Dream Days: 2016

WHAT IF?

Which waves in every raven tress,

Or softly lightens o’er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express,

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place

Him. That one emotion entrapped in a physical vessel. Him; punctuated in every sentence that doesn’t make sense in her head. Him.

People don’t make sense, these human frailties don’t make sense, the confounding emotions have never made sense, and these fleeting hours will never make sense. What a time to be alive. She keeps her hair tied in a messy bun and smiles at the metaphor on her head; this mess is mine (she thinks) as the faint blush of the sky trades places with her cheeks. She has written about unnamed sentiments, having been a survivor of a fine assortment of a few.

This is new, this is dangerous, and this is very strange. She is walking towards the tablet to find a substitute for pining, a small scroll through her itinerary for the day. She doesn’t like it one bit, this pining, this chaos. She likes it all figured out. She remembers suddenly, mid-scroll, Nietzsche wants her to foster chaos to give birth to a dancing star.

Clandestine, now that’s a word she has come to understand inside out. It is juvenile and infinitely thrilling to do things unconventionally, it has got something to do with her fear of rejection. She hopes, to get back to her former self which seems like a morphed version of her former reality, she is trying to reclaim the past, failingly, just like Gatsby. She sits back and analyses with a blinkered mind, this is possibly the worst decision you could’ve arrived at, sport, but let’s make a mess lioness.

They say that the world was built for two says Lana del Rey’s haunting lament which is not being helpful tonight. There is no dearth of misfortunes in her circus for a mind and eventually her life, and the rational self deters her from pursuing the flaming path of regrets which is bound to leave a bleak sadness in its wake. She must be under a spell, she thinks. Taking a bite of an apple, she skims her fingers over and over the cold screen, this is probably going to kill me, but I have nursed a taste for tragedy, let’s get this circus on the road, she smiles.

She writes it, types it, edits and re-edits it and on the concluding note, falters. She completely loathes cold feet, this is how she has judged humanity, the ones who do and the ones who don’t. She is painfully close to being the later. Her friends warned her about the ones with the sly stares, the undisclosed intentions and the invisible sadness shrouding them. They will crush your heart and leave it in smithereens. The question is whether she should jump the gun. She is still not revealing too much in her words, she never has. She never will. But it is tough to feign indifference and her conduct will get her undone. The other side of Paradise has already seen the rising Sun in her eyes, and it’s too late to shut them.

And all these emoticons and words
try to make it better but they only make it worse

She leaves her secret wish on the tablet, the raging fire subsiding momentarily, the other side still needs a divine intervention, there are no winners tonight, only hopeful romantics, waiting for the fire to be rekindled. The text just sits there waiting to be delivered to that one blind man. The man behind all the What If’s in her circus.

She leaves the room and all her secrets behind; her mind is a fucking circus.

But, What If?

P.S. This post is based on real events happening to real people. Thank you Sam and Ann for shoving the blatant truth down my throat and dowsing my self doubts into acid. (I am not referring to chemical stimulants, I hate that shit). Anaphors rule. I am all apologies for the lack of updates. Lord Byron was a true Luminary and my nigga.

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, by Unknown

art

AND WHILE WE WERE HERE

"Thank you for the tragedy, I need it for my art."

- Kurt Cobain

He sits in silence in an unending void, pitch black, the black that haunted you at night when you were thirsty but didn’t have the courage to walk those twenty steps towards the kitchen, it haunts you still. He is transfixed into a numbing stillness. He wants to understand his purpose. He has read every word that claimed to offer him gratification for surviving thus far. The Upanishads, the Old Testament and the new, the Sutras and Confucianism. He tossed it all until it hit every surface inside his head, yet, it failed to make any sense.

These were the kind of revelations that have caused thrashing waves of torment to millions, if not all. He was sure of one indisputable fact- that loneliness was comforting because it assured insolubility, not being responsible to answer another query about an existence that had never made sense to him. Whatever he would say would be another lie, a lie he was conditioned to think was the true nature of his morality. It is times like these every living entity dreads, the questions of morality, existence, purpose and an inescapable end to all of it. He is not sure. He never has been.

How do you know when you are alive? Does breathing entail the existence of life or we are confusing the process of being alive with the idea of having a purpose? Are we alive only when we are creating or the mere actuality of persisting on earth qualifies us as alive? These are things that keep him up into the wee hours; it is becoming an addictive routine, this meditation of sorts. It’s a chance for him to bloat his despicable human frailty- his id, him pathetically believing that he matters in this savage wasteland. His miniscule breathing in this prodigious world makes a difference to the cosmic clockwork.

He knows it all too well. He thinks about dinner now. Did the last piece of pie rot out in the fridge or he’ll need to wake her up. She tells him every day that he needs to learn the basics. He gets up and refills his coffee mug with the surviving vestiges of whiskey. It burns his insides, the whiskey, he doesn’t remember the last time he had a full meal, and she will kill him.

He grazes a look on the sleeping form under the sheets, just a wild mess of mahogany hair and creamy skin. He imagines them together in a few years into the future and immediately becomes aware of the crease settling in between his eyes. He is not sure, as is she. He then realises, if human affairs are not riding the same wave towards their conclusion then how can a messed up web of outcomes, ruled by unfixed decisions, have a definite finality. He will never be sure of the future, simply because he will write a new one every day.

He mounts the Muddy waters onto his vintage record player and resumes the soft tapping on his macbook. He tried to maintain a journal, but “they weren’t meant to be”, he remembers it in her raspy sexed up voice. It’s three in the morning- the time for artists, loners and lovers. He smiles, realising we are all a little bit of all three.

The tapping reaches a fever pitch, the pages bound by magical realism, this is a new thing that has got him intrigued, and he’s is good at it, or so, she says. The page numbers are ascending. He is writing the epilogue, more for the benefit of the reader and the publishers than his own, he doesn’t care for subjecting an ending to another ending, kind of defeats the whole purpose of a conclusion. He never understood the usefulness of a post- script.

The sky is becoming lighter like soaked chalk on the wall, slowly, making you aware with every second that you are alive if you can feel it change from midnight blue to a violent violet. She floats over the floor without making a single sound, her hair in an untamed mess and the huge glasses sliding off her nose, her eyes still dreaming up poetry. She rests her elbows on the table and stares at him intently. He looks at her fleetingly, he can’t afford to ruin his perfect ending, those eyes are lethal for coherence and alcohol isn’t the only substance that causes intoxication.

He types - This incompleteness is all we have, when we are not sure, we are alive.

“You are one glorious mindfuck”, he utters, not meeting her eye, bidding farewell to the keys.

P.S. credits to Graham Greene and Charles Bukowski for being the real glorious mindfucks. My second semester exams have finally ended, I really need to find a new sad playlist. I hope everyone is happy in their lives. I wrote this because we all have our messed up days. Thanks for reading, I won't bite if you leave a comment, I swear.

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, by Unknown

closure

LETTERS TO THE DEAD.

INFINITY OF SIGHS, RISING TIDES

ALL WE DO IS HIDE, ALL WE DID WAS HIDE. - Me.

Dear you,

I was prepared for the preordained status of this letter as a rhetorical statement for my benefit than yours.

You remember all ‘those times’ when all you want for yourself is an Advil and sleep. (In that order) The day that marked your vanishing act till this day, have been ‘those times’.

That ‘swell’ time when we rode the carousel with Graham Nash blasting our eardrums, telling us that, “The entire world was love” and, we sang along till our throats were parched for another shot from our ‘secret’ whiskey flask.

You had forced me to take up that ‘stupid’ job at the banned books club, enunciating every sentence from their beat up pamphlet. “Don’t sweat it, Woolfy”, you’d told me in the waiting room, before ruffling my hair (it took me an hour to look like that). And you popped a cigarette, your feet tapping with nervous energy. You were bad at faking it.

I force myself to remember the times before you had ever existed in my universe, before you dismantled my ‘guarded and cagey emotional-fortress’, as you called it. It’s like seeing through tar, everything glistening with a vortex of a technicolor on bitter charcoal.

Do you remember the playlist you had compiled over the long and bitter winter? The one you’d titled, “Black hole of a heart”, I’d burst into a riot of a million ugly chuckles and you’d whispered, and I heard, “mission accomplished”. We spent the whole night talking about the man on the moon with the playlist on its hundredth loop and the water sprinklers in the morning couldn’t erase the quiet understanding we felt in our hearts. ‘Simple’ is a foreign word for me now.

When you left for Dublin and sent me pictures of the Book of Kells .I recall you calling me on New Year’s and slurring with all the alcohol in your veins, “I put you before Art”, as clearly as my volition to keep you in my heart for as long as I shall live.

I can imagine you daydreaming about a certain colour that’s gotten you into a trance, beckoning you to jog back to your studio and immerse the canvas in it. You, sitting in a coffee shop with a friend (whom I don’t know); sketching the face of the attractive waitress on a paper napkin, I just hope you don’t give it to her.

You always had that old-world charm about you, you know? The ink black, long hair- always in an unmanageable mess. The ocher-brown irises under those hooded eyes which were always in a state of contemplation, those lips that seemed to always be smirking at an inside joke. You looked the part too, the Art major with the silver easel. But I realised belatedly that, I wasn’t your Art.

WE wished, we wished but all we did was hide. Hide from what we truly felt and meant. I know I’d be the moth around your flame, the 70’s never left me; the hopeful believer in the goodness of Love. I would quote Byron and you’d be the Eliot. You were the black hole that blinded my world and hurled me into the raging whirlpools of the hollow land, the real one. I used to tell you that it isn’t love if doesn’t feel like the 70’s and you’d quote Erich Segal and I was naive enough to think that a Love like ours was meant for movie screens.
We kept running in circles, always shy of the horizon, where we would actually meet. We never realised what we truly were, we never ventured to explore.

You hid behind your Artistic freedom that dictated you to disconnect from fixation of the romantic kind; you were a traveler, a vanishing act. I was the dreamer who stood on the horizon, waiting for you to join me and watch us become. I hid in the waiting, all the illusions slowly dissipating into an inferno of flames, until there was only me and the burning sky, so much for becoming.

I have lost too much love to fear, doubt and distrust. So I offer you a final secret: my hiding place.

I wrote this, not in hopes of finding a riposte but, to finally find a restful slumber in knowing that I can finally come out of hiding.

With hope at last

-Me.

P.S. I woke up from my seemingly indefinite Odin sleep. I wrote this while listening to daughter and Nada Surf. I have been neglectful. Sorry. You guys are Love. And Love should be treasured. This equals to a Peace offering?

Ezra Miller inspired the man in the letter.

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, by Unknown

content

WARPED REALITIES

“Here you go” said the perky waitress in little Shakespeare, setting down the warm cup of vanilla latte on my ancient ebony table. “Thanks.”I responded with a crinkling smile, feeling no gratitude towards her.

As soon as she left my personal space I sighed in acute relief. The familiar ochre floating in lighter clouds comforted me. The smell of cocoa and vanilla makes the world a background noise. I took a deep breath. I needed to browse the bookstore before starting my dreadful assignment. My life was a perpetual downward spiral.

“People aren’t broken. They’re just interestingly wired.” ― Silvia Hartmann. Sigh.

The quotes carved on my table reminded me of the vehemence of a lost era, a time when quotes and ink held Delphic wonder. I stroked the patterns in pity. Had I not once dreamt of writing something so profound that it would validate my purpose? I had. Well look where that landed you my subconscious sneered.

It was my dream that now made millions for the people I’d naively believed in, it was my thought that found an echo in a million hearts, it was I who watched it being tossed over like a pack of cigarettes.

I shouldn’t resent it now. I will get another moment to glow. “Don’t lie to yourself, Bronte.” I heard a voice from the adjoining table. I snapped out of my reverie and turned my head slowly to the direction of the speaker. Reid.

In one fluid movement he stood up and sat across from me. His long brown hair slightly tousled, his nut-brown eyes measuring my demeanor. “Aiming for the sad Keanu look?” I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got that harrowed expression again.” He settled an ivory square on the table beside the now icy dose of caffeine. I fixed my gaze on the fierce jaw, the wishful eyes and suppressed my own inexplicable need to linger a little longer. “A book?” I said, tilting my head, my hair cloaking my eye.

He just kept looking at my hands. The sound of tearing paper made me the Sun for people within earshot. His perfect lips turned up into a knowing smile. I ducked a little with a wispy “sorry” and there it was, my personal miracle.

Dear Miss Faye,

We happily accept the request for publishing your debut novel, “Somewhere”. It will be a success. Our entire staff is excited by the possibilities of this project.

Find enclosed with this letter of approval, all guidelines required to finalise this process. The production editor had a few notes so enclosed. The paperwork is a preliminary draft of your book contract.

Please look these over till 5 December 2015, also feel free to contact the head of sales Mr. Carroll.

Looking forward to meet you.

Sincerely, yours

William Hatter.

Tears of consternation and reassurance blotted my cheeks. Reid shifted his chair and closed the distance between us. For the first time in my anaemic existence I was seeing signs of life. The rain of joy terrified me like a nightmare. “It’s happening, it’s coming for you.” I gazed at him through the tears, “unparalleled Happiness” he whispered. The words embraced my thoughts, reverberating silent prayers of gratitude. “Winter”, his voice implored me to accept the moment. “Reid” I whispered with all the emotion I could converge into the preceding words “Why do you care?”

He tucked my hair back, I could feel the weak willed restraint leaking out. “Because, you make me brave” said he in his oceanic voice. He saw things the way a dreamer knits incessant illusions, with a mutilated hope, hope nonetheless. I cannot recall who kindled the searing Lip-embrace as I called it, but it hurt to part. All my sorrows washed away. “Reid you’re a mythical creature” I sighed. He snorted attractively; I do not know how one accomplishes that. He stood up beckoning me to follow him “Today’s book- purchase monstrosity is on me, go play in your natural habitat, Winter.”

PS- I am ashamed to be writing anything at all. It's a fucking shames that I have neglected this sacred blog for mso long. Any plea for forgiveness cannot clear the guilt and shame.

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, by Unknown

art

THE ARTIST

He walked in the purple haze. The light filtered by the dust motes, softly falling on her phantasmal visage or mirage? His feet lucidly trudging the moss floor. The errant pounding of the massive stereos now a soft thumping on the ground, his steps mirrored the beat. The graciously poured alcohol had started making its intentions clear. His hands instinctively ran through his floppy hair.

He could smell the smoke from this distance, the familiar scent of the wild mingling with soot from the cedars. He trembled a little, a small part of him afraid to disrupt this perfect Shangri-La. He quirked his lips remembering, “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” He steadied his breath and set his gaze on the magical enchantment especially conjured from his personal hell.

“Will you paint me?” she laughed quietly, her eyes playing with the light. His eyes fell on the Art supplies at her feet. She smiled a lost smile, a trick of the eyes he guessed. “I guess I have time” he scrutinized her face, probing for an indication for this hour to be a dreamer’s paradise. “I am getting old here” she chortled, her eyelashes casting shadows on her cheeks. He sat down on the grass, his back against a cedar trunk. Never once did he let his gaze off her, worried if she’d fade away. She was wreathed by an Elysian glow, the kind we read in folklore. Her head was swaying to some imaginary tune he wished he could hear too.

The charcoal in his hands glided on the paper unceasingly, his eyes lost in the valleys and moons of her facial world; every part of it was a revelation. He remembered something from a book he’d read awhile ago, the unworldly maiden who was perpetually lost in the woods. Her hair tangled into the branches and she became one of the trees.

She held still but there was fluidity to it. The Sun kissed the horizon and the world became a balmy breeze.

“Do you come here often?” he asked her with palpable curiosity, he was finished with the portrait. His fingers lightly brushing the shadows, lingering wistful stroke on her lips. “Yes, whenever you do.” She murmured, her voice becoming dreamy.

He looked up to find an empty space, just in time to realize that he had invented her all along.

P.S. This story doesn’t imply that your beloved author writes under chemical influence. Also, it’s magical to write in a toasty blanket- of- dreams on a chilly Winter evening.

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, by Unknown

Review: Thirteen Reasons Why

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This Book could've been a profound reminder of the need to be heard and understood, a common complication of the teenage. But it fell flat on the very pedestal it tried to stand upright on. I am filled with regret to have spent and early morning sleep over a book which failed to strike any understanding and illuminate a very serious issue of the modern times: suicide.

The book is in the form of pre-recorded cassette tapes that Hannah Baker, the suicide leaves for thirteen people who knowingly or unknowingly led her to taker her life. The plot is dramatic and intriguing but the narration is from the point-of-view of one the people she has accused of her decision to take her life. The narration is unreasonably prolonged, maybe the author wanted to build up moment that just wasn't there.

The writing style is bland and very forgettable. Even though you understand that as trivial the indignities faced by Hannah seem, it is fathomable that the suffocation of the barrage of unfortunate events that have unfurled in her life could have led to something similar to a suicide. But I for some reason could not be convinced by her voice, her torment could've been heard had she allowed herself a chance at reformation like her English teacher recommends at the end.

I guess maybe that is what the author wants to insinuate; an unfortunate event as it is, without an artificial manipulation of the human hope to trump an ending. Maybe this is what they mean when they say- "it is what it is."

Even though I can try to understand her desperation to change her circumstances I fail to see the urgency of her choice to stop something as precious as human beating heartbeat. Maybe the writing could've been sharper, the sentences more ornate rather than just being there, they could've taught us a thing or two about life. But they didn't. except for the narrators earnest attempt to not repeat the mistake of not trying a little harder to bear people.

Maybe the only lesson learned from this story is that we can try to hold someone a little too tight
and just try to walk in someone's skin just to feel a little more human.

View all my reviews

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, by Unknown

Review: The Outsiders

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, by Unknown

fiction

STUCK IN LOVE

I am catastrophically sorry for not posting earlier, if anybody still anticipates a post. This one’s for a creepy girl I know and love. Thanks for kicking me off the bed and letting me mope and write on the floor. I’ll make no promises but I can assure you that I am trying hard to be more productive lately, with new year just lurking in the backyard.

This is for all the people falling in love right now,

“How odd is it to be loved at all” is a digression from the original thought, “How strange it is to be anything at all” reminds me of the pestilence that has gnawed many a hearts whole and made world’s whole for some. Yes, dear reader, I am writing about the sweetly cloying magnanimity that many philosophers argue, surrounds humans even when the lights are out. Love. It will pour down into a cliché if I make up pretentiously ornate word bouquets about the sickly emotion that always gets too much credit for making everything worth fighting for, which I personally believed as a big farce sold to Pre-pubescent teens, shamelessly snatching away their right to find for themselves the reality of the oddly familiar sensation. We’ve read about Heroes and heroines and their epic love sagas since the middle grade, hell they’ve been a part of our curriculum, overtly glorified in the form of a Utopia intentionally handed down from hopeful dreamers to be alive for a little longer or maybe to validate their faith in something that never came true in their own lifetimes. Love is a tragic comedy some might argue and for some, it is the final salvation. We are creatures of circumstance, reader.

Whatever love is, it definitely gets bills paid for lovelorn writers. This sudden amorous atmosphere or the lack of it is a simple product of a romantic- film- itch that has needed my attention for a while, well I scratched it yesterday. The post and title have been inspired by a film of the same title. The film was a mediocre attempt at portraying different scenarios that play out during the plague of love. (I just found that I had a song buried in the crypts of my endless music files, I’d been looking for it everywhere but here) Strangely the content in the brackets illustrate a generalised concept of love which I begrudgingly accept. There is a thin line between holding on and letting go. How long is long enough? What if hope trumps surrender? This may be a fictionalised world I am building hereon but it is inspired by very real events. Are we running from one to another in search of a substitute for our disgusting illusion of a person who emulates everything we don’t stand for? Or are we just inherently restless? These are a few things that keep me up all night. And the thing that stings the most is that we know that we know and yet it will still play out the same way it was supposed to in the first place without the materialisation of the divine intervention we have been hoping for all along.

The concept of moving on from a memory and moving on from a person is relative. I am going to paraphrase Dostoevsky (because I am currently reading his work),”At any rate man has always somehow feared that two and two makes four. And I still fear it. Granted that man does nothing but search out those two time two is four; he sails across oceans, he sacrifices his life in this quest, but, I would swear, he’s somehow afraid of really finding, discovering it. For he feels that, as soon as he finds it, there will be nothing to search for.”I have always wondered what scares us so irreparably that we wait in the shadows especially when all we want is the Sun? I am raising more questions than answering them. I am hoping that we are not afraid of bearing out the ugliness we have shrouded ourselves behind, a carefully orchestrated soap opera behind the face; the flaws, the shame, the taut opinions, the tired soul and the inability to accept ourselves as vessels of filth and wonder. Maybe we should know our heart before we seek to find another. Because I know reality is better than dreams when one knows the anatomy of the heart. We draw conclusions before we solve the equation. We anticipate an ending before we read the prologue. Our disbelief of anything pleasant ever happening to us overpowers the mousy hope to survive the storm, maybe under an umbrella with someone.

Waiting for the right moment should be a formidable sin punishable by law of the land. It’s not waiting, it’s an excuse to prolong the cowardice, the laughable attempt to escape from truly feeling contented with a feeling. Maybe we’ve been drilled superstitiously to fear happiness because it’s known to be followed by bleakness. The film teaches us to hoping for more than we think we deserve. And if you're just scared to get your heart smashed into smithereens I'll tell you a secret, smithereens have an occult shapelessness to them, a lack of definiteness and if that is not beautiful I don't know what is. It's okay to love things we do not completely understand and I think heartbreak is a purposive honor screaming " you know how storms work, weatherman."

People like me often sigh with relief because we’re unbound by another human tie but, it is us nonetheless who sigh at the small miracles of love too. I am a coward, reader. An A-listed coward to feel anything potentially romantic or as I call it, disastrous towards another human being. Running in circles makes your head spin, it’s better to play hide and seek.

I distinctly remember from Before sunset “Isn’t everything we do in this life is to be loved more?” The real problem arises when we do not receive it from a particular person. As the man in cornerstone stumbles from bar to bar looking for a figment of his imagination and asking strangers who remind him of her if he could call them by her name, he cries “tell me where’s your hiding place, I am scared that I’ll forget your face” I guess sometimes that’s what we are chasing too; an abstract idea of what we want love to be and then submerge ourselves in morbid misery when we run out of places and chances to find it. I could tell you my opinion on how to not retrograde the progress or I could choose to lay down the bare truth and let you make a judgement for yourselves, I am offering you the choice the former Pre-pubescent- you was deprived of. Make that choice. Love is not a laser quest as song writers will have you believe. It is mesmeric and it’s suffocating, it’s a whole new dimension. There are things in a man’s life that he doesn’t reveal except maybe to his friends, then there are things he doesn’t reveal to them too and ultimately there are things he refrains from revealing to himself. If that is what you’re afraid of, the possibility of a forlorn limbo of paralysis i.e; finding something warped and twisted or worse, finding nothing at all, you are wasting time.

I’ve always wished for love to be simple but then even clouds cry to satiate the parched earth, why should humans get it any easier?

P.S. I hope the right people receive the right message at the right time, I hate being late.

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, by Unknown

AND WHILE WE WERE HERE

LETTERS TO THE DEAD.

WARPED REALITIES

THE ARTIST

Review: Thirteen Reasons Why

Review: The Outsiders

STUCK IN LOVE

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