Your smile half-asleep

Most days are laid out in front of me

Like freshly ironed sheets

Everything seems so new again

 Unfamiliar, Uprooted

 A part of me feels too old to learn the tricks all over again

To reconcile myself to the new ways

 To the new world of yours which you inhabit so effortlessly

I long for the familiar old room

The walls that have heard so many of our whispers, our tears,

The window that saw us through many rains, unspeakable heat,

The old ways, the old life.

Most of all I miss those Sunday mornings

Walking to your place before the world woke up,

 before you woke up,

climbing into your bed,

And you would smile half asleep,

and that meant everything to me.

.

Can you feel the loss?

What is a year to you when
 you have seen so many?
Today they all rise, raise their hands
 and shout and cheer, "This year was the best".
Didn't they say the exact thing last year too?
You can barely separate one year from another,
 They all seem to occur all at once,
 As though time has stretched and bent
 and collapsed altogether, Just today
 while throwing the ball at a four year old child
You suddenly remembered how you had come up
with one excuse after another in order
not to get up at 5 in the morning
to go for march past practices;
You wish you had gone instead
 But that was four years ago
 Not this year that is ending
You wish you had told them you didn't eat the chocolate,
 Just thrown it away because
Because you were six years old
You wish you were better at being yourself
You wish you had said a few more things to people
 You wish you hadn't stopped yourself
 Because you didn't want to open old wounds

You wish, more than anything, that you had written more

 Instead of  stupidly violently hurting

On your own

Can you feel the loss?

Heartburns

Do you remember that time of the year
When K. spent days sitting by the window,
smoking more than he could bear,
 filtering in and out of love
And S. was not keeping well,
 lying in the sofa, deep within the blankets,
reading her Greek tragedies,
 morose and moody and dark
A. kept arranging the flowers,
or plucking them or whatever it was
 she was doing with those flowers,
I just remember them all over the place.
I kept waiting you know,
kept waiting for you to call
I was so easily distressed,
so prone to bouts of despair
When you had something else to do
Perfectly valid I knew but even then
there were those heartbreaks I suffered from
Silently painfully
I could envision not having someone to come to
 at the end of the day and that made me dreadfully sad
even though I knew full well I was too young
and mustn't worry about things like that,
like my mother would say
 I don't know what it is that you did to me
 and how my heart tore in a way I couldn't bear.
 But those December heartburns,
 how it drove us all quite mad.

How strangely and awkwardly the days past, 

Days blurr into months and years, as though it happened

 within a click of our fingers and now it has paused, slowed down

And how we are all grappling with our lives

Valiently, sometimes indifferently, forever given to despair

And everyday we tell ourselves we are too far behind

How we envy those who know for sure

We are given to frequent daydreams

Inquiring about insignificant details

Of what flowers we would put in the office

Once we get the job

Which place to travel to with our first paycheck

No other age has been as startling as the one

we have finally stumbled into late one night

Intoxicated with wine, peering stupidly at the mirror

Unaware of the threshold we had crossed

Such electrifying glory it was,

Given to great depths of joy 

And to think that all of this will be gone too

In a flash right in front of our glazed eyes,

Dissolving into each other like mist.

Consolation

You are at age when nothing holds you,

Any slight contact with the world bruises you

You write

 but it's not quite writing

More of strange words disconnected from each other

Each word sitting alone

Unable to reach out 

and form a sentence.

There is too much thrashing and clawing

 for things that are too early for you to grasp on to.

And hope and belief seems fraudulent words

Your young heart is wary of them already,

Suspicious, watchful and stays away.

You dread the cold immense nights stretched out infront of you,

with daytime so far away

You still haven't gotten used to loneliness

Not yet.

But there are certain consolations, you tell yourself

Soaking in the warm winter sun with the book

 you were supposed to save up for the dreary days of December.

 And walks, long solitary aimless walks

 in which you end up dreaming out loud to yourself.

But what you really have

you don't know yet.

And that partly makes up

For what you can no longer call your own.

Dreaming from far away

Grief comes
and recedes
like waves
The eyes forget
the contours of your face
Your smile is etched briefly
Then fades, smudges over
We are the broken columns of sunlight
Illusions of youth,
 holding fire in our hands.
As though all our lives have been
building up to reach this point
Spilling over, falling over
like schoolgirls running up stairs
 late for class, brimming with mirth,
jostling ahead of each other,
uncontained.
Like stepping over an edge,
 Hesitating, but quite willing
Certain till a point but certainty has
 its limits, like all elements.
Love is but a paint coated over stone
Lying near a puddle
Being stepped over by hundreds of foot
Yet you remain
 Longing and falling and changing
Like creatures shedding their skin
and growing them again
Deciphering words from shadows
in places that you have long
 outgrown but continue to hold you.

You left abruptly

You left abruptly 

Left with the dark of the night

Before sunlight found its way to me

Through the slight parting of the curtains 

In your room which is so full of you 

Even when you are absent 

I woke up without you 

And I haven't heard from you since 

Your letter i carry with me 

Holding on to the last of you 

Panic rises and subsides like tidal waves 

Thinking of how fragile our world is,

That two years worth of everything can disappear without trace 

In that unknown place between sleep and wakefulness 

there is too much and too less in what we are 

You vanish so easily from my world 

But I m terrible in my love for you 

That you are gone 

And that i have to do these all alone-breathing, waking up, laughing, smiling, frowning, 

There are lives that i collide into 

Your friends,  our friends

The places which you filled 

And fitted into, so snugly so effortlessly, empty now, abandoned 

As though things were dying 

In your absence i tell myself that i am imagining things

Even though silence rings loud

Disturbs, hurts, like the clinging of metal on metal 

But I hang on to the promise 

you had kissed me before you left