Kintsugi

It doesn’t take much to fall in love with someone.

Sometimes it takes a night of intimacy that leaves you wanting to wake up to them forever.

Sometimes, it takes lying in their arms on a lazy Sunday afternoon while watching the rains fall.

Sometimes, it takes dancing with them amongst people, aware of their gaze on you, on every move you make.

Sometimes, it takes evenings spent walking with your hand held, with fleeting kisses in the shadows.

Sometimes, it takes countless conversations over several months, turning curiosity and interest in adoration.

It doesn’t take much for you to carve a space for their warmth, for their company.

So you begin to pine. For tenderness, for the haven that allows you to be vulnerable, even if it were but an occasional grace.

And you remember. You remember every moment with every fibre of your being. You remember so much, your heart aches.

For it doesn’t take much to fall out of love with someone.

Sometimes, it takes being issued an ultimatum to stay or walk away from them.

Sometimes, it takes being left agape when you tentatively reach out for a kiss.

Sometimes, it takes being conveniently ignored.

Sometimes, it takes having your time and attention trifled with.

And so, with each failed attempt, you approach the next with even less to lose. With each occasion of having your needs denied, of having affection accorded to you in fits and snatches, you pull up the walls even higher.  

You are forever mourning the lack of foresight, the ease with which you give in each time. You are forever grieving the years you keep losing to being hung up over them, chasing them, crying over them.

Until the tables turn and affection comes your way when you least expect it, when you have long given up on the hope of it ever materialising.

But you find yourself cold in the very arms you once sought refuge in. You find no comfort in being embraced, your heart remains still, hardened to the core despite being caressed and kissed in the gentlest of ways. You are no longer moved by the tremble in their voice, the sighs punctuating each pregnant pause, the barely concealed undercurrent of pain that flashes through every now and then.

You could not care less, it would seem.

Too little, too late is perhaps an apt, wise adage, after all.

However you can’t help but ask: what does it take to fall in love with someone yet again?

Does it mean salvaging a bridge from being burnt to ashes? Does it mean refilling and repairing the cracks that snake down to the very foundation?

And, perhaps most importantly, does it mean according a chance at redemption even if those questions continue to remain unanswered?

Verba Volant, Scripta Manent

I write letters – it’s what I do. Writing to someone is an act of love for me, and having others write to me was, and continues to be, a source of great comfort and joy.  

However, it has been a while…a really, really long while since I could bring myself to willingly pick up the pen and write – whether it’d be for the sake of my oft-forsaken introspection, the occasional birthday letters or, for that matter, the rare piece of prose.

For words once written read the same regardless of the time that may have passed. Words that mean something, at least at the time of being written, and it is not difficult to fool oneself into believing that they continue to mean something irrespective of the context leading up to it and thereafter.

As it stands, what had once been a source of great comfort was now a mockery of the very things it represented. My much treasured collection of postcards and letters, instead of standing testament to the fact that I was once loved and cherished, were now reduced to bitter reminders of what I once had and subsequently lost.

It was as if the written word had stopped being my love language.

However, things do find a way of coming back to you. I’d have the occasional friend sending me pictures of notes I’d written to them long ago. They were reminders, as sporadic as they might be, of the fact that perhaps, my words did mean something to others, if not in the same capacity as they meant to me. 

Yet the reminders coalesced into a singular, definite realisation only when one day, a dear friend happened to ask me if I still had the letter she had written to me by way of farewell, when she was in her final year at our college. 

While I looked for that specific letter (so that she could have a picture of it as well), I wound up leafing through my collection once again. I was steeling myself for feeling that familiar anguish that I’d come to associate with all those words, but her letter served to remind me instead of my capacity for love and kindness. That I mattered enough for her, and in hindsight, all those others who wrote to me, to earnestly endeavour towards penning it down. 

And here is why I finally found myself willing to pick up the pen after all. For time will pass, people will change and move on, but their words remain  unchanging, indelibly printed onto the parchment of  their time, their relationships with us. And we write, not in order to be remembered in perpetuity, but to leave behind testaments to our best selves. For others to remember us by, even if they have little else to go on with. 

And so I shall write. So that I may be remembered, fondly, lovingly, as I remember the others.

Affiance, Mislaid

Promises, avowals.

You swore, didn’t you? To stay,

Through thick and thin, for better or for worse,

As goes the adage. As have been the sweet nothings since time immemorial.

I knew better, and I have, for some time now.

For words have failed to be the salve to my wounds

And I wanted more,

More than your saccharine placations,

More than the mirage of a shining future,

More than the home we built for ourselves in our dreams.

I wanted…realities. Small, steady, live realities

That I could envelop myself in,

That I could replace my armour with,

That I could finally call home.

But here we are instead,

On opposite ends of a bridge burnt to its very skeleton,

And I could not care less if it were to turn to ashes,

And drift away in the whistling winds, just as your words did.

So I raise the flame to its denouement

And bury the albatross for good.

Mirage

“Each step I left behind

Each road you know is mine

Walking on the line ten stories high

Say you'll still be by my side”

I think of you often.

(I think of you always.)

Your presence remains affixed in the landscape of my head.

Your existence is something I wish to embrace as if it had ever not been a part of my being.

But time passes, people change and life goes on, and I remain standing where I am, living as if suspended in motion, rooted to the ground.

Would you care to put down roots of your own? Could you?

“When the sun sets we're both the same

Half in the shadows

Half burned in flames”

You wanted to see my scars. You wanted to run your gaze over them, trace their outlines with your fingers, wonder aloud at the history that caused them to appear.

But I was not the only one bearing any, was I?

You do not get to pull the scabs off, while hiding yours.

“We can't look back for nothin'

Take what you need say your goodbyes”

Your touch ghosts over my skin to this day.

I feel the weight of your arm resting against mine night after night.

But it all disappears in the first light of each day, of a world that you could never bear to be in.

“We're leaving the things we lost

Leaving the ones we've crossed

I have to make an end so we begin

To save my soul at any cost”

I wander away from everything I know and hold dear, in an endless hunt for a place I could call home.

And you had said to me once, “Home is where we are, remember?”. 

I try and hold on to those words while I continue to lay adrift.

But my journey takes me farther and farther away from you, and each word I write to you is taken beyond my reach forever.

How could I ever hope to find you where I struggle to find myself? 

[Hola, to anyone who is still reading this, I have managed to come back from the dead. Hopefully, I will keep writing in the months to come. Lyrics credit: Beautiful Crime by Tamer]

Madeleine

Sometimes, you don’t need reminders.

I have carried the thought of you with me like an amulet. Hoping to turn it into an anchor, hoping for it to acquire life outside the four walls of my mind.

Like a colour that bleeds into everything it touches, I hear you speak through other voices, I trace your countenance in other faces.

I may have chosen to bury the corpse of our brief time together in the backyard of my mind, but I’ll be darned if I can forget the moment of no return.

Your eyes are the colour of hazel. Here I was, wrapped up in your arms, looking up to you, and in all that time, it had not occurred to me until I finally noticed.

In that moment, time seemed to stand still. I knew, against my rationality screaming itself hoarse through every fibre of my being, that I had fallen for you.

This was not how it was supposed to be.

You were supposed to be no more than a blip on my radar.

(And will you deny that it wasn’t true for you as well?)

And yet this fleeting encounter - which I envisaged to be my moment of vindication, a badge of appreciation, cherishment even - became the proverbial albatross to be hung around my neck.

Entice me with your hazel eyes, ensnare me with your silver tongue yet again, why don’t you?

And so I wait. I wait till I forget, and let time run its course through my world, blurring away the remnants of your presence from it.

I wait, even though the hope that you find it in yourself to make your way back...meet me halfway perhaps, is but a flame that continues to singe me even as I vainly try to stamp out it.

Memento Mori

Image Credit: Hayley Blanck

Yes, it’s an oft heard refrain. Remember your mortality. Remember that you can’t live forever, that there is – notwithstanding alternative beliefs about multiple reincarnations – this one life, one only life and your days are numbered, your breaths measured…if not by some divine ordinance, then by the sheer uncertainty of our actions and their consequences.

You can never know when the reaper comes knocking at your window, the spear ominously hanging off his shoulder.

How often do we take cognizance of this, though? How often are we mindful of our limited time here?

You would disagree. Of course, our birthdays serve to remind us of the years slipping away from our grasp. Of course, the progression of our lives is invariably charted towards sustenance, toward longevity. The inevitability of death is staved off in name of goals, meaningful pursuits, carousing even.

However, as is said, knowing and realising are two different things.

Let me backtrack a little here – some context is in order. To begin with, I am fortunate to not have lost someone very close to me yet – my maternal grandfather passed away when I was 14, but back then I was perhaps still too young to fully comprehend what such loss entailed. In hindsight, I naturally wish I had cherished my time with him more.

In a span of the past three days, we received news to this effect about two people.

One was a former caretaker to my maternal grandmother and had lived with the family for well over a decade. Scratch that, she had become family, so much so that we looked forward to seeing her just as much as the rest of my maternal family on our yearly trips to New Delhi. She would accompany my grandmother to our house when nani would come to live with us for a couple of months, and while her equation with my nani wasn’t exactly pleasant, she loved me and my mother to bits. I have fond memories of being treated to her sumptuous cooking, of her taking care of my daily schedule whether it was waking me up for school or ironing my uniform the night before, of my mother and I taking her out to eat or to shop for sarees and jewellery.

She was diagnosed with oral cancer a year ago. A stout, sturdy lady who never needed medicines and could work all day long even at the age of 55 was reduced to a mere shadow of herself.

I remember the last conversation I had had with her. It was over six months ago, and she had already returned to her native town by then. “I’ll come for your wedding,” she had said, and I was at a loss for words, for marriage was as such inconceivable for the next couple of years, and who knew?

I don’t remember what I said, but I wished her well and expressed hope at being able to see her once again, hopefully recovered. We would invite her to come visit, despite knowing it was a journey she’d be unable to make as such.

I had once wished to learn cooking from her. Had tried even, five years ago when she had been here and I was yet to start college, but it never materialised into full-fledged lessons.

And to think my grandmother would instruct her about her role in dressing my grandmother for her cremation. My nani lives to this day, hale and hearty.

The other was my paternal grandparents’ neighbour. She was a widow, and both her sons were settled abroad. And yet, I had not seen a livelier, happier person in her stead. Not only a huge support to my dada-dadi but an aunt to us kids – we both addressed and regarded her as our masi. My cousins had been, in some way ,closer to her than I ever could be, courtesy having lived with my grandparents during their childhood, but she had been no less fond of me. 

You could say she was family as well.

And just as unexpectedly some three months ago, she was rushed back home from Australia on account of a paralytic attack. It devolved to brain cancer, albeit at the first stage, and she had every chance of making a full recovery. I had only met her just last week. Chemo was yet to take away all of her hair, and while visibly weakened, she seemed to be pulling through just fine. “All these years, I’ve never even had a fever, and now look at this.” Yet another woman deprived of her sense of self-sufficiency.

My mother and I had not stayed for long, promising to come back soon. As if we took it for granted that she was still around.

What a folly to think that way, indeed.  

Being afflicted with cancer is no longer akin to signing your death warrant these days. And perhaps that is why, on both occasions of receiving the news, I stopped dead in my tracks. 

It was just how it was meant to be, one would say.

Death as a concept, an event even seems surreal to me to this date. An idea I can barely wrap my head around. For it doesn’t take long to get back to the humdrum of daily life, does it? Regardless of how severe the loss has been.

However, for the few moments of disillusionment that do manage to catch hold of you, it’s worth the thought – what do we really take away with us when we die? An identity, painstakingly crafted through the proverbial sweat, blood and tears, generously supplemented with acquisitions galore. All of it left behind.

Except for the memories, also equally subject to the ravages of time.

Which is not to say that I advocate for nihilism as a way of life. That, for the fear of eventual oblivion, I treat everything with a certain degree of irrelevance.

Nonetheless, I’m no stranger to the melancholy of transience. And yet, if mono no aware is anything to go by, it is that beauty lies in impermanence.

I, for one, would be driven mad for the lack of a pursuit. Meaning, whether contrived or intrinsic, has to be sought after. That pursuit is just as undeniable as death itself.

I suppose it is all about walking the fine line between the two eventualities, in our own search for that absolute, unvarnished truth. And so it is.

A Requiem

Image Credits: Lesley Oldaker

Scribbled notes tucked away in borrowed items on being returned. Chocolates left on the desk next to the earmarked book forever lying open. A brief voice note enquiring after the result of an interview. Languorous walks taken in a breathless evening, in defiance of impending deadlines and upcoming events.

And conversations, countless conversations. From moments stolen in between droning lectures to hushed whispers across the library tables. Between bouts of raucous laughter over long-drawn meals and quiet retellings in the dead of the night.

You ask for tangible takeaways. There are none.

You disagree. There are the yearly birthday gifts, that trophy from a hard-fought competition, photographs done up in a collage above your bed. Souvenirs bought and exchanged, interspersed with the occasional postcard or letter. A varsity t-shirt bearing your name, the yearbook with testimonials scrawled across its pages.

The curated albums, the saved messages. A digital trail of your acquaintanceship, retraced over and over.

You hold onto them in lieu of their givers. You parse the bits together to bolster your knowledge of them, reduced to little more than mental constructs.

It is another thing that your memories take on a life of their own.

I rephrase. You ask for tangible takeaways, albeit living and breathing ones.

However, your time has come. Who can stay forever?

In denial of their transience, you forge your memories into a touchstone, hoping against hope that it will weather the erosive caress of time.

But you see, oblivion - even for how impactful our vocation could be - is our inevitable reality.

Nevertheless, I take a step back from this moribund discourse. Your memories fan the flames of optimism, keeping you warm against the cold insularity of your current existence, your uncertain future. Your ideals are at their zenith, raring to go. You have found ardour and kinship after years of painstaking effort and proximity. Why should anyone put a dampener on this vital force?

The thing is, it is not the only comfort zone you’ll ever know. You are young, so young.

I say - revel in your takeaways, tangible or intangible, only as far as it leads you to the next door. To another bridge.

For a chapter can go only so far.