Strangers

Strangers in the dark,

We met to light each others paths,

With hands held tight, 

Our candles sparked

Strangers in the night, 

We walked a long way;

Our hearts were tranquil now,

We had each other.

Strangers hand in hand, 

We were no longer unknown, 

We waltzed through the dark, 

Like we weren't afraid anymore. 

We were strangers in the dark, 

And we were finally, 

At the end of our cave;

We saw the light shine bright on our eyes.

Strangers on a journey, 

We took together, 

But as we reached the end of our tunnel, 

And we finally saw each other, 

We were once again unknown,

One to the other. 

Strangers in the dark, 

Travelling together, 

Hand in hand,

Hearts tied together.

Lovers forged from the desolate night,

Strangers once again,

In the face of light;

Lovers composed of nothing but, 

Carbon and bad timing.

These days I don't play for free.

I've been wondering where to go with life lately. I've always been a failure at academics. I've never excelled at sports or at clubs. But lately, I've been failing at stuff I've always considered myself to be good or rather, better than average at. I've been loosing. Literally and figuratively. Well, more literally than ever. The anthology I've picked to describe you gradually defies me. I've considered the miles between us fragile as I've always believed that home is where the heart lies. And I'm pretty sure our hearts lie at the same place. But lately, I've been wondering if I left my home way too far behind. This city's been getting to me, and so are you. I don't know where I want to go from here, I don't know what I should look for. I wish I could give up on this, sooner than too late, quicker than too slow. I just want to come back to you. I wonder if I want any of this anymore. I wonder if I remember every last scar on your body like I used to. I wonder if I'll ever listen to your voice again. You know how these crowds unsettle me don't you?

P.S:
I love you.
I miss the way you smell.
Well of course you know that.
Bye.

A Rainy Tuesday

19/5/17

We sat there,

As we watched the ice cream, 

Melt before us, 

One last time.

I raised my eyes, 

From the muddy puddle, 

And I saw your face,

Expressionless, 

Silent.

They say, 

Silence, 

Is of two types, 

One,

Where you do not know what to say, 

The other, 

Where you have so much to say,  

But you do not know what is appropriate;

Only,

I don't believe our silence was shared this time.

We sat in our corner, 

Mirror images of each other, 

But only, 

We hadn't noticed the crack,

In between our mirror, 

That had parted us, 

Midway; 

Perhaps now, 

We were, 

A bit different.

Our eyes met, 

As you broke the silence, 

You were the first one, 

And you said;

That you've so much more to see,

So much more to do, 

And I sat there, 

Still, 

Unable to break my silence,

Unable to cry out loud.

It was raining outside, 

The rain was perhaps,

The only thing I liked about that day, 

The rest is a piercing memory,

That I cannot forget;

I cannot forget, 

How this time,

Your lips did not curve,

As you said those three words.

I looked down again, 

At my chocolate puddle, 

As the brownie turned soggy, 

As it soaked up the ice cream,

It was all a mesh now, 

And I stared as my tear drop,

Made the puddle ripple,

And the ripples thinned down as they touched the edge, 

Like the years, 

That had spread us thin now.

I looked up, 

From my puddle,

Only to see, 

That you, 

Had finally left, 

On a rainy Tuesday, 

In search, 

Of your next big adventure.

The journey

One fine sunny day,
I had embarked on a journey,
To a place,
I had long since longed for.

On the highway,
Driving across the empty road,
I looked on at the clear blue sky,
Ahead of me;
The white clouds fluttering away,
Carelessly,
Like little butterflies in a flower garden.

I drove across the countryside,
Amidst the hills,
And across the fields of yellow;
The sun peaking out in between the clouds,
It's golden rays sparkling on the water,
Beneath the bridge.

Beyond the hills,
Across the river,
The sky had turned an odd shade of blue,
A shade that reminded of fear,
Fear of joy,
Of losing what was never mind,
The clouds were no longer careless butterflies,
They were,
Packed together in outrage,
My heart no longer fluttered,
It sat still.

I drove on,
In search of my destination,
The place I had long since longed for.
The place for which I had travelled all these miles.

I drove through the foreshadowing clouds,
Amidst the dark grey,
And roaring winds,
I was perhaps,
A bit scared,
For loneliness in the dark,
Is a sight I hadnt wished to see.

The clouds had cleared up,
My sky was once again calm,
My red once again beating;
And my feet once again still.

I was in search of a destination,
I had long since heard of,
But I had never seen the daunting beauty
That captivated every soul,
Leaving them,
Spell bound to its endearing appeal.

Across the valleys,
And the fields of yellow,
From beyond the hills,
Reverberating my red,
I had finally reached my destination.

But the sun had set,
On my Sandy beach;
And the infinitesimal grains,
Slipped away,
From beneath my feet,
Like the illusion of time,
Always fleeting.

Perhaps,
It is the illusion of a captivating destination,
That sets us on a journey,
We would not have otherwise taken,
Only to find,
That we had loved the journey
More than the place,
We had long since longed for.

The Musician

She’s that one voice on the other side of the phone that’ll be keeping you awake through cold winter nights. She’s that one desperate ‘sigh’ at the end of a sentence your story is incomplete without. She’s that one complicated smell on a windy winter evening that tastes like summer but feels like a thousand raindrops on your skin. She’s that one faded shooting star in your sky that you wish on every night, even though she’s not there. She’s that one person you can see from a million miles away and still fall for every time you remember her. She’s that one beautiful flower in the middle of the forest that’s the answer to all your prayers, the cure to all your diseases. She’s the one flower you can never get, but you want and you die for everyday.



She’s the one that’s been killing me with her song.

Let Them In

The bag was flung to one corner of the room, the clothes stripped off and thrown on the bed. Like any other kid, when school ended, I felt so free. But, my story wasn’t like every other average child. Our stories are all different, aren’t they? I’m not you and you’re definitely nowhere near to me. We are all so different, yet all so alike. Why is it then, that we face discrimination? Just a little thought in the mind of a 14 year old girl. The bag dropped, so did the clothes, I went out to play. That’s something pretty normal for a 14 year old kid, isn’t it? Too bad that the difference between reality and the realm of human perception is so tainted that what seems is never what truly is. I wonder how many people know what it is like to be forgotten, it’s like living in an isolated realm away from mainstream humanity. However, the laws of humanity do not apply here.  I heard that they talk about us all the time; allegedly we are all over the news. While they debate about our lives, I being the victim of this hateful world that is dictated by man’s greed, see no ray of sun light shine towards me.
For a 14 year old, I surely think a lot. They say that maturity comes with age, with age comes experience and experience gives way to maturity. However, when you experience life in the form of a gaping abyss that sucks you into its darkness, you are bound to be more mature then your age would allow.  Coming back from school, that day, that evening, it was all a distant memory in some fairytale land that we once lived in. Those are all just fragmented memories now; it almost feels like they were dream sequences. When we were little kids, we were told about shooing stars. Make a wish upon a shooting star and it’ll come true. However, when the sky came crashing down on us, there was nothing mystical or enchanting about it. As the sky plummeted down upon us, we were helpless, afraid, alienated from the rest of the world. Left to our own devices to suffer, as our world burned down, the world outside just sat and watched.
Did you ever wonder how trees feel like when they are uprooted? Torn from the roots, taken away from the mother earth that it belongs to, stripping it of its home. No one wants to leave their home behind, but what do you do when there is no home left to stay in? Home is where the heart is, but in this inhumane, cold, abyss of a world, the heart grows weary of the constant fallacies that it faces.  I had a home, a life, I went to school. In one tragic moment that was all torn away from me. I had lost everything and in the eyes of the world, I was now a refugee, the bitterness that came to mind, how I bite my tongue while saying this word. To the outside world I was now termed as a beggar, just that instead of begging for money, I would beg for a country to live in.
We had to leave behind our country; some were smuggled out in oil tankers, others in trucks. They promised us safe passage to Turkey. We didn’t really care where we went, who would? We were mentally scarred, we felt naked, stripped, torn apart. We gave all we had left to the smugglers; the journey would take two days according to them.  We just wanted to feel safe again. We wanted to be away from the constant dropping of bombs. We didn’t want to live with the constant question of, ‘will there be a tomorrow?’ We put all our trust, our lives at the hands of unknown people who would take us to an unknown land under sordid conditions. But, at least we would be safe.
The first day was almost over; we were half way to our destination. It was the dead of night. Everyone was asleep in the truck. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t put myself to close my eyes knowing the horrors that I had seen. The truck suddenly stopped, it wasn’t supposed to stop at this time. I peered out to see what was going on. The truck drivers got out, two big men. They were very hairy, they each had thick beards, they were talking amongst themselves, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying in their thick farsi accents. They were coming my way, in a sudden shift of fright I sat back against the truck, but they had spotted me peering by then. While I closed my eyes as to pretend I was sleeping, I felt cold skin creep up against my mouth. It was a big hairy hand that pressed against my mouth, I couldn’t scream and by God I did not know what was going to happen to me or whether I would come out of their alive, they dragged me down the path into some woods. The truck stood there in the middle of the road and all its tenants lay asleep unknowing  of what my fate was. In the woods, the other man was waiting. What happened later was a series of screaming and the only memory I can recall of it was the pain and the screams, the pain that their vile pleasure had given me. After that, I couldn’t put myself to speak to anyone about it. We were on our journey, on our way to our destination, but I was lost somewhere. I knew that a part of me was left behind in my own country, but the rest of me was lost somewhere in those woods.  I couldn’t put myself to tell anyone about it. I felt so impure, I felt unwelcome inside my own mind. No matter what I tried to think about, my mind would be stuck in the memory of that night, in the woods.
We had reached Turkey, that’s when the stomach pains started. It felt like bone crushing pain. I couldn’t bear it. We had just entered Turkey, but everything was still so frantic. The chaos still didn’t subside, amongst all this I didn’t want to bother anyone with my petty stomach aches.  When a tree is uprooted and left out of the soil, the mother that nurtures it, for too long, it’s bound to wither and die. Even after you plant that tree in some other place, it still takes a long time to get back to being healthy, if you’re quick enough that is, but still then it can never go back to being a 100%. We had a place to stay now. It was a safe place. But it still wasn’t home. I don’t think any place could be home now.
I was back at school, playing with my friends, we were laughing. It felt so good to be back in a school uniform with a bag on my back. All of a sudden, I screamed out. I shrieked in utter pain, the intense pain in my stomach. I woke up from my sleep, back in my slummy bed. The dream of going back to school was just that, a dream, the stomach pains however weren’t.
We weren’t welcome in Turkey anymore. We were treated like sick animals, no one wanted us. Where would we go? We didn’t have a home, we were the citizens of the world but we were still homeless.  Their troops raided our shelters and forced us to leave. We had nowhere else to go. We didn’t know what we were doing, we just followed everybody else. We got on miserable little boats in hopes of weathering the horrid seas. The seas were dangerous, but at this point, danger was a daily aspect of our lives. The boats were overcrowded, babies, old people, newly-weds. We all wanted, one thing, to start over. God had mercy on a few of them and took them to Him. The woods stripped me of myself and the rough seas stripped me of my family. I was a 14 year old, sick girl with no family, alone with strangers in the sea. After 5 weeks at sea I found out what my stomach pains meant, two abhorrent men had cursed me for life.  I had no one left in this world to look towards, just the hope of a new life. The psychological trauma made me want to kill myself. I was just a little kid, upon whom God had no mercy. When we washed ashore somewhere in Europe, we didn’t know where we were, but all we knew was that we weren’t welcome there. We were citizens of the world without a home, all we wanted was to be let in. All I asked was to, let me in. 

Happy Endings

Sometimes I wish I could touch your fingers for just once more. Sometimes I wish I could get lost in your arms for one last time. Sometimes I wish you’d rest your sleepy head on my shoulder again. Sometimes I wish we could get sip on one last cup of coffee together.

But hey, I guess happy endings are a thing of the movies. I couldn’t say I don’t believe in love, that'd be too romantic. I couldn’t say you took all I had in me away. And I couldn’t say that I don’t want to have my heart torn out by somebody once more.

But that doesn’t change the fact that what you took, I can never truly replace. So instead I try to fill myself with the smaller joys in life, like cradling a newborn or seeping through the fading twilight with a bunch of fireflies in my hand. Till I find hope in someone else’s sun…