I think that’s what I want,

— The kind where our love is enough

Where you don’t need intoxicants to make you forget where your hands went,

Or did not.

Where you’re comfortable in your skin

And mine

Enough to not make you want to turn off the lights

The kind when you’re not in a hurry to leave

the next morning — and still remember my name

Where you care enough to listen to my body

Bodies speak y’know, and they’re not all the same

I’ve spent a few years, kissing strangers,

And none of it was fun

Trauma will make you find solace in anything

But I’m no longer on the run

No bottom of the bottle rendezvous’

I’d like to hold you in your sleep

And wake up feeling loved

Not like I’ve extended an expired lease.

I was born into a family of hoarders

We hoarded everything

From polythenes to paper bags, dailies to magazines,

hand-me-downs we had no use for

And devices that had long breathed their last

We never threw a thing away

Stowed everything away to safekeep

Because one day, we believed, the day would come

when we’d bless ourselves for saving them

Kept things around hoping that one day

They could be put to use

Soon we’d gathered a mountain

Of things defunct

We were never poor, just ‘frugal’

Never quite ill, just ’struggled’ sometimes

I never really caught on to the metaphor

Not back then, at least

But I grew up with a blue basket of broken toys

Tucked away in a corner of my grandpa’s room

Inhabited by my father, after he passed

And I spent hours playing with aeroplanes which could no longer fly

And dolls with dresses too worse for wear

The more worn out the toy, the greater my devotion — the longer I’d spend with them

I had a college professor once tell me

That the life I’d lived up until then meant I could only go two ways

when I asked to borrow a copy of Walden from the library of ‘banned’ books

I could find value in society and be a valued citizen, in turn

Or retreat, and be an anomaly — an outcast

I think I grew up into a bit of both

Or maybe, more

— Healed, healer and struggling.

What is the cost of staying soft

In a world determined to make you rough?

I look to poets and madmen for wisdom

Because only madness, after all, could justify such resolve

Perhaps, it’s a tell

What is logic to others

Causes me shame

Do you think the world conspires?

Bringing forth a few million of us, mad ones

Unto every generation

The rule-breakers, the nay-sayers, the outliers

Who make homes out on the fringe

Never to be let in

Lest we disturb century old hierarchies or corrupt tradition

With our questions and our confrontations

Maybe the answers we seek are within us

Maybe the answers we seek have been forgotten

With every reiteration gathering a new embellishment

I tire

I am exhausted

Open your doors, then

Watch me ‘man up’.

Some relationships never end

Some lovers never leave

Even after they’re gone

So you carry them along

With you

Everywhere you go

And home the little quirks they left

And hope your friends won’t know

It’s like how I’ll always feel a little stab within

Every time I hear Delicate play

I don’t think Damien Rice intended it

But well, she didn’t stay

Or how I’ll only think of one face now

For as long as I’m alive

If I see Raj Kapoor tramping in the rain on-screen

Remember how youth can be, just as cruel as it is naïve

It’s like how the first boy I said ‘I love you’ to

Got an Enfield instead of a superbike

Just because I’d mentioned I liked motorcycles more

So he could take me out for rides

You know, or how yours were the first cats I met

Whose names I memorized

Before a ginger came along and adopted me

Long after our goodbyes

There’s this one barrelled brew I order, every time I’m at a bar

Introduced to me, by a girl I knew,

Much the woman now

We reconciled as friends

Every lover taught me something new

Sometimes, I find myself down familiar streets

With memories I’d rather not recall

For all the lovers that left me gifts

There are a few that also left scars

Memory is a fickle thing,

But habits are hard to forget

So I try not to make habits of everyone I meet now

Learn the lessons and leave the regret.

The right way to love me — is to let me be.

The other day, I made myself eggs just the way my mother used to make

some twenty years ago. Well, more.

Couldn’t call it comfort food

But there was comfort in the remembering, sure

Of how waking up at the crack of dawn, and accompanying her to the kitchen

as she made breakfast for our family of four

was a private ritual shared between the two of us

a long time ago.

Isn’t it amusing how memories evade you, until you command them to return?

I don’t remember mother very often

We barely spoke of her in this household

After her passing, we banished her ghost

So I grew up grieving the loss of a mother, just not my mother

Seems unfair

Unfair almost how her memory persisted

Despite all attempts of erasure

Only to haunt me

Years later

They say grief is nothing but the love you never got to give

Well ma, I remember you

Do you remember me?