Drunk with you

What is it about you? Seriously, what exactly is it that keeps me so bound, so captive within my heart? What sorcery is this, that doesn’t let me have enough of anything you say or do?

Is it your fragrance, that reminds me of the warm autumns I used to spend back at home, with brown leaves strewn across the courtyard and the musty smell of old tree trunks wafting in the air?

Or is it your touch that shivers every fiber of my body, with a rage I have known not?

Is it your warm embrace that fits perfectly into mine, or is it the split of a second when your beautiful brown eyes sneak a peek at me during a kiss?

So many questions I ask, and you don’t give me any answers. I say, you do feel a lot like my life at the moment.
But seriously, what is it?

I am tired of this silence around me. No voices ask me to stop falling; no hands pull me out when I drown into a pool of memories every single night. Ironically, the only sounds I hear are the deafening fathoms of silence and the only hands I see are the ones pulling me deeper into the abyss.

I cannot keep going like this; I certainly cannot keep going like this. I sure am in transit, but I’m travelling back and forth. And each time, I circle a few blocks and end up at one of my least favorite spots, at square one!

What has happened to me? I seem like a different person, even to my own self. I used to write my own songs back in the day, but now my pen longs to be within my fingers. I used to play those songs too, but now my guitar throws me glares of indignation from a corner of the room. I used to read stories about love and war, now my books don’t delight me with the fresh smell of paper. I used to sketch my own dreams, and now, dream is all I do. In a flash, my life turned into these “used to’s” and I didn’t even notice. Until now of course, and I’m afraid it’s too late. It’s always too late.

Yes, I fell in love, but why does it have to be such a pain? Why do my fears always cripple me down, when all I want to do is run to you for love? I wish I could Google the answers, but life is not a search engine, it is a question bank with no answers. One would argue that wine could make the questions easier, but alcohol does not get me drunk, what I am drunk with, is you. And I have a feeling this hangover is going to last forever.

With all of it said, there’s one last thing; I love you. And I still hope it’s you and me in the end. 

The timeless journey

What do I write with a pen which fades away after etching a few thousand words on a piece of paper? How do I keep a paper as a memento of remembrance when it reaches the bottoms of the dustbin in no time? Leaves die with the adagio of time; flowers wither in the storm of ignorance. What then do I hold on to, when the world is full of things which are compelled to leave some day?

An encumbering weight burdens my chest, the pain is intense. But why do I have to be the only one to feel this pain? Why is everyone rejecting me like a bad organ transplant? Why does the feeling of obscurity sting my conscience day and night? I have no clue. The answers seem blurred in a mist of ignorance.

They say expectations hurt. They’re wrong. Expectations kill you slowly, making you realize how little you mean to the people who mean a lot to you.

Life has taken an unknown turn, and I don’t know where to go. I’m standing at a crossroad, with so many untaken roads ahead of me, having no clue which one to choose. The only way I want to walk is walk back, to the place where I could make some repairs. But that road behind me is closed. There’s no looking back now. Gone are the days of ecstasy, and gone are those shades of freewheeling.

A new morning awaits me, as I duel to get past the shackles of abandonment. It’s not about the things now that my heart could do; it’s all about the things that it refuses to do. And I have to go on, until the scars of treachery are healed by the ointment of affection. I have to wait with stretched hands till the gaps between my fingers are filled by a soft caring hand. There’s so much to do and so much to get, I’m tired of walking this aimless journey. But I have to go on, because giving up is never an option.

The future is scary, but I can’t just run back to the past because it’s familiar. Yes, it’s tempting, but it’s a mistake. It’s more than time that I get a move on, try to negotiate with the shadows and still keep my own light burning.

The past was wet with tears of seclusion, but they have all dried up now. I am a hundred years older than yesterday, and time has camouflaged every wound in my heart. But sometimes, on a sleepless silent night, when her thoughts creep in stealthily in my mind, a tiny drop of tear walks out of my eyes and vanishes into an air of indifference. Yes, I cry in solitude, and my tears are the only friends that I’ve managed to hold on to. But in between the sniffles, when the cool night breeze ruffles up my hair gently, I drift along towards an age-old dream, a dream that is in my eyes since I had known to feel.

I sit and sigh as the euphoric scenes flash in front of my eyes, where I see her staring out of the window with her deep blue eyes, and sing to her in my black guitar. She listens intently to each word of my song and when I’m done, comes closer to me and places a moist kiss on my forehead.

All of this I want to be real, but for now, everything seems blurred in a mist of imagination.

No promise stands firm, no trust remains unbroken, only the dreams lay scattered like dead leaves of the autumn. And I drag my tired feet along, waiting for my time. Praying for today and dreaming for tomorrow, I keep walking, chasing the light at the end of the tunnel. I do not know where destiny has planned to end this journey, but my feet our suffering with the wounds of deception. I have walked a long way in hope for resurrection, and I have to walk on, until I reach the place which yet remains unrevealed.

And so I walk, on and on and on…..

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how difficult my life is, I guess its time to spare a thought on how impossible it is…  

The other side of me

                                   

How often has it happened to you that your life hasn’t cared to walk on the decisions you’ve taken for it? How often has your heart refused to go through the routine you’ve penned down for it? Surrendering to the urges and fighting the oppositions of your mind, how often have you repeated the same mistake which made you cry your heart out once? You’re right, it happens to you all the time.

True love, they say, happens just once. Fools they are, because love is not a variable to be determined. Instead, it is the only root which satisfies all complicated equations of life. How strange it is that love can only be accepted and not resisted. But it is even stranger that resistance to it makes you terribly vulnerable, a state where all your explanations to yourself do not seem to be a part of the answer.

It took me some time to free myself from the tentacles of affection. In fact not some, a lot of time. And during this time, I kept telling myself one thing and one thing only:

‘I’m not falling in love again.’

And I succeeded too. For the moment, my heart had stopped responding to the stimulations of love, my mind had shut itself to the forced awkward situation called dating. I had managed to turn into a perfect embodiment of abstinence. But no matter how permanent I wanted my resistance to be, it just faded away like the colors of an old painting.

I don’t remember the day, but I remember everything about it. I saw her. One flash, and there were streaks of lightening in the darkness I’d chosen for myself. She came like the winter sun and spread herself in my life like the rays of autumn. I began to smile again, my heart started to feel again, and my mind, my mind hassled to refresh the bitter experiences of past to stop me, but failed against her constant temptations.

Her skin glowed on a coating of velvet; her eyes stared at me with a promise of healing all my wounds. I looked at her and couldn’t look away. I tried not to fall in love with her, but couldn’t bear her distances. It took me a while to decipher the reason for all my anomalies, but now I know what it is. I’m in love again.

All resistance failed, the ignorance faded off. She entered my life without knocking on the door, and now I couldn’t get her out. She kept telling me that she wasn’t pretty, but I could never tell her that she was the prettiest thing I ever saw. I could never tell her that her eyes stared at me like daylight and narrowed like a golden deer when she smiled. Of all the things I could’ve told her, there was one thing which I never wanted to ask. But fate does not give us a chance to choose, it only gives time to regret.

‘You can never be mine, can you?’ was the only thing I managed to say to her.

And even though I could bet my life on what her answer could be, I swear that my heart skipped a beat at that one moment. The leaves stopped swaying, people stopped moving, everything seemed to be still as I waited desperately for her to lip the words ‘Yes, I can.’

‘No…,’ she said with a sigh, ‘but I love you.’

And I laughed at the addition of the last three words. They all say they love you, don’t they? The only unfortunate thing about their ‘I love you’s’ is that there’s always a ‘but’, either in the beginning or at the end.

‘Yes, she loves me,’ I tell myself, ‘but I’m just like the teddy bear she wants to cuddle.’ Its true, isn’t it? She couldn’t throw me away, but then, I’m not something which she wants forever.

But why am I so upset about this? It happened the last time too, only with a different girl! And the fool that I am, I let it happen to me again.

Why me? Why does it always have to be me? Why do I always have to let go of something I desperately want to hold on to? I have no clue.

But strangely, there’s a positive side to all of this. And that side of me makes me what I am. I felt again, I loved again, and if my fate would have pushed a little further, I could well have been loved again. I see this as a sign of hope, of happiness, of contentment. In spite of the invincible shields of obscurity I had pulled over myself, it took her just a smile to get through my defenses. Maybe it’s good that this happened to me. Because it told me that I’m probably not what I’m trying to become. I’m perhaps the self which I’m trying to run from. Maybe I’m made to love, to care, to expect. Maybe I haven’t changed at all; rather, I never really knew who I was.

They say everything’s beautiful if it ends well, and if it’s not beautiful, it’s not the end. Maybe there’s more to my love story. Maybe fate is too busy arranging for a perfect setting for me to walk into the perfect girl. And so, I’ll wait for that day. Because if being with the wrong girl was such a beautiful feeling, I wanna feel what it would be like to be with the right one.

And so I’ll wait, wait for that beautiful day. When the gaps between my fingers would be filled with that one hand I’ve been longing to hold. But till then, I’ve only one thing to say to myself:

‘I’m not falling in love again…!’

                                                                                                                                

       

The park bench.!

I went there often, silently walking past the strewn leaves, watching the trees sway lifelessly in haphazard circles. Those silent evenings, when the shadows of insomnia dawned upon me, when my legs got paralyzed by an overdose of obscenity, the broken bench on the far end of the park was my only shelter.

Why did I go there, I asked myself. What were the questions that impinged me so much, whose answers made me trace the lonely road to the park bench so often. And then, just as I started to close my eyes to the superfluous scenes of decadence, I was answered by the silent breeze ruffling my hair with a touch of silk. I was answered by the birds in chorus, infecting the evening air with their eternal melody.

I realized the unfortunate dilemma I was in. I missed something, someone. The emptiness all around me screamed like an unleashed beast, and so there I was, clutching the ends of a tilted bench, struggling to make my life straight.

For the long hours that I spent on the park bench, I got a feeling that someone is watching me from miles apart. Someone special, someone who was a very close friend and a priceless
soul mate. I looked up at the moon, shining with an abeyant glow, and thought about her. A portrait so flawless, a beauty so serene. Why was she so far away from me? Why did it have to be this way, I thought. But the feelings of endearment appeared to blur in a hurricane of compulsion.

Tired by the third degree of emotional torture every time, I rise and start walking back on the dark aisle, when suddenly, the encumbering thought hits me like a tracer bullet. Life is difficult, I know it is, but without her, it is impossible. I miss her, I miss that special one.
I miss the pancakes in her kitchen, I miss the cups of coffee she brewed up to keep me awake while studying, I miss her divine touch on my forehead, I miss everything about her a lot.
Yes, I miss my dear mother a lot……..

Speed of thoughts.!

The mind is a racecourse, lined with a crowd of dismantled spectators, each pumping with an abrading pressure of expectation within. The grass fades in a torment of anxiety, fences crumple under the emotional juggernauts, and running around in the track of ambition are horses of our thoughts, thumping the ground with the exuberance of hope.

There’s a busy street inside my head, with a cacophony of wild thoughts racing up and down. There’s so much to think, so much to realize, every nerve pounds with a frantic expression of pain.
What are these thoughts all about, except for a boulevard of broken dreams and few pinnacles of delirium? Running around like animals in an abattoir, is this the only proximity we have with ourselves?

My mind throbs with the aberrant thumping of these thoughts, my brain cries to abjure the malignant resurrection of emotions, but little as we could do to tame the laws of nature, there is certainly no way to abscond from the manacles of oblivion. Worries come and go in the debris of uncertainty, leaving us all only to fiddle with a cataleptic paradox.

Only sometimes, on a silent drizzling night, I sit on the window sill, sipping away at the beverage of contemplation, thinking hard about the conspiracies of my mind. I wish I could give words to my thoughts, I wish if ever the puppets of my imagination could dance on the floor of reality, but the fast moving thoughts seem to slow down the vehicle of introspection in me. I sit there for hours, feeling the gentle splashes of rain on my face and the cold night breeze ruffling my hair, but the answers appear to be dizzy as always, hidden away behind a dark cloud of hysteria.

The journey that I’m traveling, the journey of following my thoughts, is tiring me like a corpse. One moment, I’m in the meadows, chasing the colorful butterflies of joy, and the next moment takes me to a world full of animosity. The race between my thoughts is getting fierce with each passing day, and I couldn’t hold on to the halter of my horse anymore.

Is it always going to be this way, I ask myself. Are the shadows of obscurity going to haunt me like a year-long nightmare forever?
I close my eyes in search of stability, but all I see is an arena of abhorrence.
And then, the night of mental Olympiad ends there. I shut the window and turn towards my bed, hoping to sleep off a peaceful night.
And just when my dreams start to take me down a long lost memory lane, I suddenly realize that the intense speed of thoughts has taken me far, far away from the life I desired…..

Sweet lies.!

I sit aloof, thinking deeply about the intricacies of life, only to discover the grave truth of pain and treachery in every step of it. I hate it to be this way, I hate to be a part of the brutal side of humanity, yet all I can do is sit back and be its victim. Peace of heart is all I dream of, peace of mind is all I crave for, but the road to peace has so many potholes on it, even the annotations of strength are shaken to disparity.

Life is too preoccupied, with dreams in the line of fire and ambitions at gunpoint. And here we are, surviving every minute of it, trying in vane to see through the camouflage of deception. The only way to shield the obnoxious feelings of delinquency is to be alone, far, far away from the crowd of incognitos. I have a reason to be in love with solitude, and the reason, though unfortunate, is perfectly in view of deferment.

The question we always keep asking is, do we ever get all that we desire?

But the question which we should try to answer is, do we really deserve all that we desire?

A small act of subterfuge annihilates all our feelings, a subtle pain of departure sucks the life out of us, but is it really worth losing our spirituality to a series of trifle misunderstandings? Is it smart to feel secured living in a house of cards, knowing that an eventual storm of dejection is on its way to bring it down?

Life has never promised us anything, nor has god. But people have.

Some said they will never leave us-lie!

Some said they will love us till death-lie!

Some said we are most special-lie!

Some said they’ll be with us forever-lie!

But then, life is made of such sweet lies. All that matters is how we face the time when we finally realize that these are just lies. We may ask, “Wouldn’t life be much better without them?”

But in reality, the times we lived on those lies were the only times we lived…..