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