourself; your ceaseless beauty, your unspoken desire, your secret passions.

To know them , to be introduced to these hidden, long kept secrets is a strange and beautiful experience.

To come to know you as you are coming to know yourself  is a moment of a lifetime.

I wait for the eternity of discovery. Jumping into the darkest, cold abyss of you; places the light has never seen, and where no other living thing has ventured yet. Take me there.

I wait for you to make my soul raw from the time spent exploring you.

I wait for the cramp of my muscles from being tense with longing.

I wait for the butterflies inside my chest when I see you unveiled, unmasked, uncovered from my shameless, shiftless  gaze.

The "SHE" in my life.... Finally

So , it’s been one months and five days since I asked her the question and she said a yes , making me believe in miracles right then (Again) . By the way , one calculation mistake about the number of days about such a historical day and the guy is dead , so I hope my maths is right here.

A journey across half the globe. Three half fights between us (Definition – I fought , she listened ). Quite a few happy moments , with me giggling at my own jokes, on most occasions and she angry on my cheap flirtings. And we are still together… with me admitting that she has contributed most to the fact that the relationship is going as strong as a well fed wrestler , with my contribution being spilling food and driving her around , primarily and ofcourse flirting.

This experience has changed, and continues to change quite a few things around me .

I mean , my telephone bills have ‘changed’ by a noticeable margin , to the horror of my mom and to the sheer delight of Telkomcel. I no longer wonder if I would have to change some baby’s diaper someday , confident due to the instruction that I HAVE to change it . And believe it or not , for the first time in my life , I ambled into a Jewellery store, looked at the decked up salesgirl as she eyed me suspiciously and mouthed the words “ I want a diamond ring.” . Ok , the Ripley’s part ends here , because I gave up after looking at seven rings , wondering how could anyone choose between things which are equally tiny , equally shiny.

But while the stuff which has changed around me is varied , with an entire chapter justified for how my conscience took it and almost fed me to dinosaurs , the most felt change for me, has been inside me.

I mean, not that my kidneys have changed color, I am talking about internal transformation.

You know, this is not the first time someone put her faith in me. Is not the first time someone thought she would have me besides her in every storm. Is not the first time someone put me in a position where I could hurt her, trusting that I would not. Idiot, I am. Guaranteed.

After all that past which would justify a Kameena Sequel to be shot on my life story , it was like god had e-mailed me a letter confirming that I was incapable of taking care of anybody, except my iphone maybe .

I had vividly visualized a Dolby surround system installed life where I would live alone , watching HBO and eating pizzas only to die someday with the unpaid credit card guys being the only ones bothered by my death .

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw a guy who had run away from every difficult situation of his life . A guy who thought ‘walking away’ is a cool thing to do, yet ashamed in his heart. A guy who had come to believe that life is this meaningless string of moments, and more scarily for me, had lost the will to find a meaning in this string of moments.

I know it was no holocaust I had faced, and there are people who have seen worse things such as a college hostel’s food or the Ramu ki Agg movie. but to my mind, I was a useless failure, who could earn money and mimic Shahrukh’s flirts , but was worse than a China made plastic bicycle when it came to reliability and trust.

And then she came along. Strong minded. Independent. Graceful. Elegant. A lady who had the sensitivity of a petal to heal life, yet the strength of a tree to face life. A heart which could absorb all pain, yet could shed tears touched by the pain of a stranger. A soul which held an understanding the very wise have, yet cares like the most innocent child ever. In short, my complete, geometrical opposite.

Considering the opinion I had about myself, I believe it would have taken a lot of foolishness or marijuana for me to believe I could be the guy she deserved, and to this day, I believe I am lesser than the guy she deserves.

But yet, since that day, she has been a friend, a guide and an inspiration for me. Without trying to teach me, she has given me something I could never give myself, something no amount of movies could give me, something no amount of hours immersed at work could give me.

She has given me a reason.

She has given me the reason to believe I can be a better man when she says she trusts me in spite of my past.

She has given me the reason to wake up at 6.30 in the morning to ensure I will wish her a good morning with a kiss to make her day special , even though it is hard getting up that early even for a free sandwich.

She has given me the reason to feel special as she sings me songs telling how much she loves me.

She has given me the reason to roll down the window and hand over some coins to a boy begging at a signal, knowing she would do the same.

She has given me the reason to call her as I grip the steering wheel with one hand, imagining the smile that would emerge on her face seeing my name on the cell screen. Pretty dangerous , that driving stunt . Don’t tell her.

She has given me the reason to stand up to accusations and screams , determined not to step aside , but to go through them.

She has given me the reason to choose the hard but right path, having learnt from her that a righteous life is better than a convenient life.

She has given me the reason to again believe that goodness and simplicity can exist and thrive in this world inhabited by greed, egos and exorbitant petrol prices.

She has given me the reason to know I am going to be all right, because my definition of being ‘all right’ has changed from not facing problems to solving them.

She has given me the reason to truly wish a smile on the face of someone not even aware of my own presence in that moment.

She has given me the reason to feel accepted, not because I am perfect, but because someone does not expect perfection.

In a way I think I never cared about the kind of guy I was. A bunch of mistakes, I lacked the reason and the confidence to do anything about every mistake I had committed.

She gave me the reason to want to be a man better than who I am.

You know, I know I will never be the man she deserves to be with. But for the first time in my life, someone has gained that place in my world that I am willing to happily try till my last moment.

Probably everyone else thinks this relationship is following the normal, bollywood inspired storyline, and will end up fizzing out in a few months or years, replaced by the real questions such as who brings the kids from the school or why haven’t I still paid the telephone bill, but I know she will always be the same special one for me.

From that dream about death amongst pizza, cartons and a TV remote , I dream about a life which ends with the joy of having lived for people I really loved.

Because while a boy finds a girl who keeps him happy, this boy has found a girl he wants to keep happy.

While a boy finds a girl to live happily with, this boy has found a reason to live happily for.

I don't know if 'you' are reading this , but if you are , I just want you to know that I have made a lot of mistakes , and my grammar is all wrong , and I crack jokes nobody gets, but I love you without expectations. And I will never stop doing that.

Abyss

People come and go. It is inevitable. But what they also do is leave behind a gigantic, gaping hole in your life. A hole you spend the rest of your time trying to figure out what to fill with.

Some try to fill this hole with other people,alcohol, drugs, pain and then there are the others. They try to fill it with accomplishments,good books and movies, fulfilling their innate desires of achieving certain things they had been unable to attain, owing either due to their inability to look over and beyond the hole or what initially existed in its place.

I belonged to the former group of people for a while. my respite was crying alone and an abundance of solitude, self pity and pain. I was in love with the idea of being in pain. I felt comfortable there, It felt like a place where I comfortably belonged without being visible to anyone else, had been there long enough to feel cocooned in it. Then came the tears. Crying all by myself, every evening became a ritual of sorts. I listened to music and consciously brought in thoughts that evoked pain in me, then I would drown myself in that pain and drowned in my tears to glamorize it further. I believed pain and tears went hand in hand. I called it solace. I called it solitude. I even found myself calling it peace. Far far away from peace it sure was. It was noise. It was cacophony. It was the loud shrills of a fish market in the middle of a busy week day. And I tried to quieten it with its two worst enemies; more noise and more pain. All of this till I stopped dead in my tracks one day and got fed up of it totally.

I am 30 plus. A decade gone by in these last three moths and I didn’t remember when I was at peace or when I last had a good night’s sleep. And that was something I certainly didn’t plan for myself at 20. I was all chirp, laughter, giggles, silly, happy-go-lucky lass without a care in the world and eyes full of dreams; and mind you all were within reach. Nothing seemed impossible then. Young blood, restless to get to the next day to go ahead and achieve all that I could, take in all that I could get my hands on. And before I even realized I was lost. Lost to the hands of time, to the hands of my own self destructive means of finding more comfort in pain than in the joys of life. Pain eventually became a habit, and habit a way of life. The hole became bigger and bigger and more and more difficult to avoid.

Now, all I see is who I was and who I can be and I have a big gaping hole in front of me, staring right back at me. I do not wish to fill it up with any more pain. I certainly do not enjoy cryng all that much anyway. Coming back to who I was. I was an humor writer.  I used to write poetry. I loved sports. I used to love reading. I certainly wouldn’t miss a single opportunity to watch a good movie . That was the life that used to truly fill me with joy and smeared a smile on my lips.

I want to get back to who I was. That is what I see beyond this hole now. Time is the toughest teacher. And I am just in time to catch up on to the last lesson it had to teach me before all was lost.

My thoughts brought me and shaped me into who I am today. And what I do from now on, to fill this black hole, will decide what I will be from now on. It is a black hole no doubt, but a cavity also comes with a certainty of an empty space that has a scope of getting filled with. What you fill it with is the choice you make. And I made my choice today.

Same Mistake

Will I ever learn to do this or not to do this? I can't even remember - did I even begin at some point? Perhaps I got complacent and lost track? Did it get to be too much for me, being what I was not? Behaving as I knew not? Are there too many loopholes in these silent arrangements made with myself? Have I put up walls for some and let others slip through the cracks?

Why did I discriminate? Why did I stop to reconsider when I should have been brutal with myself, ruthlessly denying myself both opportunity and pain? Why did I not block them all out once and for all? Over and over again until it became habit, will, nature, choice?

But I look at you.

Here you are now where you should not be at all. Were you a lapse of judgment? A weakness made real? An indulgence too extravagant? Was it carelessness on my part or an invitation made despite myself?

It’s late now and too late tonight to lament what is lost and count what is gained. I let you in and I don’t know if I can let you out. Or even how. It’s going to hurt. But you’re worth it.

Yes, I’m sure.

I am ready to surrender my heart.

I am ready to brutally wounded by you.

Because you worth it..............

The other "Three Words"

If you will try mentioning those ‘three words’ and you will have every commitment phobic across the world running for cover. And if you are asking. ‘which three words?’ please go away, have a good think about the (non) status of your love life and consider yourself a hermit (oh and that, by the way, is one of the three words. No, not hermit you ditz. Love)

As for me, I’m ok with the I Love You(s). Been there, done that, seen it, said it, been blinded, fooled, struck, killed, threatened and driven to madness by it, etc, you see.  But that does not mean I am free of the 3-word-phobia. Far from it. There are exceptions but here are my 3 nemeses: "Anything for you".

These are the three most dangerous words I have encountered. When someone says this to me, I just melt, come part, die in their arms, am reduced to a silent, mouth-hanging-open gaping ape with heart melting and tears trembling to spill. I don’t know what it is about the words. Even as I write them I can feel the sensation of molten lead trickling down the inside of me- gullet to gut. Even if I were to say them to others like to my mother.

Don’t ever say them to me.  I will come undone, unravel, and fall so fast and so irrevocably deep. If you are particularly unfortunate, it will be you I fall for. But the one for whom I have written this knows I am talking about and only, to her.

Your Silence and my Emptiness

Before you, there was enough. More than enough for me. I lived amidst plenty and had no want for more. But I received more, nevertheless, unasked. Never mind.


You were sent to me and I was found to you. Flawlessly flawed and imperfectly perfect. All I had never asked for. And all that I had ever wanted. I adored you. I could not imagine that you walked this same earth, lived under that same burning sun, breathed the air that some point or another, might have been swallowed by me. How could you have lain beneath the same stretched sky at night counting stars, making wishes, feeling silly for doing so, making them anyway? Just as I had done. Exactly like me. You had lived in my world for twenty seven years and I had never known you existed, until then. And when I met you all I kept thinking, naively, was how you must be the most beautiful human being anyone could hope to set eyes on. At least to me you were, in all the thirty one years I had lived, and the little I understood of love and human beings.


And then as fascinatingly as you had come, you went. I had almost expected it. Like you expect to wake up in your bed after a dream, or a nightmare. I was expecting it. You might even say I saw it coming from quite a way away. But when it happened, it was like a bullet through my chest.


There is everything else, still. Everything else I knew of before. My plenty. All that is still here for me. But I don't know if it's that important. Or if it amounts to all that much anyway. I think I don't really care anymore and that makes me sad because I remember how all that I had before seemed more than just enough, and I remember feeling very lucky. And look, here it all is still, and it makes absolutely no difference to me. I keep looking down at my hands. I don’t know why I do that. Probably because they seem to mirror the loss best, they are so small and so empty. You are gone and I feel poor and ashamed for my bare life. I feel my life must look very naked without love.


The world looks bled. People are just noisy cardboard cutouts, and all pervading is that same invincible silence that belonged to you. Of all the things to leave behind.


So now, there is your silence and my nothing, and so much of both. I have never heard so much silence or known so much nothing. It makes my senses seem alien. It's funny how something can fill you up and leave you feeling so empty anyway. In the beginning, the pain was exacting. I could feel it pull at my gut and I would keel over on my knees holding on to myself, trying to scream. Trying really, just to make a sound that might sound like how I felt. But I don't think there is a sound like that because every time that happened, there would just be this moaning echo that pushed its way out of my throat. I realized that there is no sound for loss because there is nothing there, you see. It's loss. That means it's not there anymore. It's gone.


There is all this room inside of me and it is all empty, all of it. I felt like an inflated balloon and when I tried to scream all the air came out. And it's left me pretty flat.

13th January 2013

This is just one more in my many attempts to write to you. It gets harder by the weeks, the month and now, it has gone like beyond a year. Like a year of trying. Sometimes I think you must dread hearing from me; like I left a bad taste in your mouth and all of this, all we had and all we were is something you would much rather forget. That is not something I can take away from you.

The days are the kind that seem to stretch on endlessly and in there somewhere there is all this time has slipped in between the space of you and I and filled it up making it harder to reach out and hold on.And yes I wonder why I go on trying. I wonder why I cannot learn to say goodbye, put my feelings into a box, lock it up and throw away the key. It was then that I realised this: relationships do not end. They just change. People do not just go away, they leave. And I say this not to compensate for what I have lost, rather it is so console myself of what I still have. And I have this: I have love and so much of it that sometimes it fills to the brim of wherever it is it lives, and spills like tears. That love did not die, it never left even when you did.

I remember telling you that I did not need you to love me for me to love you. Its true. Because here I am still, all these years after, changing faces and shapes; with a tired mind and once-too-often broken heart and old and older and still, feeling. Still loving, still. Relationships do not end, they just change. Love does not die, it just leaves. You. Alone.

We are no longer who we were and we no longer have what we did. You extricated yourself and left it behind you. You did what you had to do and I, stayed on. Right here. In the same place, built for two, now too big for one. I am still here and I continue to love and be with the love that once belonged to you. I continue to share and laugh and curse and grieve and smile and be passionate with you. You are not here, I know that, but it ceased to matter a long time ago.

There are deeper levels of understanding and having, loving, living with. Our souls go so deep and we cannot but love on, live on and be; and at times even without ever knowing, if we must.

Today I am writing again. One more in my attempts to write to you. I am writing because I heard a conversation I was having with you inside my heart the other day and it went something like this: Remember long ago one gorgeous afternoon on January 13th we met for the first time.

I Set Fire To Love

Today, I set fire to love.

It was our funeral.

I would have invited you

But you were the one I was burning.

I just wanted to thank you for giving me reasons to let go of the guilt that engulfed me day and night for the past thirty days.

I want to thank you for the relief I feel, for the anger I have found that has replaced the deep, gnawing pain. The fury that has given me the courage to destroy whatever else I had so stupidly held on to.

I want to thank you for setting me free from your cowardice which never let you love with all the beauty you possessed. Free from the demons and fears which you let eat you alive and crush your dreams time and again. From your half-truths and stubborn loyalties which finally pushed me away the final time.

It is so much easier to hate what you have done than to love you despite what you could not.

A broken Heart and a bloody Hand

It’s useless. i have a broken heart that doesn't stop breaking. how does that work? break, re-break and re-break. how many little pieces do i really want? there must be hundreds. no, more. god i could weep right this minute just thinking of that bloody little mess in my chest somewhere.

i am broken. i am a broken person. not just the heart, but all of me. i’m just that. so broken that nobody can touch me. anybody who comes near me and tries touching me walks away with bloody hands.

Unlove

You must believe that in my eyes you will always remain beautiful and that I may continue to love you long after you have gone,  irrespective of response or reciprocity. But also believe that in this love needn’t be hurt, as I am discovering slowly now.

I write to ask for time, to allow me to unlearn and unlove, if not undo? Let me have time to retreat, retread and retrace those steps? Time to break down and rebuild? Time to walk backwards to find that fork in the road where we went so wrong and then, take the other path?

Give me time to extend my arms towards you, ready and willing to accept and embrace the us we must become now; the us we must grow into. But will you give me this and still find the courage to hold my hand through it all? There are no promises, no black and white. Only a bright searing beauty that is at once punishment and reward. This is truth.

In exchange, take from me all you want. Leave all you care nothing for and forget everything you have known to be true of  me before right now.  It was hope, you liked to think, that you saw in the eyes of the boy that looked back at you from behind a pile of memory inside your heart.

In this renewed freedom let me show you what you once saw. For one last time, let me show you who I am.

I dreamed of you last night.

I dreamed of you last night.

I dreamed I went to a wedding- yours probably, and saw you there. You were dressed in a beautiful red dress. Your hair was unusually wavy and you had on bright lipstick. I know, it’s so unlike you.

I don’t remember coming into the reception, but I remember leaving. I took one last look at where you were sitting. You finally saw me and looked uncertain, confused and for a moment, even afraid. As if I were there to ruin things for you…

When we made eye contact I mouthed the word, ‘congratulations’. Your worried face broke into small smile. One that conveyed relief and perhaps, even a hint of sadness. But maybe I imagined that part. Then, I turned around and walked away.

This morning, I woke remembering the dream so very vividly. I looked around my house and saw all those pictures of you and I together. Those beautiful photographs that I display like trophies. Maybe as evidence that there was an ‘us’ at one point. That, you did love me- I didn’t imagine it. Anyone looking at those pictures could see clear as day, that there was love here. Proof, that you had existed in my life at one time, even though today there is not a trace of you anywhere. Not so much as a strand of hair.

For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Fuck Love

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it?

It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armour, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…

You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it.

They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore.

Love takes hostages.

It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind.

It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.

"I hate love.”


Rose Walker in Neil Gaima's Sandman