Infinite boulevard

Letters to Anne

to the people, we will forever be in love with and Anne,

it is, breathtakingly hard, to picture yourself on the edge of a cliff, with your heart almost failing to step back and then there is the imminent fall. do you anticipate the fall? do you know it is going to come to you any moment? yes, you do. that is both the beauty and the grim aspect of having to live, love and breathe. but you still take the fall. you do it simply because the thought of even remotely living your life without them is enough to put you to bed, drowning in your own tears and wet pillows. and regardless of the fact that this fall is going to end in a thousand seen and unseen bruises, we take it, with a wide smile across our faces. but that is that. we put ourselves through the pain in circles that never end and run close to the hope of being alive again.

what lengths will you walk to see someone you love to feel alive again? will the lengths measure to the ends of the earth like was promised? or to the moon and its craters like was in the poems? if the lengths of your love are even accidentally up to the lengths of your neighbour’s doorstep, you are luckier than the rest of us who have little or no chance to walk that path. to love someone, is essentially, to put yourself through the impending risk of having to shatter into more pieces than the last time you thought you were capable of loving someone. but here’s the question, i am and so are others, striving to find an answer to – is loving someone truly just another way of asking your heart to break?

if i did not allow my heart to break every day when i woke up and every night as i slept, i would voluntarily say no. but i do that, still, knowing fully well what it is like and how much it takes from my soul. we do it, still, knowing fully well what it is like and how much it takes from our souls. but if there is one thing, that rests in our souls, insurmountably, it is love. we make a conscious choice to give a cup of this love, everyday. do we run out of it? maybe. but love and loving is so analogous to drinking wine in a vineyard. do you run out of the wine? yes. but do you also happen to live in a vineyard? yes.

every thing we experience, every bittersweet feeling we feel, every morsel of peace and agony and love for someone is meant to do but one thing – carve your soul out, and place it back after taking a good look at it. now, what we’re more concerned about here is the ‘carving out’ part, where as what we should be writing about in these paragraphs that are read by no one, is the ‘putting it back’ part. if at all, feelings like these are meant for some work for as long as they’re here, it is to scar us, carve the remnant souls we have and perhaps, if we’re lucky enough, put it right back.

you see Anne, feelings are essentially like people and there is a groundshaking and life altering reason why god put them on earth with us humans. we cannot possibly believe there is a goal for us, and not for feelings. we hurt the feelings of Feelings when we surround them with this air of doubt and let them not touch us. is it fair really? to stop them from happening? would you stop yourself from meeting a certain someone you’ve been waiting to? on what planet is it fair? i am, for one, nothing to call this world fair, but if we somehow, find ourselves capable of allowing ourselves to get cajoled in this cynical world, we would have lesser jerry maguires and “hellos”.

so, if i have to walk to my neighbour’s doorstep, simply to watch my heart break on his front porch, i would. it is just ten minutes. love is counting these minutes and the steps you take between the doors. the doors of their soul and yours.

yours fondly,

it doesn’t matter if the happiness isn’t mine.

you’ll always know when you see happiness. it is that bright ray of sunshine on a winter morning that feels unseasonably warm, or that comfort of the passing wind just when the sun is about to set. you can watch happiness through transparent windows and carry on still, smiling in that very brief moment.

i smile when i see someone laugh and snorting because the joke was too funny or at how someone laughs when they fall off their chair.

i smile when i watch a dog wag it’s tail at me.

i smile when i pass by a beautiful child with rosy-red cheeks. i wave to him hello.

i smile when Richards, the grocery store owner shoves some candy in my bag for free.

i smile when i find someone else smiling,

or when someone cracks a renaissance joke

or when they mimic their dads on the phone.

i find my happiness in the things that aren’t mine.

fugitive.

Very briefly, I lifted myself and brought the pillow closer to my back, put my head on the edge of the bed and looked up-
Up at my wall that has some paintings I drew before I turned eighteen, some fairy lights I had insisted on buying, polaroids of my friends and I back when life was a lot less complicated and fairly simple, a Van Gogh starry night frame and it came to me like a sweep of winter wind –

That none of this is going to stay with me forever.

For instance, my paintings will gather a reasonable amount of dust and all the colours would unsaturate eventually.
Those lights will no longer work and twinkle in the middle of the night making me feel warm.
The polaroids will dilapidate and wear out when it’s time, curl from the edges and fall.
The frame will crack and the painting underneath will die out eventually.

But it’s also not just these that won’t last a time span.

Tis I too.
Tis life too.

It is convincingly strange at how life offers you a bittersweet moment of truth and realization that all of what you have, will one day stop working. Even that heart we got pumping in the middle of our chest will stop when it’s time.

I’d rather, these things came with time slots so I’d know when to expect them to die out.

Viz. The lights have stopped twinkling today.

unmade

Now that there’s not a shadow of my existence in that apartment, let alone my smell,

Is your bed still lying unmade and messy, uncannily resonating with how my life became, after you?

Unorganized, disoriented, cold, wrinkled.

I remember how cracked it made you that I was a morning person, who loved to rise with the sun, sip on some honey-lemon tea, weave my fingers through your hair and watch you let out an annoyed groan and roll away to other half of the bed when my alarm would go off and all I would get from you is a rather sarcastic eye because the alarm yet again, did not go off on time or perhaps, I was simply too early to leave the bed.

I remember how I’d drop the spoons and mugs, make some unnecessary hubbub in the kitchen

And how you’d come from behind, get the pack of milk out and shut the refrigerator as a simple act of vexation.

But I also remember how you slid you hand under my shirt and sniff off of my ears and tug at it.

‘The bed needs to be made’, I’d say.

You never listened.

run

I keep looking for apologies in corners that were mine, corners that smelled like warmth on nights of foul winter breeze, and then I wonder, why did I ever not get one? Do I even deserve one?

I am to blame for too many walls that I lifted with a vulnerable heart that is so close to exploding; too many unturned locks with lost keys to my soul, walking parallels with a doom on my sleeves.

And when I look at our reflection from the window of the coffee shop, there’s just us, standing in a haze and watching the pages flip with cold wind ruffling through them; winds of change.

Yet you promise me that you’ll never go away, for being stranded inside an inn of dead ghosts and memories is where we never want to be. Don’t look back, with eyes and heart and that tiny little mind of yours. Let us go.
Let us walk.
Let us run away
Like you’d run from the law
Darling, let’s run
Run from it all
We can go where our eyes can take us
Go where no one else is, run.

end.

He says with eyes bluntly avoiding mine and a smile I know is not his.
Faith is the thing with people, who hold onto it.
Love is the thing with people, who can’t unlove.
I try. Harder. With every ounce of flesh and nerve, I try to touch him and not feel her.
Oh, but he does. He does.
I run my mind back to the day I saw her, rubbing my eyes harder to see.
And I run my mind back to the day when I lost all the sand I had so tightly grasped;
And how in a brief of a second, I watched my life roll down a hillock and crash. I watched it end.

lovin’

There isn’t much that I want; just a little loving when I’m asleep,

Just a little caring when I’m awake.

A ride home from the supermarket,

A short walk at the park.

A tiny peck on the nose, a shiny dew on a rose.

To look at stars in the sky,

To hold your hand when I fly.

There isn’t much that I want; just a little loving when I’m asleep,

Just a little caring when I’m awake.

parallels

We’re running in between parallels of heaven and hell, waiting and wanting to be a part of both.

I see you peeking from behind the wooden door that I left open, wearing a cap and a baseball jersey, lurking in the darkness in search a lone soul.

I slid into that yellow shirt you left behind the last time together.

It smells like sweat and love, and potential heartbreak.

Pulling the sheets from under me, I seemingly melt into my bed, watching the stars glow.

A small tear, some sobbing, and a lot of love.

I can feel you here with me; your warmth, your indifference, the coldness in your feet.

I can still feel all of it.

Will you ever leave?

Will you always stay?

Stay forever.

here comes the sun

In equal parts of light and darkness, we find ourselves staring at sunsets, almost on the edge of letting the sun and all it’s forms consume us in ways we haven’t seen. Before the dawn, watching the skyline selfishly swallow the whole of night, the stars and every other huge mass, the moon and it’s coldness, the blue and the violet scattering the light away from eyes that can’t shine. The sun is laying low on the horizon, watching and rising in oranges of all kinds, stealing away some to give away more. ‘The sun comes up again’, but does it ever taper off it’s ends or is it our eyes that can’t follow? Does the sun ever feel the pain of burning, or has it just diminished itself in the way of being an everlasting source of orange and hope?

loopy

How effortlessly have we conditioned our minds to believe that in order to understand the intensity of someone else’s woe, we must fulfill this unsaid requirement of feeling it too. A sufferer’s adequacy of understanding another’s struggle is met by how efficiently they are able to find spots of relation in their struggles; that the only way to comprehend the unfathomable frailty of humankind, we need to inadvertently walk through it.
But all said and done, we’re all truly suffering in a loop with tiny fleeting moments that we spend reeling in this world here and there, looking for happiness but that is if we’re lucky.
The loop circles and life goes on.
So how do we really put an end to this suffrage that just doesn’t seem to end? However did we reach this far without having answers and solutions to these impossible questions? This pain that swells like the river mouth and take us away. Do we have people to thank for it or just ourselves? And how is this pain invariably derived from people and not feelings? Why is this pain invariably derived from people and not feelings? Are people feelings or are they something that make us feel?