Skin.

Maybe it's been 365 days of the most beautiful roller-coaster. Maybe it's the mark of a crowning glory on the last day. Maybe it's a big achievement and the selfishness of it's external comparisons that render it a happiness-like quality. Whatever it is, more I don't recognise myself, the more I like myself and as and when the blanket of familiarity draws closer, so does a sense of derision. It's strange, this process of learning- of growing up. They tell you you will accumulate, build, create. They leave out the parts about losing, crumbling and destructing. Where you grasp the essence of unconditional love, a love without boundaries or barriers or warriors, without a requisite number of people feeling the feeling, not bound by unnecessary necessary banal activities lying to draw people closer but actually designed to drive them further apart. I love you, and if you never do, it's ok, but if you don't want to, I'll smile and let you go because there are no conditions except one. My love for you. Where you grasp this, you also fumble with the concept of black, white and grey; right, wrong and I-don't-know. Is it always so simple? Am I always right? I must be, since becoming all worldly-wise? See how ridiculous that sounds yet it's a very plausible possibility in your enlightened mind. A mind that tells you there's a distinct line yet doesn't know which side of it the missing piece of puzzle lies. You let it out on those that disagree. Disagreement doesn't sit well with this new persona. The changing unchanged bits of it are the most affection-generating ones though. Travel to places, to hearts, feet, souls, landscapes, oceans, vehicles, temples, graveyards, vineyards, airports, stations, instruments, music and lives of brave-hearts are on top of the list, at the bottom and in the middle. It is the list and while I pen down lines that I've dreamt of the previous night and hope (latest poison) for a sturdy shoulder to come home to and rest on, it is still the only list and there is no place yet, for anything else. Not even warmth.  

you touch me within 

and so I know

I could be human once again- Grimes

Spanish Sahara, Greek Abandon & My Very Own Oasis

Breathe.

When I turn around and I see the two of you, that's where I want to be. 
A place where the background changes landscapes like watching an old, silent, black and white movie being played out in some art-nouveau museum that I've wanted to go to all my life, only so I can sit in a dark and quiet room and do nothing but watch beautiful women blow smoke at the camera while holding a thin cigarette in dandelion-like fingers. 

Romanticise.

If I wake up feeling like Sinatra and go to bed feeling like Bukowski, that's how I want to feel. If I have an apartment on an untouched-by-culture-fusion lane in Barcelona, I want you two there. When I look up and see the sun streaming in to destroy the unneeded presence of all the lamps made from all the hands that I'll never know, I want to be able to see you two when I turn back around to pick up that lighter from the shade. I want to see you fighting over bathroom hours, bed choices, men choices, life choices and making meaningful trivialities like picking up one thought from every mile travelled just to have a sentence at the end of your life that everyone wants to be a part of because it's the most hauntingly-liberating sentence they would've ever heard. I want to see you when I look up from the playlist of love, the summer of life, the bar of exotic and from the mind of one who is truly forlorn. 

Describe.

Galleries, museums, open-top buses, hair in the wind, smoke swirling in loose strands of hair, dingy poison coves, with flames atop the poison making it even more poisonous and lustful, sand in the space between my toes and slippers, ruffled sheets and invaded sanctuary's, French distractions and some memories that have a way of making their presence felt even as they are occurring, telling you slowly, softly, that try as you may, you sure as hell won't forget me. When a tear escapes, my heart breaks and goes out to you and I can't comprehend why on Earth something on this planet would be cruel enough to hurt you. If I had two hearts I would give them both to you, but for now, here, I've broken this one in two. A half each. Don't think I'm going to be needing it for a long time. Keep it.

See.

Keep it and the next time you're jumping off a plane, or a cliff or a height that you've reached all by yourself, don't think but for a moment, for one moment think of me and take that piece of me with you because I will dream of it. Because I will dream of the jubilation and the adrenaline pumping through me and the pure happiness at finding no one else but you two on the ground, and it will be like I'm there. I'll dream of that perpetual drowsy feeling easily mistaken for inebriation but mostly just contentment, a feeling of not wanting to move an inch from where I stood, with you. I'll dream of brilliantly blue waters like a sea of our perfect reflections that I could swim in for an eternity, I'll dream of tapping feet, all-consuming music and the most fierce kind of intensity we may ever get to see in swishing red dresses and sharp black suits in the form of this illusion called flamenco... and I'll sleep soundly.

Devour.

Snapshots of a lifetime. A lifetime. That I don't want to leave behind. People I could never get over, because some are meant as balm for the soul. And I'm told that when you find the sort you dance yourself into oblivion, into a world where you can only see them and the Irish voices, dizzying lights and the gliteratti just become mere tapestry in the room where a genius song was being composed. One whose music was composed on the beach as the sun came up, and lyrics coined as a beautiful island neared from very many thousand feet up in the sky, where birds would be envious of you. A song, that was bound to sync every nerve, every vein in your body with the perfect movie. A movie, that was us. 

Reel.

When an expanse of blue merges with white and all you have to do is plunge into the deep end of the blue only to resurface at the darkest hour with the brightest stars paving your way and dim candles and frosted glasses illuminating your life, nothing can possibly go wrong. When we have each other and we have the best fucking Swedish music bursting through our temples and right down to electrifying our toes, we have nothing to worry about and we have nothing to yearn for. Except this. So much more of this. And so much more of life, in different latitudes and longitudes and coasts and mountains and poisons. You two are like sangria- delicious happiness in a jar. Don't try and wake me up just yet. Let the best dream I've ever had, finish, please. 

Breathe. 

-And the seasons
Will change us new
But you're the best I've known
And you know me
I could not be stuck on you
If it weren't true- Blind Pilot

Dreamer

Should I wake up now?
Do I have to?
Can I not just stay here and breathe, deeply, in a reverie, of what this year has been. 
Nobody knows it like I do, neither do you, nor you. So don't ask me to wake up. Shake off and let go when you don't know the magnitude of what I'm letting go of. 
A dream that spans cities, countries and continents and not just one person, is a special one. It's special enough to be your whole life, or what it's worth anyway. 
Can I be jet-setting for another decade? Can I be tending to things bigger than me and definitely bigger than you for some more time? Can I learn from him and build up fractions and fractions to make up my next dream? That dreamcatcher above my head only makes my pillow look more comfortable, the real work, needs to be done by me.
I'm waiting for another tide, with baited breath, but while the beach may be my home, I don't control the moon, and he has his own plans and I'm another speck of grey, in the larger plan of the sea of colours. 
I'm going back to sleep now, don't wake me up. 

Pictures of you; midnight catastrophe

She walked into his house, the smell of her reminding her of nothing but herself,
Last night's remnants of whiskey and second hand smoke.
What she really wants to be remembered for is him, all of him.
He misses her and she misses you, what kind of perverse universe would play such a sick joke?
While he falls asleep thinking of her, she doesn't quite...
Dreaming of you, hoping for you.
The only reason she wants you back is so she can play mindless games,
That weirdly simulate the most mindful getting-to-know-each-other's-galaxies conversations that either of you has ever had.
Anyhow, it would be so much better than these seconds just ticking away.
Emptily.
So. Empty. 

My Winter Night on a Summer Day

"What would you girls say if I told you it was going to be snowing tonight?"

You never really know until you've been through it, until you look back at it and realise it's over, that last night was potentially one of the best nights of your life. That feeling when you connect with people that's not quite like any other connection you've ever felt before. Not like the ones you forge on the first few days of university bound by uncomfortable talk, dry laughter and chatty indiscretions. Or the ones you make over three years of having seen some people through their worst and best tides. Nor the ones you're expected to make after referring to a lot as your family through the years. These connections you make with souls. When it doesn't matter anymore how high you are, how many substances it took to get you there, how beautiful life looks through this lens with just these people, how you never really knew what it meant to live on the edge until tonight. What matters is how you found a way, against all odds, to be there. How all of us, coexisting on the same plane all our lives, just thousands and thousands of miles away from each others' universe, found a reason within us, to pick the same universe and find each other there. It's like your whole life you've been stuck in a dull zombie movie or a sombre novel that your uncle gave you for your thirteenth birthday and try what you may you just can't get through it and its dead-weight weighs down on you more and more each day, so much so that when this precariously dangerous, adult-borderline-no-coming-back-losing-yourself life brushes past you, all you want to do is cling onto it and somehow make it your own life's biography. 

"I mean who gets to do that kind of stuff? On a freakin' mountain-top!"

Stepped out of my African romance and seeped into my London carnival, thank you for being a reminder of everything I need to look forward to. Conversations through the course of the night that can change how you look at life completely, entirely. Conversations with the help of which your people become my people and mine become yours. Conversations that begin with you finishing my sentences and end with EXACTLY's, just like that. Conversations that you ache the moment they're over, ones that I know are about to arise, because I know exactly what you're going to say with every twitch of the mouth, glimmer of the eyes, movement of the hands, I would know. And yet I couldn't wait for you to say what you were going to say anyway like it was about to change my life. It probably was. You and me, me and you, you and her, her and you, us. I love us.

"Manhattan? Brooklyn? Queens! You girls could totally be from Queens"

Quote my favorite show, make me your favorite character, talk of places even I didn't know I wanted to go so bad that when I hear of them from you every cell in my body does an independent dance of its own. It takes two to tango, salsa, samba... I'd do the dance with you any day. Look at me like you can't believe you haven't been 'see'ing me your whole life, smile at me like you can't believe this is such a good time and we're here living it, tell me how I'm amazing in the most superficial and deep ways you can muster at the same time, reach out for my hand as if it's just another of your limbs, run your hands all over me like you'd want nothing more than to reclaim every inch of me that you haven't been around in only a few days, dance with me like nobody's watching, share with me as if individuality just merged into the stars of this gorgeous city, kiss me like it's the surprise you've been waiting to give me all night long, be happily surprised when I kiss you, unexpectedly, and say to me...

"You know I love talking to you"

Yeah. Just like that. 

-------------------------------------------

Satellite in my eyes

Like a diamond in the sky

How I wonder

Satellite strung from the moon

And the world your balloon

Peeping Tom for the mother station- Dave Matthews Band

Somewhere in London

Somewhere in London there's a girl, occupying a small space in a large city of blinding lights, tall towers, strange people and an unexpected spray of sunshine. She reminisces about her mountain-top, about her sea-side spot, about her families, old and new and about this carefree life that comes with the travellers' syndrome. Her body in one place, her heart in another, her mind in another and her soul in another. 

Somewhere in London a flight is approaching. With a boy on it, who's a boy no more. At some point through the clouds in the skies and the ones in his eyes he shape-shifted into a man who couldn't be recognised. A man who left his life, beliefs and apprehensions back at the bay, to fight for and embrace the one thing he knows now he loves the most. The one thing he cares about. The one he pushed away from him as much as he could, for years. The one he broke and now hopes to fix. Her. 

Somewhere in London there's a small studio apartment where she steeled herself and gazed unmoved at a heart breaking right in front of her, at her best friend she didn't recognise anymore with all the vulnerabilities only she had ever felt. She let go, tried, broke, and let go. Knowing that if this wasn't meant to be, then no love story would ever make any sense to her again. 

Somewhere in London there's a hotel room with smoke that has cheated it's way into the four clean walls of an unfamiliar, impersonal space. With bad food chucked away after a bite and two glasses of wine warming up and cooling down, untouched. With crumpled sheets and overnight bags and a small pair of hearts entangled, cuddled up, breathing in long breaths at the nape of the neck and that point where the wrist meets the rest of the hand. Eyelashes fluttering shut on another's shoulder and feet grazing. All of it hazy. 

Somewhere in London there is a train parked dreaming of these two hearts. A movie theatre still craving these two pair of eyes as it's favourite audience, a pub refusing their refusal, a club dying to play their music and feel their feet move at an uncanny rhythm, an Asian town scribbling down the memoirs of their oddest tourists, and a door, wishing with all it's might to take back the goodbyes, the tears and all the words that had been said, only to exchange them for the ones that hadn't.

Somewhere in Bombay he waits, 

Somewhere in London she misses him like a traveller misses home. 

"So intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
-Pablo Neruda

Out of Africa.

Like the legend of the phoenix

All ends with beginnings

What keeps the planet spinning

The force from the beginning

Open my eyes to a beautifully scary mountain range, the sun too bright for it to be in the same place as last night.

The birds too loud for them not to be sharing my ecosystem. 

The baboons too visible for anything to be real and my breaths too short for me to be calm. 

I wake up to the cleft in your throat, that point right above your chest that gives me just enough of warmth, comfort in a spot and a hint of your smell that I get to keep. I wake up to half shut eyes of you, an arm wrapped firmly around the small of my back, a pair of lips close enough to claim any part of my face that decides first to twitch away and a leg loosely locking my feet ensuring no escape. Claiming ownership. And you've never met a better slave to that. 

I let you have me, all of me, God knows I haven't let anyone but 'him' do that in a long, long time. What is it about you that made me bend the rules? You're the only one I've met more exotic than me that still seems to think exoticness is more prevalent in me. You hail from so many parts that I crave for myself, you've led so many different lives that only I can relate to the charm of, you're nothing of him and you're so much of me and yet you're you. Unpredictable, unreadable, incomprehensible, immature, intelligent, beautiful, silent, attention-grabbing, a merger and a stand-alone. You're a contradiction and you're too tempting. You're a trophy and yet I want to show you off only to myself. You make me envy anyone who's ever been a part of you, so I snuggle up just a bit closer to gather more and more, to be the future cause of envy...

Moving from a bustling reminder of my city, to a quieter place more fit for finding oneself and experiences that fill your heart, to peaks undiscovered that aid in you finding something you never thought you'd have the chance to find, I found you. Somewhere along the way you appeared and already made yourself unforgettable. I will despise you if you turn out to be another disappointment but I don't think I could ever hate you because you've given me a memory very few are lucky enough to possess. You've given me a night under a billion splendid stars, thousands shooting down just dying to beat one another to make my wishes come true, in that very moment. I can almost still feel the fresh gasps under my nose when I popped my head out of our tiny tent in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the Simien mountains of Ethiopia, and the vast nothingness that stretched ahead of me, you and above us. 

I can still feel the importance rendered to me in that country by everyone I met, by every little girl I interviewed who told me she 'wishes she could be like a boy,' by every child in that blind school that would braid my hair just by the feeling of it, touch my arm and without actually seeing me, tell me I was beautiful when all the beauty that emanated, was from them. By every thought I thought, by every word I wrote, by every scorching afternoon I bore, every farmland I walked across and every real friend I made. It was stunning, it was touching, and then there was you. Every evening I'd flutter to you like a wasp to an untouched flower, like a magnet to it's very own magnetic North. The smoke that we inhaled and then exhaled were so different from each other, separated not just by seconds, but by a sentence in a life-changing conversation. By a feeling in a string of emotions, like one note on a harp being played by angels, because that's how I felt sitting on that bench surrounded by people in complete darkness and in a twilight zone, intoxicated. Yet all I could sense, was you. I hope you could sense me too.

Do you know why I didn't want to come back? I wanted to give you some more time to redeem yourself. To be not just who you were, but to be my best friend. To know little corners of me, just like I've learnt little corners of you. To want to flaunt the little crevices of me that only you hold the key to, just like I couldn't contain prancing around with mine. But precious or semi-precious, sunrise or sunset, cliffs or plains, whiskey or weed, stars or bonfires, food or travel, loud music or eerie silences, camps or dodgy hotel rooms, Africa or Europe, I will remember you. 

Whether you choose to stay or let go, I will remember you...

My gorgeous romance novel. 

:)

We've come too far

To give up who we are

So let's raise the bar

And our cups to the stars

-Daft Punk

Disease.

So they dug your grave
And the masquerade 
Will come calling out
At the mess you made

What is this? 
At a time when I was supposed to have everything figured, all aspects covered, all bases cleared, all hidden nooks discovered, every nuance seared. I find myself here. 
Jeered at, mocked, rendered pointless and stopped.
Stopped from fulfilling what I came here for,
they reached inside me and extracted what I was hiding,
straight from the core. 
I didn't care for much anyway, 
but when I did, even you knew it wasn't child's play.
Yet you tracked me down
Yet you hunted me around town
Yet you traced my footprints from uncovered sand
Yet you found my hideaway in the throes of abandoned land. 
Did they clear you for heartbreak? And what about insensitivity?
And you're sure about sheer stupidity? 
Used me to your amusement while I was at your disposal,
refused every proposal,
diffused every carousel. 
Then while I stood amidst all the darkness with just some twinkling in the skies to guide me,
I never asked you to come find me.
Still you drew up a map and tracked that lighthouse I told you about,
the lone one standing where the world begins,
where you once heard me shout out,
that I knew of your daylight sins.
The night time isn't so bad,
because that's when the fables are told, 
and the mould actually holds. 
Now that I'm here again,
scathed, unwanted, brain-dead.
You're finding a way to do it all over again.
You're finding a way to stop the rain,
from washing off all I need it to,
all I'll bleed into. Until I'm reduced to pulp and fiction,
only then will you concede and stop the friction.
Only then,
when,
there's nothing left of me;
and all that's left,
is you.

Don't get too close
It's dark inside
It's where my demons hide
It's where my demons hide -Imagine Dragons

Don't Let Me Fall

"Underneath the moon, underneath the starsHere's a little heart for youUp above the world, up above it allHere's a hand to hold on to"
You've given me some warmth and I can now draw out my cloud-like blanket to wrap up all of you and all of me in one sweet gush of hot chocolate, snow settling inches away from our faces, happiness cloaked as silliness and a smile I don't even know has been at the corners of my mouth for a fortnight now and that's how long we've been in different seasons. But you're here, inside of me, this time making me laugh at you, cry for me and be patient for us. 
"But if I should break, if I should fall awayWhat am I to do?I need someone to take a little of the weightOr I'll fall through"
Maybe this is the flip side of the flip side. It was probably meant to be a trap and what started out as a joke on me is now no laughing matter. I've seen you. All of you. And you can't do anything about it but what's most disconcerting is how you don't seem to want to. Don't back off this time or I'll break. Don't back off this time or I'll self-resuscitate; break-crumble-last-breath-die-away-wither-sunset. Are you smiling? That's weird. I thought I was.
"You're just the one that I've been waiting forI'll give you all that I have to give and moreBut don't let me fall"
You're here for good. Wow. Say that again? Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn love. Did the Lumineers write that song about us? 
"Take a little time, walk a little lineGet the balance rightGive a little love, gimme just enoughSo that I can hang on tight"

Be my happy place. Be stationary in an ever rotating-revolving-roller-coastering snow globe of mine. My life, outside the door and inside, is the postcard of that secret garden and that hidden away sea where we extracted that sea pearl from that shell where we found one more thing than we lost and those lights twinkling behind me told me you were my makeshift dreamcatcher but that's when I figured that midnight city or not you'd shine like my daylight, glitter like my snow or twinkle like my personal dose of indigo neon stars. Sigh. Comfort in a cup. Mine. 

"We will be alright, I'll be by your sideI won't let you downBut I gotta know no matter how things goThat you will be alright"
Taking care of me taking care of you, admittedly falling into that zone you detested and savouring every refreshing drop of it. Calling me by my name after years of anonymity and oblivious, blind banter transforming into conscious, self-aware conversations that smell of musk because your breathing might just be my heartbeat. Heart. Beat. Box. 
"You'll be the one that I'll love forever moreI'll be here holding you high above it allBut don't let me fall"
Come now. Don't take too long. Look up, you might just see the Northern Lights. Don't wonder how they got there, I brought them to you because I wanted the muse, the inspiration transported to where we are and not the other way around, have something to say to the Universe that has a way of doing things exactly how I like them? Prepare for the holocaust because your question could just be answered. What have you got? Me? I'm yours. Not your usual take-what-you-get-psychopath-dramatic-bundle-of-explosive-energy, you've got me at christmas time. Happy-hearted. :)

-"Lenka."

Crystal Mornings.

Hello snow, happy snow, my first real snowfall. :)
If everyday was like this, there'd be little cause of any worry at all. Such a beautiful world we live in.

Happy new year gorgeous followers!