One Foot in the Grave.

The worst part about growing up isn't the expiry of your ticket to get away from responsibilities,crisis and blunders. Nor is it the bed time stories read out just before that hot cup of milk.Nor is it about the kisses your father would flood you over with as you rocked on his knees some lazy Sunday afternoon.The worst part about growing up is the fact that while you age towards the peak of life,everything around grows senile and decrepit.

I've attended six funerals in a month. I've seen cousins lose their parents.I've seen disease engulf others.And others engulf themselves.Maybe we are at that age.Maybe we have reached that stage in life when the people that have mattered the most are busy decaying away.

I sit back and leak out the poisons of today that have accumulated in me while walking through your paradise of yesterdays and watch it all become about disease, demise and degeneration; all three composed into a melody and stuck on repeat.So as death swamps the air,do I still smile and say its going to be okay?With the roots disowning us and the crown of branches betraying,I ask you if we are loving enough?Are we saying enough?

What is it that scares you the most?

Is it the fear to see your self swallowed into the darkness, to be forgotten as the world continues to spin without you,your friends and lovers continuing to live as your grave is walked upon and old pictures left out to get dusty until forgotten? Or to know that the only thing permanent about life is death?

I'm afraid to grow any older,least you grow away from me.And the dilapidated weight of your bones and flesh bury me inside you.I'm afraid to watch you decay while all I can do is pray to your God,a man I have never known.And watch him and failing cells and organs ruin the sequence of things around me with their cold, clammy fingers.I'm afraid of not being able to fight this back. I'm afraid of not feeling hurt enough to survive the loss and the irreparable damage it'll cause to my soul and I'll wither away under the gloom of my heartbreak.

I'm afraid to cry in front of you or to beg you not to leave.I'm terrified of the things you'll leave me back with,all smelling of you and I'm afraid I wouldn't have done enough to make you proud.

Yes,I'm more terrified to love than to wither away,for attachment is one of the most difficult vicissitudes.And now you know why;for all that I am and all you should know about me,both edited and unedited- I write.So you always know this girl in me that was too proud to love you back.

The New Strangers

I'm a junkie when it comes to love.

And each time I wish to be torn apart and messed up.

"Miss you",you exhaled,

in between that drowsy voice and the silence following it.

Sometime in between the sunrise and the darkness before it.

You wait as the words replay in my head and mess everything up.What you do not realize is that had those words been capable of touching,they'd set me on fire.I close my eyes and refuse to speak.Our tangled story is enough to trap me already.

I've seen time,and mistakes and lessons gyrating about some invisible axis,impossible to stop.And I realize that you and I are dancing, intoxicated on razor blades.Its the same story over and over again.The same overwhelming feeling.The unaltered potent phenylethylamine rush.The twin madness.But this time

 its me and you and this.

Theres got to be another way to love you,because this one just isn't right.

Sometimes we love just because we long for a story.

Sometimes its a change.

Sometimes its red satin madness and the turmoil of emotions it causes.

Sometimes its just forced out of habit.

Sometimes its on the platter and semi-fulfilling.

Sometimes its perfectly played and won.

Sometimes it hits you when you least expect it to.

Sometimes you just can't runaway from it.

Sometimes its the awe.

But mostly its because its the best we can do.

I realize its time to stop where I am and love you from a distance.Atleast till I figure out which way to love you,in the best possible way I can.

This part of me.

This isn't a post.This isnt anything they'd wish to read,but you.This is just for you and the pauses between our conversations that have now become stagnant and stale, just like us. This is to tell you that I love you.You know who you are.

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L,

Why do I feel every word you write has a me intact somewhere? Why do I read them over again even after I dread them? Guilt overflows my 5 feet 4 inches and I struggle to keep my head above.

Why do you do this?

Why don't you conceal it better

and keep me ignorant?

This is a dream...

And now somehow everything I called my own seems to smell of you and I cant escape it even six feet under.

I wish to talk of us..I really do..but I can't,for they can't possibly understand and now I'm tired of searching you in other people. It hurts when they turn out no where next to you and I hate each one of them for this.

Why can't they be?

And you refuse to speak.I wish you not to either.Maybe Im just afraid.(of words?) I ignore the sadness in your voice each time we talk and blare out an immune me,when the truth is that Im far more fragile and scared.

I do all the things you'd do and say..I imagine your reactions to each of my actions, and then defy each on,and I runnaway from myself , building a solid barrier around me thats now become impermeable.My heart ice cold.

Where have we gone?

You were my drug all along; and now I twitch in the absistance of the bygone times..

Do we want them back?

All this is so strange.This dependency and need. No not need,I don't need you..I never should.

Sometimes knowing someone too well and to be known equally well can be suffocating.Yet we work in unknown synchrony I wonder how.But should I even be surprised, 'cause hasn't it always been that way?

I laugh at this absurd connection with you.I understand thoughts and justify your decisions even if they'd never be mine.And look for traces of your presence around,however new the surroundings might be.

The stars rearrange themselves each time we talk and relapse everytime we return defeated. There can never be a winner between us, this you know better.

Could my glass barrier have been preventing you as well? My fingers burn as I run them along, searching for edges..and it gets darker each time I try. I shut off the radio now.The words conspire against me and the music betrays,restricting my thoughts to a small oval shaped lobe and I heavy down under that ever building synaptic rush.Maybe thats why I keep it out of reach, to keep away from your recesses.

I fail.

I love you for what you brought to me. 'Cause you've been the only person whos never gotten scared away from me,even when I was.And you protected my self believed hard exterior by your tender flesh./

From distance I see you as my savior and now I drown without you there to guide me any longer.

I never agreed to what you said,this you know; but I followed it just the same, this too you know.

Today I help build the wall between us,cementing it with all that,that brought us closer in the first place

You dont break away from a person gradually.Its always an instant snap and then the music blares away aloud,shutting the world away, and we move dizzy in reverse.

I write this to you just 'cause I always have written to you,on paper and in print.Preserving the envelopes addressed to you and avoiding inquisitive questions about you.

I lied to you when I said no one mattered anymore.I lied when I screamed on the phone,my intention to move on.I lied when I said I was happy.

'Cause you have mattered all along.

'Cause you are the only thing I carried along with me,throughout,no matter what.

'Cause I hate myself for missing you so much.

You might find this letter totally out of place and funny.But I feel I have the right to do this,more than anyone else.I feel like I own you in flesh and bone and the things that separate us.

I've always believed that I can shut anyone out if I could do that to you and that's exactly hoe its turned out to be.

I today match my fragile side with yours,wondering where which puzzle fits..and anyone who could see through my stained lens would be able to tell that the incompletion in the picture was you.

It had always been easy to come near you,building this something.But I fail to turn that something back into a nothing now.And I shut my eyes for I'm tired of this futile searching.

You think I cannot feel 'cause I declare myself to be immune and numb.But isn't not feeling, a feeling too?

I always wonder why we complicate our lives so much.Maybe sometimes all that is required is a stimulus, a simple mistake to complicate this simplicity.

Its maybe because we all are schizophrenics in some way;confusing fantasy with reality,wrestling dreams and catching crashed rockets we launch, in an attempt to personify the voids we believe to be something.

Maybe trust is a conspiracy.Love,a catalyst to betrayal and dreams,the pirates of hope..And each one manufactured in this corrugated mind, a reason to dread.

But then I remind myself to be anesthetized,immune to belief in any form..But why this then?

This is so cynical.

This is contradiction all along.

My heart beat deafens me.

Your neon lights blind me.

Im not stoned

But Im falling over.

I sniff too hard to sense you around.

Growing numb under your touch

I cry as I read your words.

Inflammable,I tonight wander around fireworks and shooting stars..and you.

This night isn't the scariest.

Come foretell this story.

Without wax,always

-C

The Laboratory in my Heart.

Its been a while since we have spoken. And yet I read your daily column, nodding my head and pinching my skin, like I just know what you are going through.
Maybe I do. Or maybe you just write too well.


 You flick a smile when I speak to you and I shudder 'cause I know what you really mean.I trace down the lines on the back of your foot, and I finger the scar he gave you.
 Maybe I do understand. Or maybe it has always been there.


 Maybe I still haven't learnt to love.Maybe I was just busy trying to learn you.

Overgrown.

"...Its just as we had thought- outlining horizons,hills and horses.

You'll love it here.

Love T."

I cant remember you, I'd say, when they'd ask of you.Defending your last essence within, defying constellations and catching questions bounce back at me.

What would you say to sympathize with a 19yr old girl that 

dreamt of horses, wished on rainbows and always had her hair 

adorned with Gardenias? 

Who lived for beauty, for religion and

for a ruffian who claimed to love her too.

You used to say you wished me to be happy, away with a man you believed could touch me in a way you never could or ever can. And I lived though Indian summers,seeing the world through the same prism as you. Nauseated by promiscuity, I travelled this redrush continuum, hoping that bidding my soul could help save yours. Estranged from everything I recalled as home, with disgust crawling up my neck, all I prayed for was a proof of your love to me that got blown away with rotting autumn leaves.

I stop as I unfold my memory.It longs to know you as it always did,on nights that resemble those but only in colour. But all they take me to is your laughter,trapped in a silver polaroid, sandwiched in your wallet, on a white Slovakian morning.

I cant remember you,I'd say when they'd ask of you. I hopelessly fail at each attempt.And I question my memory of a sailor that spoke Yiddish and wrote poetry.

All I remember are your kisses;that smelt of tobacco and tasted of the sea.And your touch that raised tornadoes form me to you back into me. I remember the marijuana and the smoke and the collecting of starfish on moonlit nights when neither of us spoke.

But I cant remember you. 

The Missing Exclaimation Marks.

"Somehow everything I own

smells of you.And for the tinest

moment its all not true.

More than anything I want to see you go..

You could be happy,I hope you are."

Whats your zodiac sign?

US- Perfectly symmetrical masses fit perfectly into one another,giving birth to our induced fit theory.Reading minds and actions,giving more than you get.Traping moments and presenting our own sarcophagus of jumbled thoughts..

Did I tell you I still think of of you,read you moves and predict the things you do..I still know,I still understand.I still believe in you.

"you'll grow out of it baby.."

Writing now only feels painful and however much I try to runnaway from it,Im doing it tonight just for you and our symmetrical selves
I cant write anylonger. But I still can feel.
I today acknowledge you and your shut out things.now they resemble mine,and when you asked me if 'we' are getting any better,I know you realized I would lie.
If we could,I'd turn time round to make things like they used to be..
To be able to undo your accusation and to undo my suppressed longings,to be able to protect me from what I've see..and to be able to speak them out to you.
I cant write any longer.
And i dont care..
You were my only refuge and this is just for you.

We now fill blank crosswords,me puzzle you and you build on clues.
Dragged conversations,forced smiles,disarray emotions,8 minutes to our 180..
What have we turned into?
So tell me are you friend or foe?

You cant leave out explaination-lost words out after a time.And now its turned out to feel like having splinters pushing through my heart.

You arent allowed to be a child anylonger

Sometimes its just not fair to fight,to runnaway from hanging conversations,to keep you away so,to hurt you like that..
I now let you linger a little longer,till you dissolve unto me.
Your thoughts condense upon my skin,your voice plunges through the crevices in me..

Even hate has a saturation level

Everything moves so fast and in reverse I follow.This all's too unfair,too selfish,too unlike you and me.

This isnt a longing,this is loss.


Oh! and before I forget,
I miss you.

Surprise me..? (please.)

Scars like stars

When the electricity fades and only lightning remains

and we've drunk the last drop of dead dinosaur blood

and we're forced to run outside into the streets, you and

I will yell out aliases and call signs like fighter

pilots falling. Because we don't know each other's real names.

- IWTFY

You defend yourself of my accusations and I openly let you do so.I could even live this way forever.Accustomed to your pernicky self and the fluctuating me,I understood what you meant in the silences between the words you spoke.I still do.I just cant seem to save my self. Not because of the sudden lapse of judgement in me or because I have sealed away the hyper eighteen year old girl that I used to be ,but because I'm afraid I'd mirror my surrounding to the you I was always afraid of.

You surprise me with the pity you wear as your underclothes to friendship,and it disgusts me each I look at you.But I cannot hate you. Now I understand what they meant when they said that you can only fall out of love with someone,not stop loving them.Our-star crossed signs now smirk as they look down at us,the celestial lights connecting our hearts a shade dimmer each time.And it has devastated me in terms of Identity with you.

I have watched each one of you disappear from the frame that once captured our happy,unaware faces.Our star fighter pilots have given up along time.Now we are afraid of drowning,our boats afull.Why didn't we realize this was a one-man submarine throughout? Over filled with faults and unspoken words our stagnant faces fade away into distant spaces that still carry labels to identify you and me. There were times we promised to do something about it.We know how.But instead we step aside allowing life to put up her dread show before us. One at a time it shuts us out, with you so intimated.But I hate you.For your pride and mine too.For your nonchalance and my ostrich-act. This show isn't amusing any longer.And I see you realize that.

You wish to drift apart;too tired of me running away over again,too tired of explaining,too tired of convincing.Dammit you have a life too!

And mean while I shall put up a show of my scars that now seem like stars to me,each one marking their over-rated autographs on my skin and I glow beneath them.But look,the nights got plenty more.

Its only shame that makes us real,and somehow defines who we really are.This you will understand someday as well. You have always been a slow learner and I lovingly patient with you.

Last night you cut off my oxygen supply asking me to breathe.And I obeyed with your voice pounding like bullets in my head.And I prayed to you.Its just cause I have no one else to turn to,asking you to save me before this part of me that you knew so well should fade away.And if it reaches you,I shall say amen to that.Because I don't own a sand glass any longer but I realise I'm short of time and tears.

Sometimes I wish to write about you and me.About us and the times that used to be,but i fail repeatedly. Framing sentences in extravagant vocabulary and throwing phrases just to prove my maturity to it.Sometimes I wish to talk about it.To show you my over flown self and the crevices that wont fill but I'm exhausted and I wont let you see those tears again.

Sometimes talking your heart out and weaving thoughts to Latin-born words only makes them even so treacly.Thus I don't speak them.Least to you.And I shall never say that I miss you.