Water Lily

The first few days after a break-up are exceptionally hard to get by, they say. And why not. You get up every morning and look to your left. That was his side of the bed. An empty pillow meets your eye. You take a while to get over the first bit of shock.

You drag yourself out of bed because sleeping in is not an option. You're not Miss Havisham of the Lower East Side. You've got to show up at work because there are bills to pay and cold attendance sheets to worry about. 

You go in for a shower and there it is. The toothbrush, slowly turning mouldy. The tube of toothpaste that you have not bothered squeezing till the end because somehow their memory held your OCD by its throat and strangled it. You cry in the shower. That is the first time in the day that you have let go of yourself.

Within the four walls of the bath, the tears are easy to call. You hear a stray ring and realise that you have spent way too much time thinking of what might have been, had you stuck together, had you not left them.

It's easier if you're the one who has been left. You have someone to blame, someone to hate for breaking your heart. Someone to help justify your anger. Someone to call names. Because the anger needs an outlet. Silent screams are not an answer.

But what if you're the one who walked away from the relationship? How do you console yourself that you deserved better? Even as your mind replays for the thousandth time in an hour the way his skin felt on yours right after he got out of the bath. 

"What?" he would ask, as you looked at him, trying to find a new inch of his body that was waiting for you to discover it that day. He stayed a while after coming out of the shower, just to let your eyes linger on him for a moment, before laughing and going to the bedroom to get into his shorts.

The fragrance of the water lily stayed on just a moment more than necessary. That shower gel was his favourite.

Blank Todays

Yesterday, we met, and talked
Of dreams that bound us,
Of pains that were mine; only
That yesterday is long gone.
Tomorrow is but another's
Story. Of newer dreams, different
Desires that will bind me to another.

Today's all you've got.
The hours trickle by - 
Stripping my shell off;
Leaving me with fears
Better left unfaced:
Of a tomorrow with another
Opportunity lost.

You add another yesterday
To my log of blank todays.

A Face

The obstructed beam of the street light
Draws strange silhouettes on my window
Everytime the leaves flutter in the wind.
Then the rain erases all in its hasty flow.

In a daze, with sleepy eyes still wide-open,
I try to look at the shapes on the pane.
Now deformed, by the raging raindrops,
Some hysteric's laughter, defying all things sane.

There's a face hidden in the shadows on my window.
A face altered by innumerable eons of pain;
A visage: once the lust of many, the envy of some.
A face washed away by tears; and now the rain.

Shedding the numerous masks of laughter and fears;
My face is only a shadow: that, on my window, appears.

The Rupture

The change was sudden -

Like the flash of a lightning bolt.

Then came the deafening roar,

And shattered my illusion with a jolt.

Perhaps all of it was not so abrupt.

After all, there were many hints

Strewn on my way. Transperence:

Is your quality; mine is the grey tint.

The word 'we' has been buried long and deep,

You and I are at different ends today,

Connected by that same thread, though.

Tugging at both sides, but not giving away.

Change is never without a cause,

Never sudden. The seeds lie in our eyes:

Waiting for that lightning to strike, for

The thread to break - and with it, all ties.

To He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!

No, I can never touch you, nor feel you

Lying beside me under skies blue.

You are just the dream that I dream each night

Shedding thoughts of emotions wrong and right.

You tread on grounds beyond my reach,

And I pine for you, waking moment each.

But you are just a dream: my reality.

This is for You to Realise.

I’m tired of the unanswered calls.
The numerous times you drift away
Makes me wish I’d let go of all,
And adapt to new pains each day.

Things might have taken a better turn,
Life could have been less of a surprise
Lessons, perhaps a few less to learn:
Perhaps you’d stayed - to wipe my eyes.
Like all who’d said that they’d stay,
You too turned back on your words,
Found your own path, and walked away
Leaving me with just a few memory-shards.



This is for you to realise.



I don’t weep tears of sorrow each night,
Though that’d appear ‘not normal’ to you.
And just in case you thought I couldn’t fight:
My torn life, I’ve begun to learn how to sew.
If in the mood for any other surprise,
You should know that I’m moving on with life,
I’m running around again, chasing butterflies,
Shedding you off, learning to survive.

This, is for you to realise.

Forgetting Memories...

I don’t know why I cry or why I feel sad for somebody who threw me away so easily. When on the one hand I have somebody whose every breath has me in it, there’s another who doesn’t even care about me. Perhaps it is the human heart which runs after the ones that throw us away. Is abandoning somebody so easy? What do you do to the memories? How do you make a bonfire of all your feelings and emotions? That’s where the hardest part lies. Forgetting.

Faith, hope, light, brightness. All these seem like empty, hollow words to me. Lacunae which somehow can never be filled. What then is the remedy for this? All these unhappiness, darkness seem like a canker which is slowly consuming me up from within. The storm just doesn’t seem to pass. Every time I try to pick myself up and build my life again, there’s some uncanny hand that shatters me down and tramples over me like dust.

What is love then - just a self-indulgent masochistic wish-fulfilling illusion for souls which have lost their direction? Things are complicated. So is life. Separating one feeling from another seems like a herculean task. Perhaps they are not to be separated. I don’t blame him for whatever he has done with his life. Perhaps he will realise, perhaps he will not. I really wouldn’t wait to see the trajectory of his life. But the thing that cuts me across is the fact that he loved me. That he made me feel like I was the happiest person on the earth. May be it was all my foolishness that I trusted him, but I was happy in that ignorance. Knowledge shattered me. So much so that I don’t think I can ever get up again and walk away from my past.

People have asked me to let go of the anger, to forgive him. How do we forget? I don’t know about others, but I was so happy with him, so happy at being treated like a princess that I made it a point to store every moment spent with him in painstaking detail within my memory. He never seemed to notice. Perhaps all those appeared funny to him. Or childish perhaps. But it was my reality. It was the present where I wanted to dissolve my past and get rid of my earlier self. I wanted to become someone else in his arms.

But somehow, the arms which once embraced me, the hands that once held mine in them with the vow of protecting me forever, turned and hit me hard. I was bruised. From within and without. Gradually, the marks on my face, where he hit me, vanished. But what about the places where he had kissed me numerous times? Making me feel like I was the happiest person on the earth? Will time ever be able to heal them, can ointments erase their existence?

He moved on. He went and explored other terrains, uncharted areas which perhaps were lying for him to discover. And I lay there abandoned. Scared of my own shadow and running away from my past. But it always catches up, no matter how fast I run. I am still running, trying to escape my past, escape the person that I was. I know that I’m lost. I can’t find happiness in laughter. I shirk from people, from smiling faces, from sounds. There’s a silence deep within my soul. It has engulfed me completely. I know I’ll find happiness in oblivion. But my memories never leave me alone. Through all thick and thin, they always make me remember each detail about him, about me, about us. Welcome to my life.