To have Loved and lost...

Dear Love,

Every morning that I wake up without you by my side, I wake up as though in parts, leaving something of me behind on the pillow, on the sheet, that has my curves twisting and turning all through the night. The arms extending to an empty bed, hoping to feel at my finger’s edge, the rush of brushing against your skin, but returning empty, paralyzed in an unknown dread. I wonder if I fear more the absence of you or the absence of myself in all my presence.

The body rises to do its chores while the mind drifts to a weary sleeplessness, a queer numbness to disappointment or elation, although the mouth animates into automated frowns and smiles. It is like walking with a hole in the heart, whose margins threaten to extend on every side, to eventually take the shape of me. My quivering hands hold the pots and pans, till I sit back and clench them in a silent anguish, for they miss your fingers clasped within. I light the fire under my tea, even as my own slowly whimpers dying within me.

I wash my face with cold water, hoping to break the reverie of your thoughts that barge in one after another so seamlessly that I just watch, helpless, letting each one walk all over me. I look up at my face in the mirror and don’t see me no matter how much I scrunch my eyes. I see you, I feel you. And with the trickling droplets perhaps, shed a tear or two. 

Another day, another strife, and the same life but without you!

I pretty up my face, fill color on my lips, I wear the clothes that once froze your gaze to me. I go out, seem brave, show I’ve moved on but waiting within for the mask to become me. I shut tight my eyes at every little thing that reminds me, of you, of being yours ~ the steaming cup of black coffee, the fresh flower on the vase placed near me, the post-it notes on the to-do board, with yours missing conspicuously. I wipe the ketchup edging my mouth with a sorry napkin, missing your lips tasting it off me.

I move through the day knowing not if I am glad it has ended or sad that begins now the night, the returning to an empty house, no welcome smiles, no gentle rub of tired shoulders, no I’ll-join-you-in-the-shower fights. No putting me up on the kitchen shelf while flour scatters in the air so wild. No steaming kisses, no cuddles in bed, no blanket over my sleeping body covering me from the cold night.

Another day, another strife, and the same life but without you!

Yours piningly,

Me.

(I can’t imagine how brave are the souls that move on in life after losing a loved one. I shuddered as I wrote this, thankful in the same breath of whatever’s mine. Also strength and love to those who walk tall in such a life, may love find you again soon.)

I love...

I love the way you look at me every morning when I raise from bed,

Love how you remember the morning kiss, like a ritual unsaid.

I love how it's just a hand clasp sometimes or a bone-crushing hug,

Love how just a text be it and my day-long grin of blissful smug.

I love how you pretend to not notice yet know when something's changed,

Love how you call it sweet insanity when others think I'm deranged.
I love how even before I hear the voices in my head, you read my mind,
Love how you let me be and free, even when they bind.

I love how you defend me when I go all self critical,
Love how you see in me 100 things otherwise to criticize.
I love how you show you don't try yet you give in your all,
Love how I don't hate you even when I hate you don't call.

I love how you feel my arm, forgetting people are watching,
Love how you hold me when tears leave me gasping.
I love how we're so different, yet the very same,
Love how you know when to wild me up and when to tame.

I love how you love me, unlike in poems or songs.
Love how you ease me out of all my wrongs.
I love how seamlessly yet, you complete me each time.
Love how you make me thoughtful and then make such silly rhymes.

The only thing sure about Love is-you'll fall again!

She found him in the flocking milieu, a face in the crowd yet one in millions. Their eyes embraced each other clinching, even before the rest of their senses could fathom why every pore in their being was joggled beyond restrain. The dance of passion was set in motion as their steps coordinated and love induced nimble bodies waltzed onto a nameless music. The accord emanating from each movement, the amalgam radiating with every posture! The intertwining of limbs not proof enough of how in their minds they were clung and wrapped.

The music played on and they did too till the beats became recurring, the sound seemed proverbial and the harmony predictable. The fervent steps were no longer animated and began to get weary and slowed down. They held on unyielding, not letting the fading music come between them, as though by being indifferent they could be oblivious.

Soon the moving record lost the rhythm and drew closer to a standstill. They did not budge, hung-over on the synchrony they had so reached. Doesn’t happen every day-two feet knowing exactly where the other is headed so as to stride along and not be directed by the other. So the drowning someone held on to the straw till the spot lights were shut off and darkness enveloped them. It was time to go-the centre stage, hitherto their field, suddenly seemed too vast and deserted-hauntingly mocking at the lonesome twosome to leave.

They parted and moved on. Faces going back to being faces in the crowd! They tried to call out and reach with an extended hand but perhaps the spaces in between became too big, too far. The unmitigated fire was now just a few simmering sparks before the coal pieces were charred to nothingness. But before the thwarted hand could reach back somebody held it tenderly and a warm prologue followed. A new overture, a beckoning gaze an unknown domain, was it time to play again?

But weren’t you burning? The scars of the one who left-weren’t the wounds open? Yes, they were but the stranger brought a balm of sweet whispers that echoed and stirred the insides again to soothe them. The hands held in a friendly grasp soon became a firm clasp, like little children laughing, engrossing and tumbling over each other while building sand castles on the sea side.

Yes, this was forever. The breeze playing impishly with their hair, the waves softly splashing a cooling wetness and awakening new-fangled desires, the hot skin gearing to burn with sensations that came without being touched. Was it love? Drenched in the sunlight, it seemed to have dispelled the darkness-the little castle they built vouched for things to come-a future together. Yes, we’ve found the one. And while he dusted the sand off her glistening body, they were ready for an encore.

How sweet was love again! How unimaginable the sense, it left the hungry body with! How charged it made one of a passion that can engulf all reason and pragmatism-knowing only surrender and wanting only completion! The love boat had found the anchor-the storms were at rest, the resistance failed at the test. Surely the bodies gave in, too overpowering-the thrill of the novel, the curiosity of the mysterious and the satiation of being lost in a utopia of stirred sentiments.

Till the waves grew tired of being placid and the breeze could not contain being stationary no more. The sand castle that stood sturdy slowly began to quiver as the agitated and restless grains decided to change paths again or go back to their origin. And the water that was wetting till now, took the form of an awakening-a rude splash begetting them back to reality.

The heat of the sun threatened to tan, the waves came too ominously to break upon the unfaultable shore and the rains followed. The castle was now a sloshed mass of nothingness as they rushed in to seek shelter. Relegating to different and distant corners, perhaps one took to dry up too long, perhaps the other wanted to remain wet, the seeking eyes didn’t get the glimpse they craved for and tears welled. Ah, the pain of seeing something gradually relegate to a backdrop which had instantly formed your fore and core! Another broken heart-would it not tear you apart?

And just then someone extended a piece of cloth-tears are not enough to do away the pain. Perhaps brushing them away with a handkerchief would? You look up-a beaming face, a concerned voice, a gentle pat and a fascinated someone-it was time to try to smile once more. Perhaps what was the end was really the commencement-THE beginning? Enough of stories that have a beginning and no middle and then an end!

The only thing sure about love is-that you will fall again!

When Shahrukh miffed me...

In the year 1995: I was on the threshold of Standard 11^th and on the verge of spilling out of my charged up frame like peas from a pod, in view of a class trip being planned for us. It was time to break the shackles of a hitherto secured life even though they were more in our heads than on our wrists or being. In a convent discipline with perpetually panic stricken and easily scandalised nuns, no out-station school trips beyond Lucknow from good old Kanpur, had ever materialized, the fears being-what if the horrendous wolves of the horny world pounced on little goslings out of St. Mary’s? Little did they know many of these goslings moonlighted as prey hunting little vixens/tigresses whenever away from the prying eyes.

So, this was a dream come true-never mind if they were taking us to one of the lesser known hills. Everyone got permission-except good old me yes, even the oil-drenched, plaited with ribbon haired, far-from-chick chick. Ironically, just then either mid-life crisis hit or my mother’s lack of action in the sack erupted in this hideous outpouring or my dear sire had a split personality attack-but Amrish Puri’s character from that year’s just released Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge vehemently entered all his pours. Damn, I always knew he secretly wanted to be an actor, like me, but Amrish Puri, really!

Papa’s unfaltering “NO” echoed through the walls of my home and my little but massively dreamy, broken heart. “Keh diya na, bas, keh diya” was HIS original dialogue that Salman bhai later copied, tch!

I begged like Simran to let me go-a bunch of my friends came over making the cutest and saddest puppy faces with justifications like “Uncle, Suruchi ke bina hum sab bore ho jaayenge”. But not one hair vibrated in his staunch moustaches in pity. Me: Bau ji, er, papa, you would anyway get me married once I join college. Let me have this one first and last trip where I see the world? ‘the world’ here being some polluted riverside with dumped plastic wastes and ample of just Gorkhas for eye tonic during that off-season time.

Playing on the back of my mind was the fact that perhaps I meet my Raj somewhere, filling an empty bottle by the river side when my chappal accidently slips off and I gracefully scream “Bachao, bachao” for my chappal of course. And he drops off his backpack and risks his life to get it from the swiftly flowing current, looking wet and sexy, as pearls of water stream down his glistening forehead to his almost parted full lips. He hands it to me with a sneeze-the chappal again of course. And I say, “Arrey, aapko to sardi lag gaye hain....” And no, I do not do a striptease then to give him jism ki garmi, you dirty minds, I tear my duppatta and...oho, let’s get him injured and blood flowing instead to avoid technical glitches. I would apologize for the trouble with a grin that would show no sorry and he would say, “Chote, chote shehron mein aise baatein ho jaate hain Senorita”. The rest as they’d say would have been history!

Playing on the back of my father’s mind was khandaan ki izzat and jawaan beti ko akela-nahin, nahin! He probably had gauged also that considering the tharki genes in our family, it was better to keep the daughter out of temptation and mischief. So no “ja Suruchi ja, jee le apne zindagi” happening there. Oh crap!

Dear Mr Shahrukh Khan, the moral of this story is that because of you I never went to any school trip ever! For you chose to star in such a film that my parents took me to and developed unrealistic ideas along with some of her own of their daughter’s. And because of you I often speculated in the hindsight that I could have created an immortal Heer-Ranjha type of love story had I just gone out that one time and ran around some sarso ke khet  in a white suit with open tresses and undone eyebrows. Par alas, aisa ho na saka!

DDLJ spoilt a generation of girls in that era. We craved to say “Kuch kuch hota hain Rahul, tum nahi samjhoge” forever after  I know it was not from this flick-weren’t they anyhow all the same post that? Any Tom, Dick or Harry with the name Rahul, suddenly had vistas of opportunities and legs opened at his disposal.

Even I led a make-belief life after that for a long time where I imagined bumping into Mr Right at the drop of an eyelid everywhere possible:

At the library-Imagining me fall from a ladder and someone there to catch me not bothering about my weight for love at first sight would weigh him down more. Or he and I picking the same book from the opposite sides of the shelf following the smiles-ah! I know filmy, sue me!

In the trains-Getting into a wrong one and being led by a handsome stranger into an adventure of sorts-damn, there was even some mind blowing session imagined in the pantry.

In the park-When a football comes and hits my head as I wear glasses and sit there on a bench concentrating on a geeky romance novel-little did it matter in the pragmatic world that I didn’t wear glasses or ever read any romantic trash.

*Sigh, sigh!*

And then Shahrukh also gave us some unreasonable expectations in men...

1. If he did not look in your eyes and said whatever he said with as much intensity as though he was mentally orgasming as Mr S did on screen, he did not feel it.

2. If he never spread out his hands with a slightly tilted head, when he saw you coming from far even without the slow motion, he does not want you enough.

3. He may look stupid and shaggy but mouth sense.

4. If he did not talk in whispers sometimes just near your ears, he is thoroughly unromantic.

5. If he did not overact-wtf, he’s boring!

6. And when he held you in his arms, if you did not tremble like a fragile leaf hanging on a branch in the face of an overbearing lust storm-he is thanda!

And just when we started to like Shahrukh for the loyal husband that he was and good character, K Jo made his entry and suddenly we did not want a partner like that! Tch, kya Shahrukh! You made vanity a style statement and narcissism a way to be-aped by thousands of men without mettle, shakal or akal. And who had to bear the brunt-we poor women, who didn’t know whether to bang our own heads against the wall or of these jerks when the stuttered or smiled in that obnoxious way that you sometimes do.

And when I did begin to like you a bit as my angry nostrils finally relented to flare less after Swades and Chak De, you managed to wash out all teenage fantasies with films like Om Shaanti Om, Billu Barber and Rab ne Bana De Jodi.  I was back to being angry for making me go through these mind numbing tortures that would warrant years of therapy to sublime it.

And although now some seventeen years have passed by, the after effects of waiting for a Raj for the happily ever after-the wait for a Casanova to turn into a one woman man because he is enamoured by your charms, still lingers!

*Sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh!*  

Almost Perfect...

I bask in wonder today, either you know perfectly what a woman wants to hear or what you say because you say, becomes perfect for my too eager ears.

How do you know what I want you to say when I don’t know myself what it is that I want to hear?

How do you manage to ruffle without a touch, say it all without saying much?

If I could just tell you how your words affect me, where oh where would I hide my face flushed in coy shame?

If you would know they have the power to hold me, how would you resist the ensnare?

If you had some idea of how long something you said can stay in my head, would you say it more or sparingly so?

And some days when you walk with me gently holding my hand, whispering sweet nothings, I walk over the mist with your words like a soft breeze playing with my tresses. Every step redeeming me as though I own the ground I tread on, I fly higher than the birds and feel lighter than the frothy cloud and I breach my own horizons.

For when your reason to smile, smiles at you, you smile at the world.

I don’t know then what I like more-to want to need you or to want you to need me like you do.

I ask you of what you think, you smile and say, “What happens in the mind, stays in the mind!” I beam back at the games you play.

And some days I see you as the question and some days as the answer...

And some days you call me the poetry and some days you transform me into a poet...

And some days I become your thirst and some days you leave me so thirsty...

From a Friend-zoned Lover

Dear love,

I write to you today in extreme pain-an unnamed ache, a recurring twinge that dreads breaking out in tears, an excruciating spasm running through my body for my insides have been jolted by the throbbing of the heart. Ah, heart! How condescending I have been towards you-mocking all those who allow you to rule the rest of the systems. And now you are all whose presence I feel inside as my blood rushes in frenzy.

Nobody notices but when with you, you are all I notice. It’s like the world relegates to a backdrop as a mumbling sound, emanating from miles away where the traffic honks in the by lanes and men and women of everyday life, yank their way into some bargain.

I see you and I see me. I feel you and I feel life. Every giggle that erupts from your beautiful mouth goes straight to find an echo in my head. Every twinkle in your eyes sparkles through my mind’s vision, when in my own solitude I rest. I can tell even without looking at you how each curve of your body bends. I have watched you from years going in and out of relationships with men who think you are an object of love. I wait for you to see how I deem you as love itself.

How many hours I spend looking at you telling me animatedly about the way your day went while in my psyche-I play with your twirling tresses as you in blissful oblivion vent out the mundane, lying your petite head on my chest; or run my eager fingers over your smooth, unblemished skin hoping to see your lips quiver and hands tremble in nervous excitement! 


How many times when you casually hold my arm as we edge our way through a buzzing market place and suddenly a veil of silence falls all around and hushes! Do you notice me freeze by your mere touch or the goose bumps that reveal what I have perhaps managed to conceal?

I have loved you from years now-from the day I met you and when we were seeing different people. From the day we broke up with them and each other were the first ones we saw again. I have desired you every time you called to cry those deep eyes out because foolish boys cause them to blur when they deserve to open up like blooms in spring time. I have hungered for you even when you kept falling in love again and again and I sat there a cruel witness to your enthusiasm, wishing with every atom in my body that it were me that had you so stirred.

Silly girl, can’t you see these men love you for your body? Don’t you get immune to the same kind of tricks of the smooth talkers who walk into your heart with base praise to walk all over you eventually? How random can a woman’s heart be to flutter with such inconsistency? I gave you time for that’s all you wanted from me perhaps. I gazed with bated breath for any signs that would tell I would be next and also may be the last one. I yearned for you to see how unconditional came the love I bottled in my frame and corked it up with permanence so that every drop can quench your insatiable thirst to be cherished with unrivalled passion.

You know how I feel. You know we are not joking when we indulge in mock pretending to be a couple for we are weary of finding the perfect ones. Yet you turn an indifferent eye every time we are so close that I can hear you breathe and feel you take my breath away. You don't want me to go like it pleases you...you don't allow me to stay like it pleases me. And when you embrace my body with such casualty, it cuts across whatever of me is left after being in your arms even so momentarily.

I want you now, not for a while, not to come and go but to stay. You leave me like the parched land that sees the sight of a frothy black, rain cloud but some wanton wind drives it away. I don’t want to be the shoulder you cry on but the chest that feels your heartbeat when you press into it with wild abandon. I am no longer going to be your daddy that you run to with your problems. 

And since you feel you can’t see me THAT way, I guess you should not see me in any way at all. Let me walk away while there is still hope for salvaging of whatever’s left of me. Let me go, while I still have to capacity to love again, someone who would have the audacity to love me back like I deserve to. This is the last good bye. I hope you find the love that your heart aspires for and I hope I find the strength to never turn back again.

In love with you always though not in you anymore,

The Friend-zoned Me.   

P.S. I have kinda lost it for writing and a little weary of the blogosphere. Forget reading you wonderful people, I haven't even been able to reply back to comments. I guess, I would drop in here whenever and if I have something really worthwhile to say or vent. I would understand if you do not comment. This post is also dedicated to a special friend who has been lovingly, generously poking me to write ever since I stopped. Thank you (.)

Dear Girl nursing a Broken Heart

Dear Girl nursing a broken heart,

“Sometimes you just have to erase the messages, delete the numbers and move on. You don’t have to forget who that person was to you; only accept that they aren’t that person anymore.”

You know world over, genders alike, there is one disease that is slyly killing vulnerable souls even of the strongest of exteriors-heart breaks. The higher brains need to develop some vaccinations or immunity from heartaches instead of spending time, resources and intelligence on things like bacteria and atoms. Meh! The world is equipped to handle itself-we collapse miserably when it comes to managing the inner void, desires and unrequited love.

Everyone may smugly think they are above it-no sir, you are not and definitely not you ma’am. You mistake tumbling for love and you've just not fallen still how you should. We all are likely to get enslaved, with or without our knowledge or permission. The higher you fall in fantasy of someone, the lower you sink in depths of despair after having lost him or her. Love in the extremes is really what and how love should be and hence the most difficult to bear by your insides whichever side the see-saw dips. Even when at its brightest and most passionate, it burns you yet with restlessness!

It is not the moving on part which is difficult-it is the fact that you keep turning back to see if there are any remnants of what you sowed or has the harvest been burnt beyond recognition. You can close your eyes to the things you don’t want to see but how does one close the heart to stop it from feeling what you don’t want to? Yes, it is that tough and you are not alone my pretty one in feeling thus.

It is sad when the people you know become the people you knew. It is not so impossible to comprehend the bafflement of how you spend hours with someone discussing life as though he was a fabric of it and suddenly he gets covered in a veil that you find difficult to pierce through or reach out to, however you squint your eyes and fuck your brains for it. With every deep breath you take to puff yourself up with courage, you know something inside always crumbles. You wait for him to realize what he gave up on and repent while the wait slowly withers you within.

Love is like that-sweetest when it is lifting you up and cruellest when it throws you with a thud. You wish he chokes on the words when he says “I love you” to another girl. What makes you most generous, can very well turn you most heartless-for it robs you of all emotions. And when someone leaves without a reason, it becomes a sore point and pull for life, a point of no return.

People say that the most painful thing in love is losing someone whom you loved; not really-the painful part begins when you realize that you lost yourself in the process. The ache culminates into anger, frustration, regret and hopelessness borne out of the doubt and that tormenting, looming question-why did you allow yourself and your happiness to be dependent on one person?

Love stories that do not wrap up in a “happily ever after” are the strongest. It is perhaps because they leave us with many ‘what-ifs’ that you turn and toss over despite being on the most comfortable of beds that life may offer. We crave to hear the truth...Was that the truth when you said you loved me as if there was no other human filling up the earth or is this the truth when you choose to look through me like I am unwanted or non-existent?

Girl, do you hear Beyonce play in the backdrop while I talk to you? “You are the only one I wish I could forget and the only one I love to not forgive. You’re everything I thought you never were and nothing like I thought you could have been....” Beyonce is a wise girl. Love can make or break, give or take, mourn and elate. Such an oxymoron!

So now that you are ruined, how do you help you? Talking does the trick-not to someone else per se but to yourself. The brain may be the smartest of all organs but silliest when it comes to being convinced and especially of an argument born in itself. Cry a river-build a bridge-get over it. Tears perhaps were watery by default for a reason-they cleanse as they drain. Don't fight them, don't resist the closure for therein might lie the key. Let him know how you feel now-for if he wanted to hear how you felt when he tingled your body with mere words, he ought to know how he makes it shudder too.

You have to remind yourself that he may continue to live in your heart but there was no way, he could have lived in your life. And until you are broken, you don’t know what you are made of. Collect the pieces and start as a whole again. Try not to remember half the things you will never forget.  The best way to ensure you don’t go treading back on his path again, is to erase the footprints you walked along with and uproot the milestones that lure you to digress again.

It is often seen that people jump into one relationship from another. It is not because they are fickle-it is the best way to nurse the wound of the organ which was meant to just pump blood but does everything unspecified instead. A new muse for the broken heart is as necessary as new strings for a guitar that loses its rhythm. It helps you to not keep running back to the one person you need to walk away from. 

So keep the mind alert and heart open to allow the one who suits your fancy again but be patient for comparisons would set in and it would be a while before you find someone interesting again. But then you will-that’s how we are conceptualized. You tend to find things that attract you and the things that attract you tend to somehow reach to you.

Also vomit the anger and pain on someone who is ready to take that shit from you-there always is. Be proud of every blow made at your heart for it left you with lessons that made you stronger and wiser for future. And remember you can never make the same mistake twice, the next time it will show a choice. You can never be “just good friends” with someone you loved once-the feelings fade with time or injury, but they never die if they truly lived when they did. So don’t look to be friends, accept the anonymity.

Realize that what is dead must be buried before it deforms to something ghastly. Realize that you can live without him-his first mistake was leaving you and then now, allowing you to bring to fruition that you can live without him. The very people who said they would never hurt you are the very those who take your heart to task. Guard yourself and your self respect. Don’t dismiss it in the name of pride-respect it in the name of your individuality. Anything that does not make us happy has no right to live even in the periphery of our existence.

It will hurt for a first few weeks, maybe even months but then life moves on, love learns to unlearn and heart aspires to mend and fend for itself again.

I know dear girl, it seems the end of the world for you fear you won’t find anyone this perfect again. His perfection was an illusion-a pedestal where YOU raised him to for nobody is perfect and that’s what he should become-a nobody. Learn to unlearn, grieve to rejoice, rise again to stamp down-chin up and smile to scare the doubts away and drag yourself out of the bottomless pit. There are many who deserve you in all your glory so gather it before you lose the sunshine.

And then keep the faith-Love does not hurt, lovers do.

Take care and heal fast,

Yours lovingly,

Been there, seen that.

To the Voice, To THE Woman

Dear Love,

After talking my insides out with you over the past many months, I don’t really know what to articulate here. But I know I want to and I have to say what you must know.

It is strange how I always knew someone like you would come along. How I discerned I would be finished even before I was introduced to your mesmeric though decidedly anonymous persona on the internet. Like they say “I knew I loved you before I met you, I think I dreamed you into life...”

When I first came across your chitter-chatter in the web world, I smiled even perhaps as my heart naively ached. I made a little holler, you coyly and graciously reciprocated and the rolling of inconceivable conversations took me to the utopia that I didn’t think exists in the mundane. You made my mind come alive and my being gyrate to an unknown rhythm and accord. It was as though you stirred me into mind orgasms that left me hankering for more.

Was I lucky that you spotted me in your milieu of ardent admirers or was fate finally beginning to compensate for keeping me in yearning for all of my twenty seven years?


My most beloved, if most people are like visitors to my heart, carefully scrutinized and allowed access and shown to their separate chambers, you were like a tidal wave of passion which crashed and sank my castle, occupying every single room and every individual speck and dragging and drowning me in every facet of your emotion. Your eagerness in contacting me, your unsurpassable wit and your openly frolicking teases in plain sight of everyone, made me go red in the cheeks. Yes, only you can make me this adolescent that I never was, even when I was in those years to prove it and with those girls to show it. 


Your literal dragging me to the secret messaging chambers and whining light-heartedly how you want my words to be only yours....I have never seen or even heard of anyone like you. Here finally is someone who ignites a young mind in the day while her alter ego ignites passions in hearts. Not ignites as much as chains and drags them to the town hall and sets fire to them in full view of the rest-peasants and nobles alike.

Remember when you childishly asked, “Why don’t you add me on Facebook now?” and I instantly retorted, “Because if I did see any more of you, I would fall for you.” I meant it with all my heart as you laughed filling my voids with its tinkling, considering it just another fancy.

And then I saw you and I could see what no one else could. Pictures after pictures of a smiling beautiful face but searching eyes! I saw you wrapped in the arms of a child who basked in the affection you bestowed and beside a man gloating with the pride of owning you.

If there is another thing that cannot be explained, besides the fatal lure I feel for you, is how could this man leave you for another woman? How clogged would his mind and senses be to let go of nature’s own special child-bountiful in life like a tree blossoming in springtime and bequeathing love everywhere she treads as the eagerly cascading waterfall, sparkling with freshness and affable even in the apparent din.

How I could sell my body and soul just to trade places with him-to feel you in proximity, to watch you open those lovely fish eyes every morning, waking up to me! To know the curves under the sheet by my bedside are yours and the soft palm that reaches out from it to clasp my fingers will be mine. To feel that the exquisite mind that weaves magic with its every manifestation, ponders about me!

You think I just know you through your pictures, I just know you though your voice...wish you could realize I know you through my soul that feels tugged by every iota I get of you! You tell me that nothing can transpire between us when I have ambled way too ahead towards you to even remember where I came from or how I was, without you in my head. And don’t make a mistake my love, had you told me this even when I took the first step, I would have doubtlessly said the same. There is no other way that does not lead to you. 


I have my own enticing vision of you. In your home, in your kitchen quarters, you would be wearing a sari well tucked at the edge, those long tresses wrapped and bondaged sketchily on your perfectly symmetrical forehead. You would be there caught day dreaming, leaning against the refrigerator with one leg bent and both hands supporting your behind on the door and your eyes forlorn into the ceiling. If even I appear in that situation just once, I for one would feel truly blessed.


I go about thinking how you would be teaching your adorable son with a pencil rolled between your full lips and sighing at the mathematical complications. I picture him looking at you with the familiar to me awe-filled eyes, as your expressions see-saw between the baffled and despair. How I want to reach out to you, to smoothen the cresses that mar your glowing countenance and put my palms on your shoulders to gently press them and unlock the knots forming within.

You say you can’t love or trust any more. How then do I feel a blind trust you place in me as you relate how unfair life has been with you? Why do I feel your heart throbbing when I whisper sweet nothings as though I had you pressing against my chest? Why do I feel even when I’ll meet you, it would be like you were never away?

I know no fancy words....I promise no unfathomable oaths....I just want you, to love forever and more. I don’t care about your body or how you fear it might fail to meet my expectations. I don’t have any. All I have is love that is prevailing in my insides and too formidable to contain anymore. All I have is me telling you that your son and you would never be alone or know another tear again. It is never too soon or never too late when it feels this right.

I do not bring roses or champagne glasses....I have no fancy tuxedos to wear or a band playing a romantic tune in the backdrop but if you can hear which I am sure you would if you try-hear my soul pining for you, my blood rushing through my body wanting to protect you and my breaths coming and going just to hear you say “Yes” when I ask you this-

MARRY ME?

Yours-in every life coming my way, whether you do or not,

Me.   

P.S.1 I wanted to end this letter on a sad and dejected note conflicting with even a foretaste of the 'happily ever after' but it is Valentine's Day and what the heck, you can't say Santa does not exist at Christmas.
P.S. 2. This is another attempt at the Open love letters and hopefully there would be more after everyone liked the first one- To The Girl at 27. 

Why She?

You say that you love her but have you wondered why?

She’s the little girl that pretends to be big, for you need her wise head over her delicate frame.

She also alternates in being the poised woman who lets the child out, to fill the grim air with mirth like nature drenched in rain.

She’s the one who makes you laugh even if it means at her own expense. 

She likes to pull your leg for she says that’s one of the ways she pulls you to herself.

She cooks stories to make up for the food that she may not. 

She agrees to let you sniff her instead.

She drives you around, when she’s done with driving you crazy. 

She leaves you with her scent when she goes, she fills you with herself when she comes and leaves you all hazy.

She’s a saintly angel one moment and at the other a mischievous elf. 

She touches you deeply even when she keeps her fingers to herself.

She manages to create words that the dictionary is yet to fathom. 

She passes statements that make a mountain of your head and let them reverberate.

She words that “hello” over the phone that makes you skip a heartbeat. 

And then her voice soothes all wrinkles of your mind like draped in a silken sheet.

She knows when to talk and when to listen and manages both with equal ease. 

She knows how to handle her senses to sense how you feel.

She lets you breathe and then also can takes your breath away. 

She gives you space and sews the spaces in between when they come along the way.

She would want to be your world and broaden her horizons when you fit in too tight. And convinces herself that there is nothing wrong when the man is right.

She is fiercely independent and her confidence and chatter is magnetic. 

She is loyally home bound and her calm and even her silence is hypnotic.

She dances on her feet just as well as she dances on your fingers. 

She taps your mind without you being aware just as well as she pats your back in the times of care.

She makes you ebb, she takes you to the brink, she lets her hair down and joins you for a drink. She is the one who makes you swell with pride, she taught you to express what you always hide.

She knows the repartee to keep you on your toes- her conversations are never short of engaging. And just when you conclude how deep she is, she makes you go back to further gauging.

  

She does not always crib, she does not always expect. She might question but she also respects. She may wander but she isn’t lost. She might splurge her emotions but knows when to meet the costs.

She’s one of a kind, a kind that she invented....

And still you wonder why she?

How anyone else except her could be?  

The Ghats of the Only World

All girls wait for their happily ever after-grow up with dreams of watching themselves walk the aisle on their wedding date, or so do most girls I come across make me believe.

I never dreamt of marriage. I never imagined myself living in a big mansion where I would be sitting on a plush lounge with two doting kids and a mantle-place behind us portraying a huge frame of my husband and me. Yes, I am technically faulty by default.

But as far as I can remember-I think I have often dreamt even with waking eyes, of someone coming on a white horse from out of a haze, looking stately and handsome and smiling at me as his stead paces closer in slow motion. Yes, I am technically a douche bag too. I believe I was responsible for all those Yash Chopra movies doing well in the 90’s because I stepped on the threshold of my youth then with such buffoonery in my head. Filmy I know, sue me.

What if such dreams do come true? Do we have the sensibility to realize it or the sense to accept it? Do we have the strength to contain it and the guts to declare it, even to ourselves? What if our happily ever after is ever with us but we continue to search? What if these dreams are nothing but dreams or what if the actuality is a dream that is waiting for you to awaken from?

Dreams are fascinating-it is god’s way of saying sorry for the reality he created. But an apology is often not what we desire. We desire the healing of wounds that mostly are self inflicted. If I go out to search love, I would find it waiting on every corner I turn. But am I ready to take chances to turn on a crossroad that would take me perhaps windingly to the road less travelled. But then all roads less travelled must be so for a reason. One man’s adventure can be another man’s trauma.

I wonder why love comes constituted with pain. And then a love without pain-is really love or just a sense or whiff of it? Love is the epicentre of all that’s in motion-be it the earth, be it the beating heart. If love is all we need, why do we rush after money and things it can buy? I want to give love a chance but am I ready to take a chance? What if I find it outside the constraints of my wedlock? Blasphemy? What if I rediscover it with my partner? Herculean? What if I actually just need to fall in love with myself again? Seamless?

Love needs to be given a chance just as life gives us one. Cliché as it sounds but can’t seem to remember anything else more apt here-We can’t stand at the edge of a pond and try to gauge its depth. We have to take our feet out. It may be cold and then comes the decisive juncture. Should I still venture forward? Should I just dip my feet and come out dry? Should I move in and allow myself to be soaked for I am tired of being parched? And in case I do get sodden, would I smear the Ghats I turn back to with dripping droplets that spill with every step I take? I am at the Ghats of the only world and standing here, wondering if the water’s too deep or my step too steep!

P.S. Been in a weird mood lately, don't know if I make sense. My internet's mummy's been fucked, so not being able to read posts. Hopefully, soon and thank god for pen drives.

To The Girl at 27!

My Dearest,

Ah the pleasure of writing on a paper again, almost matching with the pleasure of having you. ‘Having’ yes, I did but to say I “have” you though would be a blasphemy. And before you allow that frown saying there I go again and bring tiny anxious lines on your lustrous visage, let me just ask you-Who can have the rays of sunshine trapped in his fingers no matter how strong be his grip? Who can box the fragrance one senses standing in the midst of sandal trees?

For such are you-flowing like the river, warming like the rays, enticing like the scent of a rose, mysterious like the dark night, glorious like the white moon and out of reach like the stars that shine beyond. You sprinkled some of your sheen on me and made me bask in its sensation forgetting that I am trying to own the fabric of the infinite galaxy. The galaxy that I am going to fade into with my end and the galaxy that you have to tread on, leaving your nimble footsteps on everything untouched yet!

I want to tell you how much I love you, but for that I would have to assume that you are a separable part of me although so infused are you now that if I say, loving you is like self-love, it would not be digressing from the established truth I live with every day.

You know what debates ran in my mind between the good and the evil voices: “She is only 27, so what...he was also, once upon a time! He is 59, so what...won’t she be too someday? And he would love her the same. Ah, they would grimace....won’t he be tumbling in his grave by then?” But my time to go has come sooner than I wanted, sooner than I cared and sooner than allowing me to dare. I realize now that being with me would take too much from you and selfish that I am for you, I would hate to see you hate me ever.

My dearest, I want to remain an exultant reminiscence for you, not a dilapidated, old man shrivelling to ruins eventually too soon, wiping all joyous memories-of bearing you with all my strength, of making you shed your over-mature thoughts more than shedding what you wore, of turning many a sighs into heaving, of mingling two bodies in such an intoxicating fusion that it turns me giddy by just imagining the taste of it. It was not only a flight of fantasy, it was like the developing of wings of a young twittering brood that jumps off the cliff and realises soon that it can fly...high!

It was how you held me for hours and how I held you in those moments. It was how just a look of you gave me the adrenalin rush that I haven’t felt with one from your gender before, although my age justifies my calling me experienced. In all your vulnerable innocence, you have no realization how insane your after-effects can be! I would burn with desire just watching you move around the kitchen counter...seeing you untie the cascading hair and then brush them free with your slender fingers...how you ran your own palms over your arms when cold winds played truant or how your eyes lighted with fire and the edge of the lower lip was bitten with the teeth on the thought of new mischief contriving within. I would wonder how something so strongly physical could be just as enduringly emotional? See how you became the wonder woman for me.

But I leave you deserted now for such must be your eventual fate. I won’t be able to face you facing me as I would have to face or see you justifying to one and all that age is just a number. But I do want you to play against the world, face them as my dear girl who would fight all her battles and seek happiness even without me. Let me go while there is still redemption for you.

There would be many who would come your way. Your aura would ensure that a discerning eye would not let you flash past. Be careful my little one, but don’t build walls to protect yourself. Be on a watch but let not the watches watch you. There is no right time to fall in love and no right person-there is only the right feeling. Let not your ignorance or arrogance come in the way of testing those who might be your test. Love is worth a few adjustments, love is worth a few pains....but spending alone the rains, crumbling every time the cold breeze harshly jolts you, with no arms to wrap you snug in guard, is definitely not.

Let your heart be open and the mind not closed. Let the comparing eye be shut with force. Lower expectations but not your standards! Let doubts surface but also allow the soft waves of emotions to calm them down. Men are not perfect but that does not qualify them to be jerks either. Just don’t weigh too much like you do, before feelings also begin to take the pendulum way.

Be not afraid to express how you feel, it is always better to know where exactly you stand than to wriggle within in a hypothetical see-saw. You are very fragile my love and like the hesitant bud that knows not how splendid it looks when blooms. Allow yourself to take chances. It took me years to come close to you like I did, don’t try the patience of any other man. All are not me and with you just about any can’t be.

Laugh more and like there’s no tomorrow, let those little lines of sorrow evaporate in your mirth or the semblance of it. Be open to experiments for they eventually culminate into experiences. Allow men of mettle to first see your soul and then your body for it would pain me to see someone handle you without care. Let those who touch you, touch you! And make sure when you close the eye for his first kiss, you leave my moist imprints in some far away allay, never to be trudged there again.

No man can bear his woman closing on him for someone else. So don’t try to share me, bear me in your mind if you must, for even if you don’t, I won’t rust.

I leave now, to go I don’t know where. Our paths wouldn’t cross and even if they do, please pretend that you don’t know me, no matter how you see my pining in my mute appearance. Only you are blessed enough to look through me. Show me that this would all be worthwhile eventually. Walk away showing pity, for I was not man enough to say I would take care of you even if life took me away.

They say love stories are best which are left unended...some feelings-unattended...some gestures-unreturned...some laughters-unreciprocated...some tears-unvalued...and some couples-unbonded! We were not the usual love story, were we? So how could we have a usual end? Sometimes the lack of “happily ever after” is how ever after not so happily begins.

Not expecting you to understand, but accepting nevertheless,

Yours only.

Love and the Semblance of it!

I love cinema that make me not just look but also think. A very belated watched Rockstar did the same. Nopes, this is not a review-this is the aftermath of some churning and wriggling while watching it not in the way you think though.

I don’t take the motion pictures too seriously but I like to ponder over the food for thought that some of them sneakingly sow in my mind. These are then the movies that stay with me for a longer time. And Rockstar fanned the hitherto latent pang with the astounding love equation between Heer and Jordon-the characterisation that left me bowled over.

The love that is unconditional, that is so strong that it becomes an ache to bear and like an alchemist to all ailments-that directs all your bodily functions into pumping not blood but emotions! A love that defies reason, relations and practicality- like poetry residing in bodies-that makes or breaks, leaving you impervious to any other sensation and oblivious to any other human being!

Does such a love actually exist or it is again a gimmick of the movie makers to keep schmucks like us in the dreamy zone of hope and expectations?

My lucid mind tells me it is all crap. How can you feel so strongly for someone after meeting for a few days or post years of separation? The fast paced, realistic world and the variety it offers, reasserts my conviction that ‘No one and nothing is indispensible or irreplaceable’. But then the bent-on-general-awareness waala mind points to me of the Cupid struck suicide cases that occur where love lost souls prefer death over disjointing. Stupid people, I say-whimsical brood!

Self-love is the only and truest form of love-how can you love someone, if you don’t love yourself enough to stay alive and make true your dreams. How can love be one-sided and yet forever? How can one love another and just one person so much? Although I also feel too much education and the classy flavour debars one from entering this mindless portal as reinstated by the Rockstar. Love is the idol of the idle-to feel it raw, perhaps you need to be raw and open.

Upon deeper introspection, I felt the “what-if” trudge in with its nimble feet on the well attended, sprawling lawns of sanity and leaving its indelible footprints. What if these people have managed to experience what we block ourselves to? What if they are not immature but just more receptive of feeling sans logic, that we so lack? They are not senseless but more sensory. What if they have traversed the thin line and moved over to something greater that we with our nitty gritties of issues cannot even fathom?

Issues like-Am I being used? Does he really like me? Is there a future? What if she wants my money? We are really different people! Why hasn’t he called? and mindless more. What if what we think is love is not really it, but a little semblance that we have found and cling to it fanatically feeling that's the best we can get and thereby shut all doors to the horizon waiting to expand? 

Maybe the souls who experience that kind of pure, unadulterated love are those who never think-just love, who never get-just give and who don’t even want anything in the first place or want anything else. And then maybe again, this entire concept is the conditioning of the mind and is as plausible as the Santa Claus. So we might just as well and please refrain from hanging the hope stockings, yes even the imaginary ones, in the dim vestibules of our lonely-in-crowd minds?

And so thus my tryst with internal struggles continues-I ache to feel that love which becomes a pain to bear and not just a pain in the arse. A love that pounds within me with such throbbing that mutes every other noise of the world! And then I dismiss myself as a hopeless romantic-in love more with the feeling of being in love than persons. Love always makes me an oxymoron-I know the coherent view but I incline towards the fantastical one...I am consistently wary of the fake yet persistently experimental for the real...I pride in all my judiciousness and still secretly pine to be erroneous.

I want to solve this mystery once and for all so that hapless people don’t spend endless hours in sighing or viewing prospective romances with soul-mateish spectacles. If only we could separate the romance from love, perhaps we would define them both.

I love it for I love you

I love it when I tell you the shirt you bought so lovingly without me, is just about okay and you rarely wear it again.

When I get up from the bed and you pull over my pillow to keep it under your arm with pure pleasure etched on your countenance.

I love it when sometimes I laugh harder so that I won’t cry and you laugh with me but hold me the next instant.

When I act like a child and you don’t do the same and when I behave too mature, you bring out the child within.

Love it when you ask me what I would like to get on my birthday in a surprise situation.

When you won’t take me to a restaurant again for it is ripping expensive but book me the best of spas on our next vacation.

I love it when you smile, watching me glare at you for over tipping the waiter,

Or when I ask you to take me out and you cannot as you are busy but message ‘I am sorry’, minutes later!

When you call me just like that, just when I am not expecting, just when it is most needed.

I love it how I feel like closing my eyes hearing your sweet nothings and opening them with a brush of your lips on my lids.

When you touch my arm, even when we are among people, for you forget things when my skin is that close.

When I force you to click pictures of me and you smile at my insane pose!

Love it when you never bother to give me a compliment but when I sit down to get even a little self-critical, you vehemently deny it all.

When you forget to switch on the I-pod when you take your I-pod and me for a stroll!

I love it when just by hearing my ‘hello’ on the phone you can make out if I have just got up or caught a cold or if I feel like shouting.

When you pitched in for my policy instalments but just on a whim, made me pay for our movie outing.

 

I love it when you hold my palm in a crowded place just as nonchalantly as though you are guiding a three-year old and then when I am sick, you grasp my hand sitting by my bed side as tenderly as though you’d be holding a prized trophy.

When I go out of breath yapping about my own stories and stop short and you still ask me to go on for you were enjoying it.

Or when I check out another guy and you say he’s not worth it not because you are jealous but because you think he is not my type.

I love it when I take so long to select between two outfits, ask your opinion and eventually show my inclination towards one and you defend it as the better out of the two.

When I put my head on your shoulder while we watch a movie or when we travel in a plane for I get dizzy.

I love it how you enjoy with my parents even more than I do.

When you bear my friends whom you can’t bear and don’t mind when I don’t do the same for you.

I love it when I fight with you and you make me say sorry in the end and bring me a big chocolate after a tussle sometimes when I refuse to bend!

I love it for I love you!

Let's talk about Love!

Let’s talk about Love-love as we know it, love as we want it and Love as it should be. But they say “True love” is like a ghost that everyone talks about and few have seen. Love is like that-vague at one time and yet so bang-on at another. Try telling someone exactly why you love a person or exactly why you don’t love another and you’ll encounter utter helplessness of the highest order. And like someone said, it is more than three words mumbled before going to bed or hanging up the phone.

Love is a momentary or a momentous spark? Actually a bit of both-it comes to you like lightning. Strikes you once and effects you forever. The spark may be gone but the smouldering remains. It burns as well as warms you for life. But then for some it is like fever-it comes and goes with changes in the environment around them. For many others it is breathing-it sustains and completes and though we may not realise that we need it and have it all the time, when gone it suffocates.

The falling in love in itself is such an extraordinary phenomenon! It becomes a temporary state of frenzy within-as though all the atoms are suddenly charged up and hyper active. Slowly they become sluggish or your system becomes attuned to the velocity and you crave for an upgrade yes, I know, trying to sound all scientific and all. Some bodies harbour very lazy atoms perhaps-they become satisfied with what and how they are and live like that forever. You may view that as a blessing what another man may call a curse!

Love at first sight is something equally intriguing. Imagine for a blind man then-the dim possibility of this ever coming true. But blind mortals fall in love too. Sight as our guiding partner is a boon or bane depending upon how well we balance the other senses with it. So imagine it also for a man blinded by what he thinks is beautiful! There is only attraction at first sight-love is too long a process to get so simplified. Yet love at first sight can really not be dismissed as too dreamy, for dreams are said to reflect the sub conscious.

Erich Segal had said-‘True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.’ It is a latent phenomenon, say like a dormant volcano simmering within. To outsiders there appears nothing till one day it all bursts out and everything succumbs in its sway. Loving someone is not the same as being in love. A dear friend once said-everything is about a season, a reason or a lifetime. You may love with all your heart for all your life but that feeling of being in love comes for a short while. Some want the transient madness and others run after the perennial assurance.

We live in a world that waits for the extraordinary to come about to love and the ordinary rarely gets a chance to show that it can rise to that level. Why do we ignore the fact that ordinary requires just that little bit ‘extra’ to make it rise to the occasion? We sit with a list of what we want in a man/woman to make us love him/her. When truth is we never know what we really want from love till we fall in love. It is then that we realize what more we could and should get and how juvenile was the list to begin with. It then becomes an internal dilemma to accept the person as he is, which is the popularly deemed yardstick for love, or to keep on the search. We generally fall in love with our eyes and fall-out from our mind. Very few people are actually happy in love-as for the rest, they were either too quick to declare love to someone or too late in doing so!

If you say you can’t live without someone, get a rain check there too. Living without someone is easy-living with someone is the difficult part. When you fall in love once, there are chances that it becomes a habit-you can fall again-the body becomes inured to it and on its own finds ways to satisfy its craving. Living with whom you love, is THE test-for then you step down from the hazy clouds to the caked dry surface of reality and remove the shades to face the glare. You can scrunch your eyes or shut them or stare at the dazzle in its face. How long you can take it before you look for shade then measures if it was true love?

True love is often confused with romantic and frantic love. It is believed that if there is no madness, there is no love? If there is complacence there is something missing. So it is sometimes the hardest to derive at the inference of whether it is love or just a very deep-seated infatuation. It always is baffling for the symptoms are almost similar. The craving to be together, the adrenalin rush, the constant meditation of the beloved to the extent of becoming oblivious to it all-how do we know when it really is love?  This is where being in love and loving might come in handy. It is so easy to convince ourselves that we are in love and so difficult to actually love.

Some live to love and some love to live. It is what segregates wanting to sleep with someone hot but not wanting to do so too. It makes you look past all the negativity for that one positive aspect which thrills you no end. Love is such an incomparable feel-good. It is what happens to your mind when your mind should be at someplace else. It is the feeling of fear that grips at the thought of it being lost even before it is found. We love because nothing thrills like love does.

Can love be selfish? Yes and no. There is no such thing as ‘unrequited love being the strongest’. How long can you love someone who is unaware or unconcerned about how you feel? Loving someone is the reassertion of loving ourselves. We love because our love makes US feel good. Would we love where we do not experience the feel-good? So it really is about “me” at the end of the day. But then again-when two people do fall in love, there is no room for selfishness-no games played, no jealousy, no boastfulness, any offense or defence. In the Utopian state, there is no thinking then if you are being used or no devising of ways to play hard to get. Love is simple-you don’t do ANYTHING to hurt the one you are in love with-anything at all, and you know you’ve landed on something pure. Love makes you always ready to accept, to understand, to trust, to justify, to support. That explains why some women stand by their men despite knowing that they have been unfaithful. They know no other way of being than by giving unconditional love-accepting and not expecting is sometimes love’s biggest characteristic.

That also brings us to the very debatable issue of being in love with more than one person at a time. Is it possible or is it just an excuse to sleep around or boost your ego with the possible notion that you are so loveable? We can be in love with multiple people with evenly balanced purity of emotions and intentions. Aren’t we equally loving towards our parents, brothers, set of friends-why segregate romantic love from the domain of feelings? It’s like saying you can feel kindness just for once, compassion just for another and passion just for someone else.

We always look for a love that is forever-but how can something that is born have no end? And forever has anyways become redundant in the present times that we live in-nothing lasts forever and never say never! It is natural to expect something that’s been begun to reach its destination and thereby completion. A line can never become a circle till what you give comes back to you. And why is ‘end’ associated with a ‘dead end’? It can be a cross over to begin something new. Yes, love is like that too-transcending, changing its shades, taking new forms and you must move along with the flow or be beaten upon the crags on shore.  

Love is never easy-nothing that is worthy ever is! It tests before it puts you to rest. For some absence makes the heart grow fonder and for others-out of sight and out of mind. Love requires consistency, otherwise you just might turn around a few years down the line and realise it was just another fascination or fling. You may not hold hands anymore, you may not caress as before, but love is that million dollar look of concern when the loved one trips or a message on the phone that says ‘We don’t kiss much anymore and I know it is my fault.’

Love is a must for at least once in a lifetime. Find it if you feel it might not come searching for you. Experience it, for it might not give you opportunities forever. Treasure it, for nothing is more valuable. Without love, you’d remain vacant from within, lost even when found!

You love so you may live

Or do you live so you may love?

Tossing over a feathery bed,

Yearning for a tender touch!

You see the wonders the world has to offer

But only then close your lids gratified,

When you see passion in some loving eyes!

Why run after riches and fame

Suffering just to see your name

Etched in history as a glorious memory,

When all you need is to be stuck up

In someone’s fond reverie!

Crave not for immortality

Nor desire the world’s adulation

Pray to keep close a heart

That skips its beats on separation!

I want not gods or heavens or things money can buy,

I want not the worldly ties.

I want this fluttering heart of mine

To feel true love before it dies.