poke.

Scars are something we all bear.
Some of them show on your skin, some on the wrinkles on your face, some by the way your voice changes tone when a picture flashes in your head.
We all bear scars.
Scars on a man make him attractive to a woman (or so I've read), scars in a man make him harder.
When you get cut bad enough, you bleed. It heals and it leaves a scar.
The skin on a scar is thicker and tougher than the one around it. But if you poke it with something sharp, you'll realise the skin below it is actually softer than the one under normal skin.
In fact, the parts that do get scarred are the ones that are soft. They need to be made tougher. A scar does that just fine.

You can wear your scars with pride or feel ashamed of them. Whatever you do, you can not hide them. Not from the world and not from yourself.

I wear my scars with hope.

A hope that one day they will heal completely. Even if they don't, I hope the skin around them will one day wrinkle enough so I can't find them till I look for them, and people won't care to look for them in all those lines.

Hope that one day I may be scarred enough to not care about any of them.

But most of all, I wear my scars reassured.
Reassured by the fact that even if the part of me that's scarred today, gets scarred again, the scar will change
but won't be new.
I'll know what to do.
I'll know I should hope.
So go ahead, poke.

one love.

‘One Love’.

We have all heard that song.

I must agree, you do fear being called gay if you're caught listening to it (which I do once a year or so, not more).

But I wonder, why is it one love? Why not more? It could, very obviously, mean that all you need to live is one love but this has various interpretations as well.

(I write this from the point of view of a girl, cause that is one that is clearer. We men aren't so sure of what we feel about this highly dangerous word - love.)

"One love is all we need" is true if that love is with you today and loves you as you do him.

One love could also mean that one man that you've loved in your life may/may not be in your life any more. The mere memory of that love you had for each other or sometimes only the love you had for him is enough for you. It may be enough for a lot of reasons again.

The first and the more romantic one is that the memory of that love is so strong, so pure and so moving that no other human bond that you establish after that can bring out the same feelings of pure joy or bliss as I've heard many girls describe it. That time in your life when you could just sit in silence looking at the sky and still feel so much, as if they world was right there, captured by your five senses. The whole world had shrunk into those four boundaries of the sheet you had laid out on the grass. And that world still exists in your mind. It will always exist. That world is your happy place.

The other more tragic reason and one more commonly given is that of heart ache. The world described above existed in all instances of love. These are not cases where you say you love someone; these are those tales which begin with the knowledge of being in love.
When this world, like all those beliefs we harbour from childhood, built on fairy tales and folklores of Santa and Prince Charming, shatters the passage of time, the shock sends you reeling.

That world of bliss did not break due to problems between two people; it broke due to the belief that the perfect world you were living in would remain perfect forever. When you realised in some fleeting moment of reality that this world isn't the one described in those fairy tales even though it felt every bit like it, you recoil in horror. You wonder if it ever existed.

It never did.

What made it so, was you. I don't use the pronoun 'you' to signify both you and your ‘love’, I mean only you.

We blame Archie's and its Valentine's Day for so many problems every year. Those business men know how to sell a product. They strike at the weakness of every human being, a child; the child inside you who was longing to grow up, to live in the big bad world and still find happiness.
No child ever thinks he will grow up to be sad. He knows that sad people walk around him every day, but he never lets himself think he can be one of them growing up. That thought hasn't been planted in his delicate mind yet.

The will to be truly happy is so blinding that you accept the first sign of something new and good as the same signs you've read of in books and seen in numerous movies; each incident leading up to some happy ending. Each incident form then on seems to you like it is something you know is going to happen because the world of writers en-capsules all events that can and cannot occur in your life. And so this strange familiarity seems comforting.

Our brains, tricky little blobs, only take us to the places we want them to in our times of joy and only to those places we don't want to go to in the days of sorrow.

You spin a story in your head. Your love story is written for you and by you without your knowledge.

When that story starts to deviate from that fairy tale, the little gaps of information that your brain collected but chose to ignore start coming back to your memory and you see things in a completely new light. The light of reality; it's a bitch.

Your own life and the recent months of bliss begin to seem different. You start doubting its every moment. Every memory that you held so close seems tainted; tainted by that doubt that it ever existed. Even though nothing changed from then till now, it seems like everything has.

And that doubt is too difficult to cope with. The knowledge that the one thing you held most sacred in your life was a mere illusion is so enormous a weight on your intellect that you hit rock bottom.

Now you can't trust your brain.

It tricked you. In all relationships one doubt is enough to shatter the bond of trust. The same happens again, only this relationship is with your brain, your heart if you must.

You don't trust yourself. You try to put the blame for this treachery on the world or on him. It's easier that way, eases the guilt. You make up defences in your head to somehow save that memory of 'love' from this new monster – reason.

It falters, it will always falter and you will never quite picture it the same way again. Over time it will change and it will leave you more confused, more hurt and more insecure.

But you will get out of it. You will learn. You won't lose that memory of 'love' but you will change.

You will grow up.

And once that happens, you will not trust your brain again. You will not trust the world again.

Even if you find someone better, even if you find something more pure, even if you find a world more blissful, you will reject it because you are too scared to get hurt the same way.
You don’t even want to acknowledge the possibility that it could be real, even if now it is.

So you will never love again.

You will never feel the same joy again (not even if you’re with friends and having the time of your life).

Because you are too scared to let yourself experience your own emotions.

You bent them.
You made them unbearable and yet,
you long for them.

So trust yourself again so you may trust the world again so you may trust that word again, or keep believing …

“One love is all we need.”



P.S. This post doesn’t reflect on my personal life. I had to point this out cause I know how we all like to think, “Oh! Poor guy, he’s fucked.”
Well I’m not. I gathered this understanding from observing some people around me, four to be exact.

P.P.S. I know what I ask of those ‘heartbroken’ people is not easy to say the least. I’m just trying to point out what I’ve noticed.
Also, I don’t listen to that song a lot.
Just saying.

you're a human inside.

When your tears don't fall,

They just hang around,
In the corner of your eye,
Playing out,
All the thoughts in your head,
Which should be dead,
Instead of making new tears for you...

Your throat feels thick,
And your tongue can't lick,
The top of your mouth,
Cause your lips tremble,
The words can't escape,
As they've lost all faith,
In the world; they're too scared to go into...

The world is still,
As you're wondering,
If someone noticed you choke inside.
Some shuffling, some hovering,
As they're passing you by.
Then somebody, stops a second to see,
You sitting crouched aside.
He keeps a hand,
By your shoulder's side,
You feel the tear slide...


Cause you're a human inside.


Note: This one is dedicated to the friend I've never seen.

the lantern in the sky.

I was walking back from my best friends' hostel after being unceremoniously kicked out from one of their rooms by the other one cause I have had an exam at 8 but I wanted to watch a movie.
The road was empty and yellow with the halogen lights. I could see my shadow in the centre of the road in front of me and I was walking thinking about how narrow my shoulders seemed. I would have made a good female model if only I had the face...
I looked to the left into the dark empty park as I usually do when I'm walking back alone in the middle of the night. It's something about the dark that gives me peace. And no, this isn't the serial killer in me talking.
I notice a yellow light in the sky. I squint my eyes a little since I'm not wearing my spectacles. I see a red balloon glowing faintly over the yellow flame. It was a sky lantern drifting gently along, carried by the breeze which only the bats in the sky were fortunate enough to feel.
A sky lantern at 3:16am in Pilani, where only zombies and I walk on the streets this late. It seemed odd.
I hurried my pace a little cause some trees were blocking my view of it. I whip out my new phone to try and take a picture of it, but all its 6k ass could show me in the viewfinder was a yellow dot in a perfectly black sky. Not the glowing red hood over the flame and not the flicker in the flame. It couldn't show me the two things that made the sight beautiful.
I am now in the clear and can see the lantern descend more rapidly. It wobbles and I wonder if it will tip over. At this point I am standing in the middle of the road just looking up at the sky. It seems like a better thing to do than trying to capture it in a photograph.
What's the point of a photograph?
It isn't to preserve a moment. Cause the moment includes what you feel - the coolness of the still air, the silence of the place, the faint smile on my face and the sheer innocence of wanting to have that lantern.
A photograph is meant to remind you of a memory and in trying to capture the lantern's flight, I was missing out on the memory itself.
As I watched the flame flicker and the lantern fall somewhere in the park, I noticed myself turning around and walking towards the entrance. I entered the park and looked around for the pack of dogs that generally get territorial when you walk on their turf. They were nowhere to be seen.

Perfect silence.

I walk to the middle of the park, use my cell phone light as I get off the stone paved path onto the barren ground... It was there somewhere. I start looking. I check intermittently to see if someone was watching me walk around with a bag on my back looking curiously at the ground like a little kid. No one.

Relief.

I smell the weird smell of freshly molten wax, the smell you associate with Diwali or of summers in UP where the electricity  never fucking comes. I walk around the area looking for it. For the lantern. I don't even know what I'll do with it when I find it. Well obviously it would satisfy an engineer's curiosity on how a thing like that was flying, but that wasn't why I was looking for it.
I wanted it cause it looked pretty.

I check the time. 3:17am. I'll look for it for another 3 minutes, then I'm done.

Sigh. I smell it, but I can't see it.(It's time like these when you wish you had that cheap ass phone with the torch instead.)

I look up at the sky. I don't know why, maybe hoping there is another lantern in the sky.
I see no lantern, but I do see something else.
The sky is lit up by starts. I can see a whole blanket of black covered in tiny little specks of light. Twinkling light. The trees are all on the periphery of the park and the view is breath taking. (This is definitely a consequence of the rom-com I just saw.)
I look at the star lit sky and suddenly I don't feel like looking for the lantern any more.

Epiphany.

The lantern had served its purpose. (Straight out of The Matrix, I know.)
It was there to make you feel nice, happy, innocent, child-like, curious... It was there, floating across the sky out of bloody no where in the middle of the night, making you think where it had come from and who else was watching it. But the key here is that the lantern was supposed to make you feel all this for a moment.

A moment.

That's it.

Just one moment, maybe two. It wasn't going to make you feel that way tomorrow, an hour later or even after you step out of that park.

That's the thing about little things. They're little. Yet from the second they catch your attention to the time they just disappear into no where, they are your world.

Get it?

Every time we have a chance to be happy for a few moments we waste it trying to make ourselves happy in the future.

A kid plays with his favourite toy without worrying about breaking it, cause he knows (unconsciously) that he'll find something else to play with once this one breaks.
A kid is smarter than us.


Just like that kid and his little brain that isn't really that little.
 

not much to say today.

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knots.

Sometimes you just have that feeling. The weird feeling in your stomach. It's not the sinking feeling and it's not just knots of nervousness or excitement. It's a mix of the two. Maybe it's a new feeling all together, one that I still haven't been able to label.
I have it right now.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Nothing. It's still there.

The weirdest part is, that there is no reason for it.
Okay, that's a lie.
There are more than one reasons for it, but I won't list them all. Mainly because those people whom it concerns read the blog too (at least I hope they do).

Some of the reasons:
My friends aren't here. They'll be back in a few days. Some of them are here but they're busy with something or the other.
I found out last night that I got 1 on 60 in a test. That's 20 less than the average and that's 20 less than what I thought I'd get.
I've just come back to Pilani after a week long stay at home. Home, is something playing on my mind.
Yesterday I got nostalgic and had a long over due heart to heart with old friends. That's playing on my mind too.
There is another reason which I'm not going to talk about.

There are so many reasons. Yet, I'm not convinced that any one of them could cause physical symptoms. But then all of them together causing my stomach to curl makes no sense either. All of them are independent incidents that bear no correlation with one another at all. And none of them create any chaos in my life at all (well other than the 1/60 which holds the potential to wreck my future and see me selling sperm to earn some money, which also wouldn't get me a lot of money as no one would want a kid with a potato for a nose and a brain that gets ones on 60; you get the point).

Let's try drawing analogies here.
Imagine a kid who got a report card that has an F, expects to get back his favourite comic (read Playboy) tomorrow, expects his friends to come and have a party tomorrow, has an exam day after, and his younger brother just told him that he was adopted. Imagine the kid's state of mind. He's going to be a drug dealer. You can see it, can't you?

Let's try another one.
Imagine a teenage girl. Now now, don't get carried away. Imagine the clothes too. Now now, the clothes should be on her and not on the floor. Better.
So imagine a teenage girl WITH her clothes on. She was told her jaw line is too strong, she expects to get a new designer bag tomorrow, has been invited to a cooler set of people's party tomorrow, has her beauty pageant try outs day after, and her mom just told her that she'll bloom only at 19 cause that's how it runs in the family (Guys, I really spoiled her for you now, didn't I?)

Anyhow, I guess you have an idea. There are things to look forward to, there are things to dread and there is a lot to be done to not have to dread those things you have assumed you will have to dread anyway.

There is the fear of rejection, of failure, of the unknown. There is the happiness of... well happiness. And there is the general anxiety cause you think too much.

I guess it's just hormones. Oh wait, I'm not a girl... I guess it's just the shit that fucks things up in the bitch that's life. Oh wait, I'm not 15 any more either. Damn!

I guess it's just a lot of nothings given too much importance cause nothing really happens around me.

Yeah, I guess that's it.

The knots are still there by the way. But I must stop my ramblings cause I have to bathe, shave, clean my room, study, watch a movie, study some more and...


stop writing.