A Colossal Rant

I’m coming here after six months. I’ve been away from this place for so long that I’ve forgotten how it used to make me feel. I’ve forgotten the tapping of the of keys in synchronised motion weaving magic on the screen; miss how each word, each letter I put down made me tingle, feel a multitude of emotions. Staying away from writing for so long, I feel like I’ve been rusting, wasting away in the chaos. Writing here was my single greatest support. It kept me going. Pouring words out like winds gushing through a tunnel, giving it a face and a memory, a digital forever among the clouds, kept me intact. For some reason, losing parts of my thoughts to this contraption I sit in front of gave me peace. It set my mind at ease, my thoughts weren’t swivelling around like knives in the darkness. It felt like a bandage instead, like someone resuscitating me every time I drowned in a sea of encores.

In all honesty, I did try writing something from time to time. but every time I did, I lost hope midway, lost patience and the will to keep going. My words began slurring. They began trembling, tossed around in the night sky like a paper bag, caught in a whirlwind, getting spun around over and over and over again until I begged to die in peace. And so that’s what I did. I gave it mercy. I showed compassion towards my writing. I killed it. By killing it, I gave myself up. Naked to the daggers in my head to cut me open from within. You see, my thoughts are my greatest adversary. I cannot control them. They kill me little by little. And the last few months, I’ve been trying and failing miserably at coping with them. Now, I’m here, walking on shards of glass, pierced and porous, broken and bleeding, dragging myself to the only thing I’ve known that would heal me, make me whole to continue my everyday masquerade.

The last two years have been nightmarish, harrowing experiences I wouldn’t wish on anyone. You see, I fell out of grace, lost my livelihood, my dreams, my money and love. I was suicidal in January 2021. I was on the brink of falling over. I was numb in February 2021. I had lost all sense of the living. I was a ghoul in March 2021. I woke up, mechanically did chores and slept. In April, I caught the pandemic and lay hoping to die away. That felt like the best way to go. Hoping to die a death that came to millions, quiet and noiseless, missed by none and buried away in a quiet corner where I could enjoy a peaceful shade and some kind flowers gracing my bed. But it wasn’t meant to be. I lived through it. And when it was over, I took a trip through the Himalayas just because I was afraid of my own shadows, because I was running away from my thoughts. When I interviewed for the company I’m working for now, my employer asked me what I found in the Himalayas. I told him I don’t know. I still don’t know. I don’t think I found anything there. I was broke, alone and lifeless when I went there. I found the mountains mystical and the place filled with life. In stark contrast, I was grey. I was dying and could barely absorb the colours. I could never understand how I felt so lifeless while the world around me was teeming with it.

So, I took a motorcycle and went around the place, walked trails that led me nowhere, stayed up nights after nights in the bone chilling cold stargazing. The cold around me felt refreshing. I was so used to feeling it under my skin that watching my outsides grow numb felt like a different experience. In addition to that, the winding roads to places untouched by humankind felt alluring. So, I followed them and I found a place I loved. Devoid of our kind’s touch, it was pristine. I felt at home there. It reminded me of a place I chanced upon back in Bath. A rickety stone bench with the inscription ‘Hither from noisy crowds I fly. Here dwells soft ease and peace of mind’. It was on top of the Bathwick Hill along the Skyline Walk. Sitting there in the evenings after work, I saw buildings and people like insects scrambling, darting back and forth from stone figurines to metal contraptions, then racing away down the paved streets till I could see them no more.

I honestly don’t know what I found there, literally in the middle of nowhere but I did find something. Not the will to live but a reason to continue. The place and the travel had worn me down so much that my thoughts felt heavy. I couldn’t think anymore. I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep so much that at the end of the day, the minute I went to bed, I slept. No dreams, nothing at all, just silence and the darkness shrouding me in its warm embrace. The only time I’ve felt that way, devoid of thoughts or an aching mind had been the times I’d been on a motorcycle. When you’re on one, things go past you so fast that you have no choice but to concentrate on the road if you wish to stay alive. No room for empty thoughts, no chance of zoning out into the horizon. Eyes on the road if you wish to reach the place you’re hoping to reach. The might mountain range had saved me this time from wilting away from within. So, I got back home and began finding a job and that’s how I ended up in the place I’m now. This time, I wasn’t driven by a purpose. My fire was fuelled by a need to keep going.

I’m now fourteen months into my job. It’s keeping me busy for five days a week. I don’t see a career. I waste away on the weekends. I live under a rock cut off from almost everyone. Barely any family in my life, no friends, none whatsoever. I’ve stifled the part of me that felt emotions. Now, I walk in every morning like I’ve done all these months, work till its done and go back home to sleep. I watch mindless things to keep me busy. I’ve lost my curiosity. Things don’t excite me anymore. I live, work and drink away in a corner quiet and unnoticed.

I think I’m at a better place now than where I was two years ago. It doesn’t pain anymore. I don’t burst out crying spontaneously anymore. I don’t hide away in a room for weeks in a row, unwashed and weary. I know I’ve reached nowhere. But I’m moving, and I’m glad that I’m.

Why am I here today and now? Because I felt like I was slipping today. It all started last night. It was just another Saturday night, I was alone in my room. Not really alone but I have shut out my roommates whom I do not talk to and so by all definitions, I was alone. I had watched a movie like every other Saturday and had slept off. But then unlike every other Saturday, I had a dream and she was in it. The big, wide smile that fills her face every time she was happy and those worn out sneakers she tries to hide away from the world was unmistakeable. Her words. Her presence. Most of all, her eyes. Green and blue and honeydew yellow all at once swam around me like fireflies in the pitch darkness. I loved staring into them. She was mesmerisingly beautiful. She felt like a rainbow in the middle of my storm.

We were walking like we used to. I saw it so clearly, flashes of images connecting it to the memory I’d take with me to my grave. We got down from the bus right by the Pulteney Bridge. It was 6 PM on a cold evening and our classes were done. Shadows rushed by us. Cars, dogs, people in a hurry and I felt like I was in slow motion walking next to her. The wind blew her long hair over my face and I felt the tickles in my dream like it used to feel. Her heels clicking on the cobblestones. Her fingers in mine, but not quite. She had the lightest touch, like a leaf falling on a stream, being pulled downstream. In this case though, she was the gentle leaf and the stream. We walked past dizzying lights caring for none, she talking and me smitten. A Music Shop. A busy Petrol Pump. Supermarket with an empty parking. I remember crossing them but don’t remember a thing about them. Before I knew it, it was 7 PM and we were at her place and I was faced with the hardest task of the day, saying goodbye to her.

In the recent past, it had been so long since i dreamt of her that just a few flashes of her face made me weirdly happy.

If you must know, we never dated. Not once. It all happened in the middle of the pandemic. Nobody could go out. We made elaborate plans to go to all of the cafes we’d come across in town. We planned to drink whiskey and dance away even though I hated dancing. But we never did any of those. Then again, I never loved her and she never did either. But we had something special that gets us talking for days, weeks and months in a row, everyday. We never spoke about each other. But we talked about the world for hours and hours. We found each other in how we saw the world. We talked about marriages, politics, sex and just about anything under the sun, it was so magical. Have you ever experienced talking to someone? Like, really talking to someone, pouring your heart out? I did and I never found anyone else like that.

Somedays I sit and wonder what it would’ve been like had we dated. When’s the night’s calm and I’m left alone with my thoughts, I imagine my life with her. I can speculate of course but can never know how it would’ve turned out. It used to hurt a lot thinking about it that way. I mean, I was there. We were there, in the middle of it. We were the protagonists of that story and I was thinking about it like it was someone else’s story. It cut me deep every time I was pulled into it. Nowadays however, I know there isn’t a chance in hell for that to happen and I’ve come to terms with it. So, it doesn’t hurt much. It still stings though on some days like today.

It was a lofty dream based on a life I had eons ago. Even after so long, it still haunts me enough to spend a whole day pouring over it. It even scared me enough to do this, begin writing again. I’m currently reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and I feel a likeness to the protagonist, Toru Watanabe who loved a girl and lost her to the wind. I’m still at that part though. So, no spoilers please.

The one thing I’ve learnt about the past from all of my attempts is that you can never recreate it. I’ve tried doing it so many times but I never could get it right. It has always remained elusive. When the clock strikes midnight and you start the next day, it all stops being real, vanishes into the sky like the mist on a winter morning. No matter how many times I try to put the pieces back together to arrive at the feelings I felt at that very moment at that very point in my life, it doesn’t happen. Instead, I end up creating new memories which exists alongside my older ones.

Losing her and everything else I had pushed me to the brink of oblivion but her thoughts brought me back to this. I suppose I can be thankful for that. But I hope that it doesn’t happen this way. Because I still miss her.

If you had taken the time to read through all of that, I thank you. Until I see you again.

The Life I Lost

My last post on this blog is dated 2 January 2022. I wrote that account about two months prior to posting it. If you were to ask me how the last one and a half years had been for me, I’d say ‘pure turbulence’. Chaos. Confusion. I kept sinking to a new low every day. I was forced out of a life that I was trying to build around myself, dreams that I had been nurturing for years, the work that I had sunk into realising it, and in one minute, it all came crashing down. And I could not accept the new reality.

I spent weeks in bed, barely ate or showered. I couldn’t imagine a future. There was nothing I could look forward to. I was tired. Of living. Of everyday. I just wanted to give up and walk away forever. I kept spiralling downwards.

You see, I had built a career for myself, had envisioned a life and worked years to finally attain it. I was in a beautiful city in a wonderful country. My biggest fear was waking up from that dream one day and I realised it in February 2021. One fine day, I lost it all. My visa extension was denied. I lost my job because of that. I lost the one person I adored because I had to leave. One minute I was this guy at his best at work, preparing for a marathon, spending his weekends working in a charity and merry making, being at a place to be happy. The next minute, I had lost it all. I was nothing.

I came back home at the age of 29, nothing to my name, no future, no present, lost and desolate. I was broken to the core. I truly believed that I had lost my spirit. But I’ve come back. I’m on the road to recovery. It took me almost eight months of soul searching to arrive at where I’m now.

They say pain makes you write. That it feeds your writing spirit. I believed in it until I felt it. Pain stopped me on my tracks. Pain crippled me. It tossed me about like a yacht in the storm. Dragged me down time and again but somehow, I did not stay down. I guess you can attribute it to my fighting spirit or whatever I had left in me. I kept coming back up for air. I wasn’t going to wilt away and die just because I could not afford to live the life I had wanted.

It took a lot of efforts. I gave up on the world. Ignored everything that anyone said, turned a blind eye to society, its rules and everything it values. I began work on my reality. I worked on building my life up block by block, stick by stick. I built a future for myself. I sculpted it from scratch. I’m not sure if it is the right one for me. But it is the one I’m going to go with.

I’m not a 100% now. I’m not the person I was back then before this had transpired in my life. My pain has changed me. I’m a lot quieter now, a lot more serious. I don’t have many friends. My days are spent working, weekends freelancing, nights planning on my future. I’ve gone ahead and made my life so busy that I do not have time to cry or be depressed anymore.

I do not want to be that person I was a year ago, lying in my bed, unwashed, tired, depressed. I do not want to be that person, running away in the middle of the night hoping to never come back. And I will work to ensure that I don’t end up there. I don’t know what my fuel is, don’t know what drives me. But I’m moving forward, every second of every day.

If you were to ask me if I had accepted my new reality. I’d say no. I haven’t accepted it. It gets to me often. I scream at the wall, at my life, at things around me often. But I’ve realised that I’ve got no choice.

 To be honest, the old life has faded away. I don’t remember much of it now. It has become an old scar now. Some memories remain, most of them twisted by my emotions, twisted beyond the point that I no longer feel that was what transpired in my past.

I would not wish this pain on anyone. I cannot imagine how I lived through it, so crippling. I hope that you never get to face it, ever. Even if you did, I hope that you have the strength to pull through.

Darkness be my guide.

This lonely journey be my ordeal.

My destination is a mystery.

My today, stillness.

I trudge on.

One step at a time.

Crawling sometimes,

but moving forward nevertheless.

This pain be my enemy.

It be my fuel.

It be my fighting spirit.

It won’t go away.

I’m it and it is me.

Ripped wounds would stay ripped

Yet

I’ll hide it beneath the yellow daffodils;

Layer it with unbreakable cobblestones

And keep walking.

This pain won’t consume me.

I won’t be my wound.

Won’t be the sad, old poet in a dingy pub

Drinking his days away

Talking tales of lost life, drowning in it.

Life is a struggle indeed

But it is unending.

You lose one.

Begin another one.

The end is untrue.

No return is a fallacy.

The end comes when you’re dead.

And while you’re living,

You can always begin a new life.

Just keep walking,

One step at a time.

One day at a time.

One goal at a time.

You’ll get there.

You’ll get it all.

One day, you will.

Remember, you got this. Never ever let yourself forget that. Ever.

The above is a snippet taken from the author’s own life. It has not been plagiarized from anywhere.

The Great Struggle

What does struggle mean to you? No, I’m not talking about the ‘trying to find a job’ struggle. I’m talking about the ‘trying to figure out your shit’ struggle.

Everyday I write, read, trek, ride, laugh and cry and love and hate, yet I feel hollow. I feel empty. I feel like I’m trying to live a life that I don’t believe in anymore. I feel like I don’t want to wake up in the morning anymore.

I find the material world superficial. I don’t believe in my job even though I enjoy walking into my office everyday; I suspect it has been the one keeping me from finally losing it. I find society despicable; religion, moronic and the everyday struggles of getting to work on time, trumping office politics, eating pizzas and celebrating birthdays of colleagues one cares nothing about to be simply a futile effort by the 21st century humans to stay occupied till they pass on.

I feel that we can satisfy the body, the mind, even the heart but how do you keep the soul happy? Do you simply keep deceiving it till you die? Do you keep it in the dark, prevent it from asking questions ever or do you just force it to believe in the half-arsed answers that you say everytime it questions you?

You see this is why I’m struggling. I’m unable to answer the question that dwarfs every other question. (No, it is neither the existence of aliens nor if the earth is flat; goddamn flat earthers!).

Why do we exist? Why do we have a conscious? No, humans are not born just to procreate and fuck off. What is our purpose, both our collective one as a society and the individual one? Is it just to run a 100 metre distance faster than any other man, be happy with a piece of metal with a personal belief that being fastest equals being better, or is it only to use paper bags and plant trees and call out imbeciles and racists at every turn?

Can we do more? Can we be more? What are our limits? Can we go beyond the horizons of what we know and hold important, and look at the bigger picture?

Days like this, I honestly miss my innocence.

That day

the kettle tipped over

water fighting

the fire within;

organs set ablaze.

Mind

under duress

of the etched memories

trying to salvage what’s left

of the once green innocence.

The wasted tea

of thoughts

flowing down the abyss;

letting go

all what was held dear.

Healing yet

the plasters fail to hold,

the cracked kettle

shattering in my vice;

pieces thrown under the bed

in places

beyond my reach.

No way to sew them

back whole.

I sit

in a windowless room

pondering

wishing for the sun

to burn us to the heavens today.

Maybe death is all we’ve got to live for.

All parts of the above account are the work of the blog owner and has not been plagiased from any source online or otherwise.

The Demise Of The Escape Artist – A Short Narrative

I have always been an escape artist in everything I’ve done, or not done.

I ran and ran from every situation. I hid my shame. I hid my disgust with my life. I concealed my emotions and true my feelings. I never said what I intended to say. I chose to walk away from situations and people instead of facing them.

Everytime I was faced with a situation where I had to bear shame, embarrassment or someone’s disappointment in me, I tried as much as I can to distract myself from feeling it. I told stories to myself stories where I did not have to face shame or embarrassment; stories where I was happy and everyone was happy and life went on.

I sold myself surreal realities. I told myself fables of kings and knights where the righteous won and everyone lived happily ever after. I transported myself to worlds within my minds, structures and narratives carefully sculpted by me to not face the situations that I was faced with. The more I did, the more I got disconnected from my life, my realities.

When I started getting disconnected, I started seeing my hurdles as mountains I needed to cross instead of the pebbles they really were.

But I guess life always finds a way to get to you, to teach you lessons. It did for me. When I came around, my fables were waiting for me. With time, all my alternative realities, the actual ones and all the escapism I performed over the years finally caught up to me.

There was no running anymore, no shadows to hide in, no crevasses nor safe abodes to wait out the storm.

Now I know who and what I’m. I know what I’ve done for years. I know the damages that’s been done to myself, by myself. I tried to go back; thought back to all the times when I had run away, tried to figure out how I should’ve faced them in the first place. But there was nothing to be done. I regretted everything that was said and done, I wished with everything I had to change my past.

But, its all over and done with now.

What matters now is what I’m doing from this day forward. Life, once lost, can never be gained. Ever since my realisations, or to put it closer to the truth, my pockets of realisations that I had over time; over a varied series of events that happened in my life, a kind of an uneasy chaos seems to have dawned upon me. Its as if I’m not me anymore, what I’m feeling is not mine anymore and that I’m empty within. Without the stories, I seem to have nothing but a pale emptiness washed over my soul with this melancholic echo of my soundless screams resonating beneath the skin ceaselessly.

Its as if I’ve descended into madness and all the cacophony around me is slowly taking over.

How do I fight my way out of it? Do I believe that I even can?

I don’t know yet. Only time will tell I’m afraid.

I’ll be a man of the world and on the inside, it’ll be a battleground with a thousand horses, red hot hooves galloping endlessly.

I’ll know when I’ve won, or done.

The above is not a fiction and is as closer to the truth as a narrative can be.

An Incurable Affliction

Before I start, I need to admit, I wasn’t the one to come up with the name, or to be exact, the idea behind the name. I borrowed it from the fictitious book ‘An Imperial Affliction’ by the fictitious author, Peter Van Houten; concocted by the non fictitious John Green in his non fictitious fiction, The Fault In Our Stars.

I used to be a big fan of that book, not that I’m not anymore, just that, love fades a little over time. But, I still enjoy reading it; much more than the storyline, I love how John Green narrates the story. I find the expressions he use, sort of a lighthearted humour to communicate certain hard to swallow emotions, to be brilliant. Which is why the second I thought of misery, I went straight to distress, then to affliction and lo, John Green! Haven’t thought of him in years and here he is all of a sudden!

Anyway, I feel that I’ve staggered off like a drunken rambler again. The below post resonates with me more than I’d care to admit.

Without further ado, I bid adieu to the weekend with a not so lighthearted (seriously, when have I ever been lighthearted!) poetry,

Next time,

don’t touch my soul

and leave me to die.

Let me not fall in love

with the cascading snowflakes this year.

I’ll watch perhaps,

from behind the stained-glass windows

in a room too hot;

with a book too insipid;

rushing out in my pyjamas

and flip flops,

cold and lonely and bitten again.

Maybe it had been me all along.

Maybe I love

living a miserable life,

crave sitting in melancholy thoughts.

Maybe I long for the rain

when the sun’s shining,

and the sun

when rain’s spewing.

Maybe I enjoy watching

the paper boats float

over my broken smiles

In the wilting puddles.

The above is a work of the author and no part of it has been plagiarised.

This is starting to sound repetitive. I’m the hasty kind, don’t like to wait around. A true Aries (not that I’m a believer), I’m always in a rush to butt my head into every wall I can find. I should probably have this bit pasted somewhere up in my notes or maybe saved up as a desktop wallpaper so that I wound’t need to think and type it down everytime.

Have a great rest of the weekend!

Blinding Lights

There is a thought that has long plagued my conscience. Over time, it has come and gone like clouds on a bad day. Every time I sit down to work or write, it takes over my mind in a flash, only for a second though, but then, I lose my poise, my reason to do what I sat down to do every time.

The great unanswerable paradox: How did we decide the life that we are living now?

Now, before i start, I want to say that I tried going down this path,; evaluating how the world affects every choice we make, how the people around us inspire, or in some case force us down career paths we probably never intended to take. I looked at culture and its impacts, the expectations of the society, the material things we are attracted to like a child looking at a TV for the first time. I tried penning it all down one by one but the truth is, it is a bottomless pit and if I start climbing down, there is absolutely no way I’m ever getting out.

So, I’m going to keep to the seemingly sane, definitely insane side of things and keep my thoughts to myself.

“I traversed this space

day and night

seeking;

a reason to reclaim,

to feel alive again.

Drifting along

on the autumn winds

I wafted with the leaves.

Mountains, rivers, people,

just blurs of blinding lights.

Drapes parted.

Masquerades deliquesced.

I felt their soul,

preying;

silent howls of agony;

going insane

to make sense

of their lives.

Maybe this travesty

Is all about the struggles

laced

with pockets of joy,

enough to not make us realise,

that blurs

of passing lights

is all we were ever meant to be.”

The above is the author’s thoughts penned down after trying (and mostly failing) not to spiral down the familiar abyss. No part of it has been plagiased. Well, truth be told, the whole damn point of the post is that everything we see and do and feel is plagiased in some way or the other, so this little part here at the end of the post seems nonsensical. Nevertheless, the author is putting it up.

Entangled

In his book Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka mentioned and I quote, “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples, fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time.”

That is the inspiration behind this poem; this and the word ‘entangled’.

He calls love unreasonable. I haven’t had the chance to read his book so I wouldn’t be able to probe into why he settled on calling love ‘unreasonable’ of all terms but, I believe he was right in calling it so.

Because it is unreasonable in every way: you give in when you need to hold out, you keep believing when there is no reason for you to, and the most convincing reason of them all; seeds laid by love are never lost with time.

Perhaps love is all we needed all along. Perhaps the world is so fucked up, filled with greed and hate and monstrous evil thoughts just floating around like a cloud above everyone’s head waiting to rain shit every moment of everyday because we don’t love hard enough, because we never once felt what love could do to a person, because we never knew what it felt like to be loved by someone.

Do you believe love is enough? If so, may I ask, what is love to you?

“Entangled

since the day we met;

eyes staring into the depths

and silence but for our heartbeats.

Entangled

in your lovely locks,

meant to spend a lifetime

playing, watching you fall asleep.

Entangled

in your sweet kisses,

waking up every morning

a new man, poised to heal the world.

Entangled

in your embrace

gasping, holding on

like a drowning man to a driftwood.

Entangled

in the maze of your love,

wandering, losing myself in

forgetting the world but for you.

We don’t love hard enough

even after knowing tomorrow might not be.”

Thank you for reading!

The above has not been plagiarised from anywhere and is the work of the author.

A tale of two lovers

Sorry! Couldn’t find a photo befitting the poem below, had to pick up a stock photo from Google.

This post below is quite personal to me.

In fact, it is so personal that I can see those honeydew yellow eyes with the blue and green swim in the blank nothingness around me everytime I close my eyes. I can feel the bus stop we sat in and chatted life away, the cat we chased down the street, the dog we patted through the iron gate.

I can live every moment of those memories like it happened yesterday. Until about a while ago, they used to come haunt me every night, tell me tales of happiness I can’t seem to feel these days. But I don’t see them anymore. I guess the ghosts are gone now, probably realised there isn’t much left in me to haunt.

I guess that’s the thing with time. One fine day, we wake up and tell ourselves enough is enough and we pick ourselves up from under the sorrow and the melancholy and we start to move on. It may not happen right away but it will, eventually. It took me close to a year. Even now, I can sometimes find myself crawling back to those memories during my vulnerable moments. Even when you think its over, its sometimes never fully over.

I guess, our whole approach in addressing matters concerning the heart is wrong. We need stop thinking about it like a bad dream and start trying to make it as a part of our life, like one of our memories, a bad one, but still our memory nevertheless. We need to own it up, face it to move on. Trying to avoid it would only prolong the pain and sufferings of struggling to overcome it. Instead, accepting it as one’s past would help with the moving on process. I don’t know if it would help speed it up or make it easy on the person suffering but I know for sure that it would give closure.

To be honest, I don’t even know if my thought process is right, or even pointing in the right direction. This is just me rambling on I guess. So without further ado, let me begin!

“The grey window, listless;

He stood by it

looking up at the moon.

Darkness but for the lone street lamp below

flickering before giving up.

Yet two yearning eyes, radiating the moon;

Gleaming, happiness boundless

As wandering thoughts settle

onto her face that he could sketch from memory,

projecting onto the darkness

like a swarm of fireflies flashing in unison.

Her inviting lips he could taste

and those honeydew eyes

with the ocean blue thicket and the lush green halo

staring back, boring into his soul.

He puts his hand out, caresses her cheeks,

the rosy softness between his fingers, so alluring;

leans in for a one last kiss as if

the world would end tomorrow.

Silence and finally, a familiar calm

fills the void as the abyss

reaches out

and he joins her

in the moon above;

the lone street lamp coming back to life

to tell the tale of the two lovers

life couldn’t keep apart.”

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my posts. I can’t write like most people. I need to find my inspiration to sit down and begin writing. But nowadays, I’ve been trying harder than before to be consistent with this and going forward, I hope to make my posts biweekly. I’m also hoping to put together some posts with prose, like opinions or short stories in addition to the poems.

The above is an original and unadulterated work of the author (or poet in this case) and has not been plagiarised from anywhere.

Blinding Life

I left India to live in the UK in 2019. It was perhaps because of my love for the language or their elaborate history or my brother who has made a life for himself there. It might have even been a feeble attempt to get out of the cold, soulless life I’d been living. To be honest, till this day I’ve never been able to pin point why I decided to move to the UK. But I did and every second of it was magical!

And then I was told to leave.

It was in the second week of March 2021 when I was informed that my application to remain in the UK got rejected. I was in Bath at that time, the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in; a city frozen in time, from the Abbey, the Roman baths, museums to the Pulteney and maybe even the people living there.

This poem is loosely based on an event that happened one night at 2 AM when I just upped and left my home to go somewhere, just anywhere. I kept wandering around all night long never wanting to return, to somehow prolong the feeling of not needing to leave. But I did get back, after having stayed out in the cold stillness for over five hours, I got back to home, an empty place from that moment on, just a place to lay my aching mind and body and to have it go numb with pain.

The below is a slightly exaggerated version of that night. I say slightly because it is so close to the truth that when I closed my eyes whilst penning it down, I could literally see myself there, walking aimlessly, taking in the sights, hoping it was all just a bad dream and I would simply just wake up the next day and everything would be fine. I could just feel what I felt in that moment, it was so fresh.

“The click of my heels

on the 18th century cobblestone

reverberate through the stillness.

The Avon rushing by,

the only sign of life

in the dead night.

The towering Abbey

blanketing the world beneath

in a motherly embrace.

I slog, keeping to the darkness.

Done and defeated

I walk the long walk

home, or perhaps nowhere.

Eyes heavy, lost

into the flickering 18th century lamps

watching them

struggle, like me.

Having witnessed for centuries

men wilting, dying

perhaps one more

wouldn’t make a difference.”

The above is from the author’s personal experience and has not been plagiarised from anywhere.

The Yang (or probably the Yin); The other one is the previous post

My last post wasn’t supposed to happen. This poem below was originally set to take its place. But in the middle of penning this down I had a kind of an epiphany and got myself into write two poems at once! Yeah, it doesn’t happen so often is all I can say! The closest I’ve ever come to such a weirdly productive poem day was when I dreamed of dreaming about a poem and waking up to write it down. I know. Sounds like some crazy, Inception level stuff but I swear it happened! I wrote it down and spent the next hour after that from 3 AM to 4 AM wondering how it even happened.

My sister, for reasons unknown, called this poem and the previous one: the Yin and the Yang, the exact opposites, the contrasting accounts. I for one, cannot with all the gravy in my head, see why and how she came up with that but I’m going to run with it!

Perhaps not the kind of prelude one would expect for a morbid post as this but, I had a really good day (surprising!) and as a result, I’m in a brilliant mood! Just sharing the joy along. Pay it forward right?

Without further ado, here it goes!

“Walk this way

Where cars seldom ply

and dreams come to die.

The wasteland,

windows shuttered tight;

rising heat

and the howling winds,

like a battlefield.
The devil’s path

we must take:

broken resolves, and hearts left to rot

reeking of eternal damnation.

Open road.

Nothing in sight.

Endlessly traversing

to the distant mountains,

like dots on the edge of a book.

Yet we keep hoping, keep going

beyond the life we see;

to the embrace of the endless bloom.

For all that matters is to

live strong and die peaceful.”

PS. My sister usually does the punctuation and proofreading for all of my posts as I’m bad (don’t even get me started on it!) at it. But since she’s ill, I’ve been doing them myself, mustering all the bit of grammar I can come up with!

Let me know how it is in the comments. Shout out if you feel it better to let my sister handle them for me going forward:)

Cheers! Again, I’m sorry for spoiling the mood of the post, growing dumb by the verse I can say!