The One That Got Away

Their conversations often bordered on the realm of surreal dreams, tentatively dipping into the exhilaration of uncertainty with bated breath. The short sentences were thrown back and forth with agility – stinging, soothing, keeping one alive. She often felt like this was where it was all supposed to begin and end and begin again, like the point where the curves of infinity met in this two-dimensional world of words. And in the real world, that point became an endless pole, the axis of her existence.

“I do not really want you to be happy, you know”, she murmured.

Story-Picking

His stories seldom carried names. They were like pieces of a puzzle, without definitive timelines or protagonists, just flashes of bright colours and emotions on a wordy canvass. They fell dangerously from his lips, as if cast to the wind with abandon – a million wispy seeds of a dandelion drawn from every bright yellow memory.

Stories

Are you the ghost of a dream

Or the dream of a younger self,

An obsession to be lost

Or a loss to be grieved,

A slice of my heart

Or a phantom in my brain,

The life of all my thoughts

Or the death of reality..?

Maari

“Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time..”

I do not remember when it was that I came across Peter Pan for the first time; perhaps my vivid memory of being shown the 2003 movie at my school in the 7^th grade was the first. I obsessed over it for months or perhaps years; enchanted by the concept of Neverland and never growing up. And when I read somewhere that Sagittarians are known to have ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’, I was elated at the discovery. I divulged to every passer-by my noble intention to never grow up or be an adult. The concepts high-schoolers attach to coolness are strange indeed.

At 29 years old, looking back and recollecting some incidents, I am glad that I grew up.

My Scars

My life is a summed total of my scars.

A round shallow ditch,

Dark brown,

That shines like a misplaced nose ring

On an otherwise uneventful face

Talks of an impatient teenage hand

That picked at a chickenpox scab

And two small uneven mounds of flesh

One on my hand,

The other on my belly,

Corroborate the story.

A smoothed patch

Of hardened skin on a knee

Acts as the reminder

Of a yellow divider on a busy bus station,

A littered ground that broke my fall

And the hands that picked me up.

Discoloured stripes

On a thumb

And a forefinger that tingles on touch

Where enthusiasm made a mark

On the amateur cook,

And dishes enjoyed proudly

With fingers wrapped in ice.

Chipped corners

On a beating heart

That caught itself on sharp words,

And a tongue that learned

That retaliation

Hardly hastens healing.

And thus goes on,

Each scar a story

And they write the book that I am.