It happened in a second...

It was just a transfer of signals,

Codes, numbers, accounts, identity,

From one secured space to 

Another password protected space.

It happened in a second.

On September 28, 2012,

I got my first salary,

First internship salary,

Sitting in my grey cubicle,

Made colorful by doodled

Paper coffee cups.

Is this what I wanted?

Is this what I needed?

Atleast it seemed that way,

When I signed on the call letter,

And contract forms,

Which made me sell my creativity,

For a while,

To a company that I owed a lot to,

For making me survive all my juries,

In my under graduate and post-graduate

Design life.

Material can never satiate the soul,

That is something I have concluded,

When the dream you had, 

Of earning your first salary,

Gets shattered, 

In a second of your life.

Then the vacuum sets in,

That makes you write,

Pieces like this,

Drinking scotch on the rocks,

And smoking marlboro lights.

If everything was complete,

And was going all right,

Was life worth living

Without the void and the fights?

The irony lies in ourselves,

We complicate our own lives,

By trying to simplify the complicated,

Only to get sucked into monotonous black holes,

Of a daily routined lifestyle. 

It happened in a second.

But it's novelty is gone.

Because it will happen again and again,

Like a letterpress machine

Printing paper leaflets,

That will get extinct with time.

Chips...

We met through strangeness,

Engulfed in a vacuum filled stench

Of past relationships.

You told me later

That you were in a relationship

But I was not.

How did you decide

On a conclusion like this I wonder 

Because I always ran away from

The disease of defining it.

I cannot define love

Or the feeling of being in it.

I had agreed with you

On the logic behind it,

You were the first

To introduce me to it.

The antibiotics and rasam

Has made a concoction

That has evaporated all consciousness

Sometimes I feel,

Its fatal to breathe.

But your thoughts helped me to sleep.

Why are you trying to eradicate my sorrows,

What will happen when you disappear?

I know,

God won't come and pick up my little pieces,

Meticulously massacred by you.

But, maybe Satan will.

I fear your disappearance…

I fear your exit,

I fear for loving you so much,

I fear being so weak.

Chips make me happy,

Because they are so crisp,

They break into pieces,

When they are bitten with sharp teeth.

I bit chips worth 225 bucks,

Remembeing that night when you

Bit my fair skin, with your soft lips.

I stay apart wondering,

How can another entity

Give you so much force,

To make you believe

All the hopes and dreams,

That were shattered with grief,

Every time you tried to believe.

My warm tears trickled down,

As I cried my heart out,

For the first time,

Clasped in your strength.

How scared I was to believe,

A stranger who I loved,

Without the logic,

That the stranger had carefully taught.

The dogs barked silently

On the empty dark road.

They witnessed the words,

That came pouring out 

Of the strangers simple soul.

I fought my own feelings,

I betrayed myself to not know,

That the stranger stole my heart,

And understood me much more,

Than I had ever known.

Its strange to love a stranger,

But it is even more strange, 

To battle your own strange soul,

To understand the power of love,

And to never let go.

Chips make me happy,

Because they are so crisp,

They break into pieces,

When they are bitten with sharp teeth.

Your love can make me chip with ease.

She  travelled across the sands,

In a dusty yellow mustang,

With a man who wore checkered linens,

And sipped cognac at sharp turns.

The dark skies showered moisture,

To abandon the warmth,

The smoke of his red marlboro,

Touched her staunch stance.

He stopped the car, 

To mingle with the mirage,

While she still dreamt of ajrak grids,

To block print the tiles of their house,

Which they had built in their dreams,

With their own hands.

Changing Contexts

I questioned God to come down and greet me,

From a dark narrow tunnel,

Or from a bright illuminated sky.

Satan has visited me more often,

To reaffirm every time he exists,

Unlike God.

Will I stop believing in God,

If he does not visit me, 

or has not even met me once?

I believed in you,

Even if I have not met you.

Homo sapiens are Homo religiosus.

They believe in religion,

But not a unified one.

They believe in God,

But God to them lies in contexts.

God changes to men and women,

Because of ever changing contexts.

You might change tomorrow,

And your pomises might evaporate,

Due to changing contexts.

But if context infects belief,

Then we will live with guns in our cupboards.

And God will pull the trigger through your hands.

I hope I find you stagnant in the shifting sands.

I hope changing contexts don't poison our soul.

I hope we can Imagine the world to be more beautiful

Than even John Lennon did.

Changing contexts,

Cannot change,

What we firmly believe.

Move...

I loved you for exactly 961 days,

In my dreams.

I sometimes wonder did I imagine to love you.

Imagination can be deceiving.

It transcends physical reality.

We had trespassed reality.

But yet got entangled in it.

Inhumans would have moved on easily

But I write and frame words

My words move

But I cannot move anymore.

Move...

because love has been promised.

Move...

because I cant say no.

Move...

because stagnancy pricks my dead skin.

Move...

because my organs are infected with your touch. 

I was in a white room under a white machine,

As they analysed the infection injecting the yellow fluid

through my veins.

I did not move a mm then,

But my thoughts did move.

In death if people remembered God

I remembered you.

I went through the pain

Because I wanted to live,

For you.

You were embedded in my secrets.

I remembered you when the veri-sign page opened

Every single time I booked movie tickets,

Hoping you would accompany me.

But you did not move.

Move

when a stranger tried to alleviate the pain

Move

when it was already late to restrain

Move

when I smiled but I was going insane

Move

when you kissed her parched lips

As I writhed in pain

I want you to move...

Away

Move away now...

Before I cease to move again.

Texture of Doubt

The floor rug with yellow, cream and white.

Shifting from a white washed room,
Into another white washed room in a month.

The stone studded loose silver ring on my finger.

The goodbye kiss that my neighbor's wife gave him, 
As I was locking my own apartment.

The letters that repeated the word love 33 times,
In my third semester in college.

Taking a longer route to reach home for my fiancés birthday.

Grandfather's rocking arm chair.

A shrug over a spaghetti top.

The color grey.

Chocolate diet shake.

Duplicate keys to my boss's house.

(- 3) in both eyes.

Putting red lipstick in the lady's loo at 9.30pm IST.

Unstable equilibrium.

Dry Ice.

Sublimation.

Invisible on google chat.

Baked french fries.

Concentrated orange squash.

Infection.

Cancellation.

Let her go first...

Well today baba said something very important to me as he got down to the topic of marriages, something that I have been dreadfully avoiding being a designer. Being in control of my own spaces and own choices and suddenly thinking about adjustments gave me a sudden nauseating feeling of giving up.

But baba said this, when you really love you will know what you are doing. It will not feel like sacrifice. He said the biggest fear in his life would be to leave my ma behind to live a life by herself. I do not think she will be able to bear the loneliness because she loves him so much, so he would want her to go first knocking on heavens door.

I sometimes wonder do our generations have the capacity to love each other so purely. Can they love each other without expectations. Can they love each other with the feeling of not knowing? Can they sacrifice their love for each other? Can they actually understand love?