"Listen. Can you hear it? The music. I can hear it everywhere. In the wind... in the air... in the light. It's all around us. All you have to do is open yourself up. All you have to do... is listen. "

There is chaotic tranquility in me, around me. All I have to do is follow the music. The music inside me, the inexplicable void that speaks not in words, but in a tune only known to me. Despite, all the noise, all the contention inside, all the commotion, the music hasn't stopped. It is a faint, dissolved tune now. But if I let it play inside me a little longer, I known I can add words and lyrics and turn it into a pretty little song called Life. Follow the music. Believe in it. Let it touch you. Let the light of music reign supreme. 

"Sometimes the world tries to knock it out of you. But I believe in music the way some people believe in fairy tales."

Photo courtesy: August Rush

drain.

all the myths churned,
stories died inside an unbuttoned shirt,
your barechest didn't have a skyful of stars today.
only a tiny hole in your heart.
somewhere i would never fit.
so, i passed through a hole in the backyard.
and left, left through a drain.

left. left. left.
left with a mouthful of silence,
with a head resounding of mocking laughter,
wondering why i didn't check
the warning sign near the flowers.
wondering why the only escape was through a drain.
why did i become that escape?
why?

Child Inside.

I feel old. Quite quite old. Too old to be feverishly in love. Too old to drop coins into wishing lakes and pray for a story or two to come true. Knowing well that fairytales remain lifeless pages in Grimm and Anderson's. Knowing well that more often than not, we do not live happily ever after and there are no charming princes, no mirror mirror on the wall, no Cinderella and definitely no magical romances. We make do with what we have. It's not like I've stopped having my illusions. I still dream. Perfect, flawless and impractical dreams. And build up stupid dreamy stories in my head. But these dreams, these stories, this part of me is tucked in old yellowed pages, pressed between old diaries like red roses. It's not like I'm not happy. But there's a part of me, broken and lost and that part noone shall ever see. It's a part made up of wishing lakes and fairytales and Cinderella and lived happily ever afters.

I think I've grown up. Sometimes I stare into the mirror and wonder if it's really me. Do we all outgrow ourselves? Do we all keep losing bits and pieces of ourselves like this? Maybe it's a part of becoming rational and prudent, and yes, practical. Maybe after a time in our lives, we are ashamed to tell others that we dream, that we are still children inside. So, we repress a part of us and let it grow in ourselves, deep in our hearts. This child, this love for fairytales keeps growing inside until one day, we explode. Explode like fireworks in the moonless sky. Beautiful colourful explosion.

I feel old. Almost like a veteran. A loser, sometimes. I show off my scars with pride and proudly proclaim what I could have but never did. I tell people I've grown up, I take unbearable responsibility to prove it. I don't believe in fairytales, or so I say. Deep inside, secretly I still wish for a story for me; I still wish for a star when we kiss. I still nurse the child inside in words and silence and photographs. Yet, in front of you, you or you, I'd be the girl almost two decades old and ready to take on the big, bad world without any trace of silly dreams or stories in her palms. Sometimes, only sometimes, I wonder if happiness could be slipped into Christmas stalkings.

Someday I'd want to a child again. I shall throw caution to the winds then. Till then, you, you and you could drop coins into the wishing lake and live my erstwhile stories for a while. The stories that lie dissolved somewhere inside the lake and behind the trees and smokecircles where fairytales are said to grow.

I want to be one of the masks that you wear. I want to be a part of the masquerade too, you know. I want to be the song that creeps silently onto your lips when you're leaving for another of your wanderlust-satiating trips. I want to be the nothingness that you bury yourself in, sometimes. That darkness that cripples others, gives you security - I want to be that darkness and wrap you in my arms when in the dead of the ebony night, you are staring at the fan on the ceiling and wondering about your sepia-tinted evenings. I want to be the tear you never cried. I want to be that scar on your knee, the bruises on your elbows and the birthmark on the back of your left palm. I want to be the dim sunlight that falls on your face in the morning. Your train of thoughts. Your silence during our long long walks. I want to be the dischordant voice that lives inside you. And grows louder everytime you grow. I want to be your wanderlust, like I'm my own wanderlust. Those inklines around your lips, those old town blues that leave you a little like the storyteller you're in love with. I want to be the melancholy in your heart. Your jagged, broken smile when your world is upside-down. I want to be the laughter that follows you, everywhere, all the time. I want to be the one stolen kiss in the mundane crowds in this old dead town.

Yes, I want to be love. I want to be the voids that you leave in your sentences, that make you muse enough to be the poesy I try to pen down.

"How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here. "

The World In A Room.

They are dressing these moments up in red. A kind of tranquil, sublime red. Something like the scarlet sky blushing like a bride. Or maybe it was a nuder shade of vermilion. Like the ladies on doshomi, smearing red onto each other's faces - shindoor khela, they call it. Aaschhe bochhor aabaar hobe. And it is stark and almost ironic how they stain each other.
In the next room, they are playing a shindoor khela of sorts. Smearing each other with words. Playing with words. Stealing every word and stabbing it a million times. And I hear sobs. The words are unnecessary. The tears are unnecessary. Them playing such a pitiable game is absurd. I feel like stopping them, telling them what they are doing is wrong. They aren't only playing with words; they are playing with lives, with friendships that could have lasted forever; they are playing with the happiness that is a part of them. They are playing with love. They are smearing parts of themselves on pieces of broken glass and watching themselves drip like the shindoor-aalta words. Like blood. Knowing little that the wounds will show, the stains will remain.

There are pregnant pauses in between. And everytime the hiatus is broken, it is as if one of them has deliberately picked up the words said before hurled against the other. Each battle of words, each new round of shindoor khela creating a stronger barrier between them. It's disturbing. Even for someone from a completely different world. Someone who hardly cares to look into their world, their little biosphere which they are now tainting with a maddening shade of red. Someone who'd smear a nuder shade of scarlet in her eyes in the middle of the night sometimes, making sure noone is watching. I'm the detached one and yet, this game is too much for my detached sense of fun. I see others gathering outside the wooden door of their world, some giggling, others mocking at what words can do to even the "bestest of friends" or how they knew "he only used her". It's crazy how in the middle of the night a world is exploding at the force of words and people are actually picking up the pieces of each monologue trying to make sense of the weird but true jigsaw puzzle. They find it fun? Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

What about her sitting and staring silently at the others, wondering, probably,whether she'd use still more fierce words or silence to calm this coup of words? All she can probably think of now is her world falling apart. Bit by bit. Her beloved world. Falling apart; being blown down. Only the debris at her feet. Only a silent murmur of the million words she's heard tonight in her head. A deep shade of scarlet-vermilion red in her eyes.

It's perturbing for me. The words throb at our walls. We have no world of our own. Yet, it penetrates into our make-believe walls too. And I can hear a feeble scream or two, sobs and a deafening silence instead of a glowing laughter that normally echoes in their world. It's more than shocking for a vagabond like me. I'm afraid of worlds. I fear being the part of a world for too long. So I transcend from one world to another. And I like this painful but painless process.

I look into the sky from the window at this hour. The darkened clouds give way to a reddish hue almost like the words they were painting each other with.

Marble Moments.

In between whispering to the winds lines that are meant only for you, I think I spend most of my afternoons daydreaming on the kitchen floor. Imagining the fragile moments of you holding me so close that I can almost feel the fragrance of your unkempt hair seep into me. Imagining counting stars on your bare chest. I think most of the times I'm too tipsy during the afternoons, or too sleepy. Or, maybe I just get a high just thinking about you. And on cold winter mornings like these, my reveries keep me warm and I think about playing with your scent and kissing your brow while you're asleep.

I've tried shaking these thoughts away but they get to me, you know. You set me free, somehow. I see my unchained skies in your eyes. When you smile. When you take off your glasses from all that silly laughter we've had, you enchant me, your eyes - they leave me a little breathless. And to be with you, around you is like walking under the rainclouds. You are love. Love is you. I don't know what love is. I'm curious to know who you really are. You, like love, are nothing and everything. To me. You are silence, like love is silence. We walk together in this silence, sometimes. We know when to fill those voids with words and songs. We smile, and don't let us know. I think we're in love and yet, we do nothing about it. Sometimes we do almost everything about it. We don't know we're in love; we don't know we're silent. And, you don't even understand how at times I steal our metaphors to capture into poetry in vain.

You intrigue me. You and your words, and your ability to keep things inside and yet, smile. I wonder how you glow like a tiny firefly in complete darkness. No, you aren't really a firefly. Fireflies die everynight and fireflies come back as marbles; they bring back memories. Fireflies become tiny rounded colourful marbles that stare right into your face reminding you of trices that you couldn't hold in your palms. Nay! you are not a firefly or a marble. You're you. You're silence. The partial absence of words. Love. An ennui. Shards of daydreams cascading through the blinds like sunshine on lazy afternoons.

You're the road I take with you. You're the long long walks around the old storyteller town under the moonlight. You are the crevices in the hills where we find wild purple flowers and capture them on polaroid. You are the poem you don't understand. You're nothing and everything to me. You're love.