From Spring, With Love.

"Unanimously chosen song to be entered here"

Dear Gorgeous Seasons,

The only souls that I can remember being constants through the oscillations that my past forty-eight posts have been, are, as a matter-of-fact, the only ones I haven't written about. I guess that only re-asserts the fact that the ones that are the closest to your faint heart, the ones that have been life-changing, the ones that are absolutely impossible to do without, are the ones you tend to overlook. Not because you care for them any less. But because you care so much, that somewhere over the years they became a part of you. 

They became the second layer of your skin. 

They became every alternate breath. 

They became half the pain you felt.

And double the joy.

I call them souls, because no other term, could even strive to describe the connection. I called myself 'Spring' because nothing else would ensure that they would follow successively, and that the cycle would repeat. It's reassurance you know. Beautiful habits like them, die hard. 

I'm going away. I know it's not half as dramatic as we're all making it out to be. But that's just how we roll. I'm waiting for one of you to slap me as soon as after you read this. But I'm willing to risk it. :)

To Summer,

I swear, just as I typed that, a gush of warmth went through me, and a cloud of tears blurred my laptop screen. No. It's not that strange defect my screen has. I think you're the one that brought this about in the first place, so in a way, you are to blame. When I first met you, in my long pink skirt that's gathering dust somewhere now, I didn't feel any sparks. I didn't think we were going to ever even share a cup of coffee, let alone sob stories, most cherished wardrobe items, laughter and complete lives. If I had to pick my own teacher, someone who could guide me through everything even when I just didn't want to budge, it would be you. It would be your incomprehensible bundle of energy, warmth and adrenaline that makes you so full of life, so brutally honest, so perfect that you would pick out your own flaws and sit with them for days with a needle and thread and then pick ours up for all the serious patchwork to be done. And once you were done, we shone bright, because you picked the prettier embellishments for us. But somehow you were the most gorgeous, I don't understand how that worked. When we picked you as the season right after me, I was jealous because you got to be the name of my most favorite character. But I'd only let you have it. Because truth be told, you're a much better character than even she could ever be. Also because she wasn't the one that smacked me hard on my head when I had tears pouring down my face, she wasn't the one that told me to stop feeling sorry for myself, and she wasn't the one that held my hand and let our stilettos pierce through red leather sofas, alcohol being the only excuse. You were. And just thought you should know, I'm taking you and your strength, gonna store it in one big chunk of me. Yes, you can be the speaker. Forever.

To Monsoon,

Your unpredictability, caught me off-guard too. I'd expected mucky, bickering weather. Instead I got the most open-your-heart-out-and-dance-till-the-day-ends season I could have asked for. You are my happy place, and you've been around the longest. Longer than anyone has ever been. I was told to either hate you, or love you, and I would have ideally liked to pick both just so I could experience all of you, but I was told I could have only one so I chose to fall head over heels in love with you and I'm not complaining. Because you've never disappointed my love, in fact you've made it dramatic, outrageous, pathetic, sappy, grand and most of all, so bloody pure, that I've got all its worth. My eternal journal (and I'd only say that to you because you excuse all my corny-ness), that you are, always wanted to know every nook of how I was feeling, went scurrying there slyly like a kitten even when I tried keeping it hidden behind layers and layers of curtains, hidden in the dark. Slowly the darkness went. And then all the fabric. Sometimes while chatting with you, with our feet propped up on the Barista table, or our shutting out of hundreds of people in the madness that is our college, or while stealing tequila, or even while being engrossed in Music and Lyrics, I couldn't tell which one of us was which. I could as easily be you as I would let you be me. In fact, I have a feeling, you might be a better me than I ever was. I'm taking you with me, just because I want to do some real living, with a hint of mystery, a dash of refreshing thoughts and a dollop of what-you-see-is-what-you-get attitude in it.

To Autumn,

Full-stops. I couldn't get past them in your life, for the longest time. But once I did, boy was I glad! Beauty in it's truest form, and I didn't exaggerate, although I know you're already thinking that I'm full of shit. Ironically leaves are the most beautiful when they're falling off their life-support system. I look at you and I'm calmed. Soothed. And somehow feel sheltered and protected. Even though, I just want to drop everything and shield you every time I can see something approach you, anything even mildly capable of altering your nature, and more often than not I see it much before you do. You're transitional, dear autumn, but I want to know how you still manage to hold your own. I'm mystified and charmed by your capacity to keep everything bottled up and not let it spill out of the safe valve that you keep it in, out into an audience that would never appreciate and understand the intricacies of so many things close to your heart. I'm glad that when you picked the recipients, it was us. Because your stories, your thoughts, and your concerns are precious. And I don't understand how nobody saw that before. I could have you around me and my mundane life for days, months and years at an end without feeling the need to fill the gaps of silence with any words. But I would probably burst into uncontrollable tears the moment you were removed. You are my ego with a mind of it's own, and you know when to boost me and when to bring me down and somehow amidst all the smoke, boys, the city that's our launch-pad, and the emotions that are our backbone, you managed to trick me into making you my favorite song, just the one that I'm never going to get sick of. Be transitional, but please don't shift, because I wont know where to find you. In my head, you can do no wrong, and even if you do, I could never punish you. For now, I'm taking a little bit of you as my balm.

You compose my years, my life, and define everything that is even half worth defining. It scares me to think that this is the first word in our goodbye sentence. I shudder to imagine, hypothetically, what my life would be like, if I couldn't so much as sense even one of you around. The only existences that I can shut my eyes and picture if ever I wanted to be comforted. The only forces that will keep me going, no matter what. The elements that come together to form the most beautiful tapestry that anyone has ever seen, so much so that I would think it a joke to trade it, even for a second. There's probably a reason why God made four basic elements and directors put four leading girls in every chick flick (I'm sure there's more meaningful stuff to the number four but this is as far as we go). I love you all. More than I am capable of loving. More than I love myself... And that's a first. :)

That's it. I'm not going. 

Soul-Splitting Love,

Spring.

Home

"Tell me your secrets,
And ask me your questions
Oh let's go back to the start.
Running in circles; coming up tails
Heads on a silence apart."- Coldplay


Dear Knight in Faded Armor, 


Your attire was always too uncomfortable and uninviting for me to form any bond with you that went beyond awe and admiration. It kept me at arms length, and soon I learnt, that that was exactly how you had always intended it to be. 


It's been a long and painfully stretched out 25 months. But like I've been repeatedly told recently, I've come a full circle. But this time when we met, you had your guard down, probably knowing that two people can never repeat the same mistake. Two people can never really form anything when they once tried, and effectively failed. Unassuming.


You rendered yourself malleable. Let our interactions, physical, verbal and on so many other intangible levels, take their own course. I guess we've learnt not to stop and contain something pure, and beautiful when it finds its way to you all on its own. We're not ashamed and we don't think ahead of ourselves. How could two people transform so much and not see it until the entire, drastic transformation has fully taken place, even while they've been in each others' peripheral vision the entire time? 


I can call you a friend. And with such warmth, that I suddenly feel light. You're slowly guiding me through a crowd, while your hands stay firmly on either side of me. And you retract them just in time, so I don't get too dependent on the support system that you are. You tell me that kissing me is like walking, talking, eating, or sleeping. It's comfortable beyond measure, but it's all that you need to do to continue breathing. I look up to you when you level life out in front of me, and in the next moment chide you for not knowing when to stop. 


I try deciphering why you push me so much for my own good, but stop short of trying too hard. I try understanding the amused laughter, when you push me around and get me childishly agitated. I try to reason why I don't worry about not seeing you ten years down the line, or why everyone around us, intimate and distant, has formed something out of us. It's something I see too. And it's something that makes me smile. At the time of the shining armor, and the damsel distressed by her own notions, we challenged the time and ended up with bitterness. What we share now, is as good as a sad smile. There's irony in the happiness that we've created in a tiny bubble and don't know what to call. So instead we focus on enhancing the minutest of details that compose this bubble. Rush of blood to the head.


I don't know the answer to that question that repeats itself in my head. I don't know why. I don't know why we can mould and emote and be ridiculous and laugh at how non-ridiculous it feels. I don't know how we end up in one place from another. I don't know how I can bear with you being obnoxious or how you can deal with little subsidiaries of my life. I don't know how we ended up there that night or how we continued feeling and becoming more and more a part of the already formed foundation without much changing. I just know that I don't want it to be taken away from me. Or for that matter, what I would ever do if it was. 


More often than not, I have not heard of very many happy endings to something this beautifully untouched... Just saying.


Love,
The Equally Vulnerable.

Just Mystifying Conformity

"They tell you where you need to go
Tell you when you need to leave
They tell you what you need to know
Tell you who you need to be

But everything inside you know
There's more than what you've heard
So much more than empty conversations
Filled with empty words"- Switchfoot


Rights of admission reserved. 

Contorting that a little bit, admitting something is one of the hardest things to do. So reserving the rights to it, doesn't make life any simpler. For you of course. Everyone else is always trying to make you 'admit' to something. Doesn't matter if it's true or not, just admit it. And you, poor, cornered soul, admit whatever there is to admit anyway, just because it may be the right answer. But it never is. It changes the face of your interrogator within seconds, almost like the light changed from a calm blue to a piercing, hurting red. As for you, the admission suddenly changes everything around you. Just like I'm contorting the initial phrase to base my pathetic rant/argument on, your surroundings will start merging, then distancing, amalgamating, then solidifying, discoloring and then forming their own unusual palette. All of a sudden, you don't know what's the truth anymore. You don't know how you felt in the first place and how you feel now. And whatever you feel, is it a stand-alone thought, unique to your mind, or an amoeba created with now-there-now-not-quite thoughts of these ever-changing minds around yours. How in that case, are the rights reserved with you, pray tell? This is what it actually meant, not on placards and the back of VIP passes, but in the foundation of a social disaster-scene. Reserved with whomsoever shotguns. Shotgun.

Let's not be social monstrosities and lead our own lives and stop drawing invisible lines for others in our heads, and then just conveniently forget to inform them about them. Let's stop becoming unbecoming property assumers on another frivolity-through-life companion. Stop. Let me be. Let it be pure, and plain sweet. And comforting. What will it take for you not to take it away?

500 Days Of Each Season.

What happens when occurrences in your life, one after the other, do nothing but confirm, more and more, that you were, are, and in fact always will be, an outsider. What's worse, is when you find out that you're on this side of the glass window, somehow still intact but probably on the verge of shattering, only because of your naivety and sheer innocence. Or maybe it's just a skill you acquired somewhere along the way, of blindfolding yourself with an invisible emotion every time you thought something was coming at you, that didn't quite fit, or the time for which wasn't quite right, or it wasn't quite as bearable as it should have been. Quite. Quite foolish you'd have to be.

When you're in love, you're supposed to be a fool. Why? Because it isn't reality. It's a fantasy. One that was created as per your own convenience, and composed of your little, fragmented obsessions at the time. But nobody ever talks about how foolish, and vile life itself can be. How foolish you could be while undergoing the process of 'growing up.' But sometimes the process stagnates. And you feel like you'll never learn. Like how many times could you possibly suffer, until the suffering teaches you a lesson. Like how much could you possibly endure, until the last vein connecting your heart to your brain is yanked out. Limitless.

I'd stay a little while longer, if only I could be assured that this time, or the next time, or the one after that, will not end in tears and severe reconciliation of not just the surface skimming factors, but of the soul. 

I'd stay a little while longer, if only the truth was told to my face, and with a trust I couldn't look away from. 

It's like it was said in one of my most favorite movies, of all time. Every time we look back at something we're having a hard time recuperating from, we're probably only looking at the good stuff. The next time you look, look a bit more carefully. 

As I said, I'd stay a little while longer. But that's only if I thought there was something more this place had to offer me. If only it hadn't taken and given to me everything that could have possibly been taken or given. If only my life could turn out the way it had to in the duration of my favorite movie, not necessarily with the same script. If only I could sit here all day, not bother about frivolities that take up my vision, touch and taste, and watch this movie, some brain waves intact. Some nourishment intact. And then... Summer. And soon. Autumn. Throw in a certain Monsoon will you. 

"The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love they leave me breathless
I can’t help feeling..."- Adele

Bleeding White.

"If I don't say this now, I will surely break
As I'm leaving the one I want to take
Forgive the urgency, but hurry up and wait
My heart has started to separate"- The Fray


She looked at him with an innocent face, the eyes inset with a contrasting wisdom. Portraying the depth of those which had seen too much, and felt more pain, than is customary for a delicate being of twenty years. She read too much, and understood too little. She bought what was sold, and kept it close to her heart. Unaware, that the sharpest weapons should be kept the furthest away from such an ornament of consequence. Yet, ornament it was. Fistful of blood. 


If only I could stop watching you. Deciphering what wasn't meant to be deciphered in the first place. 


Tenacity. Who knew it was an art of the immeasurably practiced. To her, it had always been something that came naturally, through everything that she could derive passion from. Only that now, it had to be applied in the opposition. Velocities, friction, speed, rate and time. The physicists of the world could be put through some strenuous tests, if her little mind, body and soul were to be believed. 


You just said no. So was it just for me? Why such preferential treatment of the most negative order? Why can't I be that girl? Shouldn't be so difficult to answer...


She makes her way through the clear space that still manages to tangle her, and make its way to where it matters the most. While she's walking, little salt lines appear, almost magically, on her smooth cheekbones. Purity can so often be misjudged, and even more often made dirty. Which one is it going to be? Because let's face it. It can be either a life of anonymity, or the one that you're leading, beautifully ugly. She never knew what to choose. Reason enough that she landed herself those eyes. Big, light and beautiful. But you still don't want to own them. 


I might die. Would you care then?


He had a million other lives to live, while she lay still, begging for just one. Bathed and devoid of everything but him. 


Probably not. 

Being synonymous to unpicked.

Don't believe.
It's a vicious thing, this love.
It makes you believe, it makes you trust.
It clutches onto your throat and claws its way upto your head, and pounds its way down to your heart.
It tears you, and rips you apart, into a million shards.
Of glass.
Of disbelief.
It cuts you and discards you in a bin of life that you never thought you'd have to see.
Free. Freedom. An impossible attainment. Let me be.
I don't want you anymore. I just need you. I need you to make me feel wanted. 
No. To give me a reason of existence again.
I could make any of your kind do that. But I picked you. And let go of a tiny detail. You didn't pick me.
He picked. Even HE picked. Put all my convictions to shame. Karma. But I'm ok. I promise.
I'll make it go away. Despite my seams of pathos and desperation I'll make your doubts go away. But now I have to go away.
You're wrapping me in unique sheets of isolation. And then hooking me up on the walls of your convenience. You're picking, choosing and deciding and it's nothing that he didn't do to me before, him the one with the option of not having me as an option. Or him, the one with the month to spare. Or him, who snapped out of it just in time and didn't inform me.
I'm used to it. But it's a used I don't want to be. 
A habit I don't want to keep.
I hate this. And I secretly hate enjoying this part of 1 a.m. tears and Classic Milds when I prefer Benson Lights so I just throw half of it away and hope the guards downstairs don't complain. When did it get so bad. That I made peace with my own absurd prerogatives?
It got here today. And I despise today. I want to despise you, if only I could. I'll attend my 8 a.m. lecture and hate it. Stand in the foyer two and a half hours later, and live, then want to relive, the pain. Let you in again just so you can capture me on film. Publish and freeze. Because those are the only moments it's not about your 80-20. I want a 100, and I know that when that happens. It wont favor me. 
The realization, is cutting its way slowly through the point where my wrist meets my palm but I go on, and i just. don't. stop. Only now. Make that 4 seconds worth of rest.
Blink, blink, blink. No sleep. Girls who care too much for their own good, are too far away for mine. But evoke gratitude nonetheless. I can't even dial you any longer. Because you're dreaming. And I just wish I was too.


Good night my almost lover. Summer 2012, wish it were here already.

Dance this life away?

"Tides they turn,
and hearts disfigure.
But that's no concern,when we're wounded together."- Jason Mraz

Wake up one morning, in the same bed, the same house, the same you. Yet everything is different.

You don't complain about the rain anymore. The weather's not too hot anymore. Work isn't taxing anymore. And the hours aren't too short anymore. No, you're not in love. But in the prospect of being.

What happens when you've known someone for two years of your life, not so intimately, but intimate by default. And one morning they're changing the way you look at Bombay monsoons, or determining how many fits of rage, how many bouts of tears, how many shocks of happiness you're entitled to in a day. Or two. Or more.

You might want to get out of the situation. You might want to stay. But it's not upto you anymore. And when it was, you didn't even know you were in the situation.

I don't remember things being this complicated when I was sixteen. Then why do you lie to me and tell me that this is going to be just as if we were sixteen?

All I want to do is hold your hand, when no one's watching, snuggle upto you after a much too intoxicated night, watch every little movement of yours, while you stay focused on Paranormal Activity, with your arm tightly wrapped around my stomach. Watch you whisper to me that I'm beautiful, at the break of dawn. Lie, just for a cup of coffee, benson lights, and you. Steal, looks and smiles, and private dances, in a crowded club. Exchange lives, exchange breaths, exchange souls and still stay intact.

Has it really been a week? It feels like a lifetime. Much too long for you to have been an impervious backdrop to the scenes in my reel of life and not have said a word until now.

Then why is it that when you chose to speak, and step out of every little frame of anonymity, to finally make me see you, you also brought with yourself a window to my old life, the ghosts that refuse to stop haunting. I want you without the memory of my mistakes. I want you without you being hurt or scared, of being you again. I want you, fearless.

I want you, and I don't register the thoughts of others, because when I look at you, I hear laughter, and a friendship, that at least in my head, I forged when I was sixteen.

If only I'd met you then. If only I'd stopped myself. But you're in ink now. And I'm too far along.
"
Encore.