Intruder

Made me stop

Made me look

Made my breathing

Heart beating

Irregular for a second 

These are mistakes

However grave

I can forgive you for

But how will you trick the universe

Into absolving you 

Of the crimes 

You continue to commit on my mind

Capturing my imagination as the sun edges up 

And owning my dreams, as soon as twilight threatens

Hypnotising me into believing that these demons

Monsters of my own making

Are actually my saviours 

Nightmare City

I lay in wait 

For my city to change 

I have a foreboding sense of the digging

Rebuilding

and more digging

That's about to take place 

I have no way to stop it

No way for the excavation of my memories 

and the piling of tar

and smoothening of cement 

and the crackle of welder's wands

to leave every part of the city my mind has ever touched, untouched 

I'd rather not stick around

But I'm afraid that when I return to the city of dreams 

It won't be the city 

of my dreams

any longer 

Faceless companions

How about I jump into the void?
How about I jump into a sea... of stars.
How about I breathe calm while the rest of me is a nose-diving bird.
How about, life?

This is me, happy. Bored and sullen and nothing to really talk about but the mundane dredges of life scraping me by, of building up in the most painful, heavy-duty way to something I will only be able to stand on top of and scream, ten years from now. But I'm happy. I'm excited, and I like who I am. Selfish, not-thinking and seeing the partner I was supposed to devote my life to. The man/men I promised the world to, the moon when they promised me stars, the music when they promised me the lyrics, the words and pictures when they promised me postcards and footsteps when they promised me paths through riverbeds and mountaintops. It was so easy to walk away, to let go and forget that it worries me. It worries me to be alone but it throws me out into the middle of the desert with my own canvas to paint fake blues in the middle of, to splash my own mirage of H2O because I can.

Because I would love to. Because the only person I still love and doesn't disappoint me, is me. I am soon becoming the man I wanted to marry, and I'm ok with it.

Floating debris

When two people really connect, or are really attracted to each other, there's something pulling them together. But there's also something blinding their long term vision. Myopia. Every relationship starts with severe myopia. This could be good in the long run- it could mean a disciplined, daily ritual of putting on your glasses to see the world better, clearer, to see every blade of grass and every outline of a leaf that so far you only thought was a great big amorphous lump of green. And then only taking them off to shut your eyes to all of it. Or it could mean added vision impairment, myopia with hypermetropia, everything becoming fuzzy along the edges, truth submerging into reality into falsehood, into decrepit egos and mutual respect and love turning into an object to own and possess. It could mean, blindness. 

What have we done to each other? Here I sit, watching Two Night Stand on my laptop on a warm Saturday night. It's 10:30 PM, my room's a mess- great parallels being drawn to my general life there. I'm already dressed for bed, we can all smell the pathos here. And I'm all alone in an empty 3 bedroom sprawling mansion of a house, roommate missing, the TV on to some muted romantic comedy to give background, to give me white noise without the noise, to make me believe I'm not alone. Oh and my mother sitting miles away from me, texting me, she's the only person left. And maybe that's best. 

Where are you? Out with your friends, reclaiming your life that I made you lose. You see, the irony is. We were in different places when we met, maybe even opposites. I was not who you claim to dislike today. I am jealous and insecure and annoying and nagging and disrespectful and egoistical and BLIND because you made me get here. You literally held my hand and dropped me off in this land like it was school time and I couldn't bunk. I turn over my shoulder but nothing's changed. You won't admit you're bipolar, schizophrenic, an ex-depressed beautiful person who's heart was supposed to be in the right place. Who was supposed to let me fix him. I guess the joke's on me. On me and my tears. I only wanted sympathy, love, care affection and respect. Respect. For my dreams and ambitions and hopes that did involve you, if only at the last stage. What was in it for you? Not much, just a sad prize of a remainder of a lifetime of togetherness. I can understand how that's not an attractive proposition anymore. I mean look at me. But then when you do, also look at yourself. You turned a fun, sexy, cool, humorous, lively, confident, caring, ambitious and loving person (with her help as well) into this. Into me. You loathe me, and guess what. You are not alone. 

Milestone

I’m so overpowered by you. You drown me, but I come gasping up for breath right before it’s too late and the adrenaline rush keeps me going underwater. Again, and again.

I’m engulfed by you. You’re the warmest blankest on the coldest winter day. The muse to my dying art. The canvas that resuscitated me into painting the blankness of the walls of my solitude. You brought me out of hiding. Out of darkness into large, beautiful fields of daisies that are looking up each day. Each day that is filled with sunshine and the clouds and rains are happier than they were told to be by their creators.

You’ve created me. Almost from thin air. Almost as if I had no existence, no purpose, before you. But like this gifted sculptor, that only comes around once in a century, you have appeared to remodel me from shapeless clay, into edges of exquisiteness that only appears stunning to me when I see myself through your eyes. Those eyes, they do me in.

What have I done to deserve this unconditionality? This island in shimmering blue waters, far far away from civilization that really isn’t even civil. Because my conversations on this paradise, with you, are all that come close to Utopia. The verbal and silent ones. The times where we don’t even need to speak because our hearts, eyes and souls do. When I wake up in our hut of constant, endless ecstasy. My drug and my meditation is encompassed in you. You seal me, into nothingness and yet so much substance that I feel like I’m walking barefoot on green grass after the morning dew has just touched it. I’m light and weightless because you’re carrying me through life.

You pace me into breakneck speed. It feels like a ride, clinging onto you, zipping through stationary figures and fields and yet sensing an envelope of warmth and safety, like falling through the skies into a safety net that looks like a dreamcatcher.

Stop catching my dreams before I get used to it. I’m scared because I’ve never owned anything so precious, so priceless. Stay. I’ll make mistakes, I’ll fuck up, I’ll have to bite my tongue a hundred times a day. But I’ll mean the look I give you first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. I’ll mean my life that I owe to you hereon. I’ll mean my head on your heart and I’ll mean my eternal love to you in this lifetime and the next.

I love you. Don’t stop loving me.

Rewind, arrest.

What are you doing to me? What have you done? Who are you and where did you come from? I don't know if I want you or need you and whether it is enough that you love me and I love you. Whether it is alright that we don't have reasons to justify this love.
I don't understand why we only get snatches of us. It boils my blood and yet it calms me at the same time. I am aware of you and how lucky I am to get the time I'm gifted with you. It's a treasure and I treat it like one. Maybe we sinned in another life to deserve a half-baked life with each other in it, but it was also one filled with good deeds to deserve you at all. You kill me sometimes. Your words, your actions, your gaze. But each time you revive me you inject the life back into me with a new enthusiasm and new outlook towards life. You make me deconstruct everything I already know and somehow understand myself better. You make the process legible. you make me tolerant, and a better person even if I hate it. I hate you but I've never loved anyone like you before. I've never been swept off my feet, been engulfed in a sea of vastness of every emotion I could ever muster, like I have now, with you, by you. Stop this. Make up your mind, and do it fast. I'm slowly disintegrating and I need to be able to fix you so you can also piece me back together. Don't you get it? This is my only adhesive and it will help us survive. Without this, we wont exist. We've made promises. The world may not but we are supposed to keep them because we're different. We're crazy but it's us against the world. When there's no us, there won't be any street, monument, sun, stars, people, memories, nothing. It will all get wiped out with us. Every space that has ever had the chance to see us entwined, in our thoughts, conversations, breaths and limbs, will cease to exist. 
I know you have to pick life and everything contained in it because it's the final semblance of sanity that remains for you. I know that because I know you. You don't know it but I somehow understand you better than you and these three months that you rubbish are the very core of my soul which is locked into yours, like a perfect missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle. Even then, I'm asking you for one last thing. Pick me. Choose me. Love me. Over your life, and everything in it. Because I've given up mine for you. 

I handed my heart, my body, my soul and what's now really pinching, my faith, over to you. I have forgotten my mind in the process. I've lost it somewhere on the path to seeking desperate happiness. That's the thing about desperation. It corrodes you on the inside until you can no longer see the things that mattered to you as you. That should have been taking over your life before you let the idea of happiness take control. That's the thing about the idea of happiness. It stems from this sick thing called the idea of love. 

You broke my heart. I gave it to you to keep and when I wasn't looking you decided to play ball with it and smash it through the neighbours' window. Nobody lives there now. The dark rooms are haunted by the remnants of my shards casting an eerie light in small squares that are slowly disappearing. Bits of me diminished where they once shone bright. 

I want you to be miserable. Feel how I feel when I replay the image every second of everyday since I found out. I don't know if I care because it's you or because I thought it was love or because I can't believe I could be forgotten. So easily replaced in an aspect I was trying so hard to fill in your life. I guess I should've seen it coming, I guess your lack of willingness, the distance setting you back an inch everyday, the consistent attempt to display your supposed love for me to the world- all the time forgetting that the only kind of display that mattered was for me. And the amazing part is that I didn't even need any. I knew and yes still know, that you're crazy about me. Your heart longs to see me, hear my voice, my thoughts pour into your empty crevices, share your life and add to its flaws, make them beautiful, tell you you're beautiful and yet fix you, for every year of your life, the entire time.

They say you don't deserve me. You say you don't deserve me. I don't even know if I deserve myself. Is it weak of me to forgive you? Abominable even if I think of reattaching? So I have been told. How can I reform, find the broken bits of me, search for them on all fours only to give them back to the one who ran me over? How can I respect you and live with myself? I don't know what to think anymore. I hate you as much as I love you but this whole thing is making me sick to my stomach. The only respite is that you are in a fractional amount of pain as I am in and I don't want to speak to you or speak about you because I have had enough and I don't recognise myself anymore. 

My brain is weighing my body down and I have lost all motivation. I hope you're happy. 

Mine.

You fit the list.

It took me all of 22 years to find you and there is no catch. It's too soon and this post is premeditated but I can't help it, I can't help you and I can't help us.
You swooped in, into my new beautiful house and found me on a balcony. There was something extremely Veronian and Shakespearian about it and how your champagne flute, identical to mine, would find its way to your lips and stop right short just so you could drink my words instead. I have never found as much value in what I say as you did and 20 minutes later I was hooked. 
You asked me about contemporary art while I asked you about the life you capture in stills and we travelled in our pasts and in our minds until we found a confluence on every spot and every stop of the world map. 
You want to make me run the land like its meant to be run and I want you to paint it in the colours that only you can but we have to start at opposite ends and unless you start North and I start South, there is no meeting point if we are to be in our maximum splendour. 
I wake up to you while you doze off to me, virtually, physically, emotionally. You care, and God knows I've driven myself extinct being invested in the nooks and crannies of other people's vices and virtues. You have both and you let me embrace them, you do the same to me and without trying you're fixing me one distorted lego piece at a time. 
I would keep you in my safe haven and not let anyone steal you away from me if I could. But you were stolen even before I met you and now I'll see you on different grid points of our self-constructed map. You swung me in over my head, watched me with those shining eyes, brimming with passion and direction and yet self-concluded confusion, which I adored, and picked me up only to sit me down on a cloud I've never been to before. You better me, and I never did think that that would get checked off, but you fit the boxes on the paper and even the ones that never existed. But you're not staying and there's the catch. That's the part of the list that got contradicted and I never did think much of it. 
You're going and I want you to. You're not staying but I wish you were. 
I'm here and then I'm gone, and then I'm there and gone again. 
All I can ask, is you give me a portrait of you, and keep me, as a ruined photograph, in the back of your wallet. 

I hope you will find me. I hope it won't take another 22 years. 

I'll miss you.
Yours,
The Frozen Flame. 

Ramblings

I write so much everyday. I read words I don't comprehend, so many times, until I can finally call them my own. Almost. I have become so heavily ingrained in the system that it is me and I am it and we are inseparable and I am a valley of words volleying around the alleys of hope, love, despair and defeat. Of course I scream, and shout and silently cry, but nobody hears me. They're too busy carving their own ways out of the mud and beyond the mist. Why then is it so hard for me to write from the heart anymore? I barely scrape the surface before I'm down and out and trying to escape again. If only I could find what my mind writes everyday in a quiet corner, I could maybe use it to understand the encrypted dream-like messages scribbled on the walls of this prison. Maybe only that can help me escape into my reality. The one I've been looking for out beyond the fields of forever. Love.

A.

You always fail the most important people in your life. You let them down because the place you hold for them in your life gives them more than just a modicum of expectations. You perceive them to be in an outside ring of your daily life, in another realm than the monotonous encounters, glances exchanged with that person who caught your attention across the street, brainless banter during unending nights, that fail to imprint upon your memories, but end up casting a faint shadow on the comfort valve of your happy reservoir. They don't sit well with moderation, with being taken lightly. It's not ok to count them in the same breath as 'X person I met the other day and was so cool, you know, like had a really interesting vibe.' They're life-changers. They're permanent and permeable and get under your skin. They just land up some night in your life, brought to you by a shimmering sky reflected off a black sea with illusory boats composed of white waves, about to crash into you, crash into me. Their heart is golden, like the sand your feet sprinted across together. Their heartbeat just like the beats that boomed through every nerve of your body making you dance like every second of your existence depended on it. Their words, like music to your parched ears. Their souls connect to yours as if when each was formed, a little piece of it chipped away just at a point where they could merge and find each other, at the one part where they would intersect during the winding course of their craggy lives. You can't believe your luck when you find them. When all your life your experiences have been non-committal, plastic, where you get the expensive end of the bargain and have to fight to just keep afloat, after a life like that, the sincerity, honesty and undeserved respect you receive is an unreal kind of reality. It's so pure you're scared to touch it, lest you malign it with even your tarnished silhouette. These unnamed relationships don't put up well with anything short of intensity and extremity, but if you take it that far it starts behaving like quicksand before you can say goodbye. I met you with numbered days, but you've made this the most beautiful number I could have asked for and it's now my favourite. You make me see what a window with only floating lanterns and fireworks outside it looks like, without a trace of the smoke. You enable me to want all or nothing, to be content with me but even happier with you. You give me positive verbs and emotions and a story to tell and I hope I can mould the ending into a souvenir that reminds me of seashells, boundless joy, limitless laughter and summer rain on winter nights. I like the possibility of you even if I can't have you, one way or the other you're leaving me with such a good feeling that all I can do is thank you for it. Your energy is unprecedented and you generously direct its colour to the black and white of other people's lives. Unconditionally. I'm one of the lucky beneficiaries and the different shades to the horizon rendered by the dawn's, dusk's and midnight's is how beautiful your aura is, and I just want to shut my eyes, feel my hair blowing out with the wind and bask in the reflection of that light. Until next time. 


You're treating me like a treasure trove.
Unwrapping,
unfurling,
driving me crazy. 

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!