Please call me a cloud

The business of disclaimers: Is a figment of imagination

Every time in my head, when I have imagined coming face to face with you, suddenly, dressed in patched, colorful, layered clothes against what I can see when I close my eyes every morning as blinking neon lights in the night, the mood is that of past betrayal and a fresh scab of longing. There is music, chaos, people are dancing, most are generally happy because they haven't worked so hard for a chance reunion. Things come easier to those who let go quicker. But, it's only you, or something about how the idea of you settled in a corner of my heart so comfortably that it refuses to leave me. Or maybe I like being haunted. I like repeating what you have said and what you would have said to myself often in the silent gaps between two happy days.  

Further in our chance encounter I also, almost always, imagine or actually feel in my imagination a sudden rush of guilt, want, need and sobriety - like something about me is so rickety it can break any moment, but it hasn't for the longest time, I've held it together such. My holding it together is what lends your eyes the cocky confidence in me and you, and lets you have your way. Maybe we decided in an impassioned moment to let you have your way for life. I secretly suspect it was done when we started exchanging books.

I have thus decided to change my name. Please call me a cloud. I feel like a ravenous cloud and my sound is rumbling. The only time that rumble changes is when I break into torrential rains. I am very hungry, my sounds deepening in dissent like the last note of Bhairav and you will only hear me weep in floods, drench you in some strange mix of anger and love. You, be the stone and enhance the pathos of our tragic tale. 

Analogy

Long distance affairs are like a song with a beautiful, steady melody. There is a song because there is obvious melody, something consistently sweet in there. Peaking in little bumps time and again, week days are for silence, heightening the melody's haunting, soothing effect on you. And, at times it feels like the song is about to reach a crescendo, culminate. That is when you will know whether it is a song of victory or despair. But, instead, it just softly climbs down and continues to haunt you. You could choose to leave the room, in which case the melody is over for you. Or,  you could choose to stay and be tortured in sweet agony for an indefinite period. You could wait.

On creeps and ball games (cooler than Radiohead)

It’s a different ball game. That means it is a ball game which means there is throw and catch, pass and snatch and most importantly the ball is in the air only so long as both keep it going. But, what if you were pitching all these balls full of fragrant potpourri and the choicest of your tickles and pokes to some player who’s not your game? Well, the balls don’t return and occasionally if one does; it’s a smack, literally on the face. That, dear reader, is how a creep feels.

While most creeps are easily identified, warded off and branded by all of us, including me, you will never know when you end up on the other side of the ball game. Creepiness is relative and so is desperation. Mostly desperation is nothing but failure on the part of the recipient to reciprocate with equal enthusiasm. So, the poor hypersuperduper enthusiastic ball pitcher sees the embarrassing loud thuds of his public displays dwindle and droop into small bounces, all leaking desperate sounds as they fade into the darkness of awkward-irretrievable-relationships-that-never-started. I recently faced much such ill matched word exchanges.

One fine sunny day on the right side of morality can make you start creep bashing. But while you embark on that fantastic adventure of social inclusion, do spare a thought for all that avant garde-ism in your Dali-advances-on-women or some man wanting to race cars on some woman’s naked chest. Basically, we all like to hear of such momentary forward sparks and gasp in the delight of the imagery but, come to your own world of daily misgivings, ‘dude, that’s so creepy…’ Greet her with a friendly word for a whole week continuously or stalk him in admiration for all the fascinating information you discovered on Google search, write an extra friendly word on the text message or simply give an unexpected hug and you’ve blown it.

That is not the worst. For those of you who have been on somebody’s creep radars, you would know that straight faced speech with a perfectly drained asexual tone, carrying the burden of civil refrain from hitting your face: ‘Ummm…I just don’t talk to people I don’t know’. (In your heart you say: ‘Yeah, balls!’) Yes, because those who say such things never solicit friendship or more from attractive or interesting or talented or simply pleasant strangers. Never. They only rely on their trusted network of friends (who bitch about them) and acquaintances (they met one night at the wild party and got hanky panky with) or well, more talented and uber cool people (they randomly met at a conference and approached because they simply mistranslated sex appeal to talent).
The point is, people are pussies and flaneurs (persons who walk about aimlessly in the city) exist only in Baudelaire books. Also, for those in denial, everything is about a sexual experience. The impulse that you cloud under ‘fellow voracious reader’ or ‘Pink Floyd connoisseur’ is basically just your sex chemicals alerting your charm radar. And, that’s not bad news. Once you’ve acknowledged this simple idea it becomes so much easier to allow more people a chance to add colors to yours otherwise guiltless life. Think about it the next time you shamelessly feign shock at your encounters with a creep.
Yours sincerely,
Oddly bisexual woman with potential creep behavior

Little maladies of the ever molten heart

But, there is always an ounce of pragmatism in all affective dealings of the heart. There is always an element of personal reveries and side business in the distributed matters of the bargain.
There was once a black cat, lanky, little fur. Someone went round and round and wound her in red wool, tugged somewhere, pulled at other ends, fit the cat in awkward corners in an open room and then tied an end to the wall on a side. No matter how much the cat jumps and throbs and pounces and purrs, in the end she is flung back with equal action and reaction to the wall. The poor wall is constant though, silent and calm, as pale as never, perhaps hurting a little somewhere with all the throwing but resilient in pain and composed in multiple layers of paint. The cat could only feel one.
Foolishness is sine qua non to all rationale of love and so is the act of balancing. Just that here the ingredient is extreme patience, understanding, packing bags, graceful goodbyes and an utter state of chaos that plagues and stings the mind like a deep stuck splinter in some skin fissures. It keeps going black and blue amidst phases of resolve, of standing up, of forgetting, of joy, of thorough anger. Pure anger and pure madness. If I were you, I'd never throw it all away with the softest and lamest reason of distances. First you distance from you, then you distance from mind,then you keep in distance a solid pretty image of our beautiful frozen time together.
Edit: I felt like there were bricks in my stomach, each preserved as futile as the other rags, old papers etc. But, those should also lift magically and melt into clay and time that apparently heals it all should cork your movements. So is not true. Every evening I skim through almost a spectrum of emotions ranging from immense detachment to extreme disgusting creepy clinging. Only some of them at certain times I can show you. But, as I distance, I am confident that old self is wakening. I just can't get over one conundrum of broad daylight, why all that needed to be dumped into the sewers.

First of the heartfelt fuzzy farewells

To,
Missus Literature clad in elaborate sequined shawls and beautiful saris, standing like the Marianne with a more urgent cause on the brink of a literary revolution. The churner of all the plodded fat greasy brains in my half fantasy and half nightmare of a real classroom. To study, to learn, to write, to talk, pose and proclaim poetry, misquoted paragraphs of long dead revolts, all this comes carefully arranged in an embroidered exotic cloth bag to us Jezebels of the civilisation of coded clothes and numbered people. To foster such beasts, little devouring, completely shunning responsibility, dragging you in all mirth to the same marshes of pale drying grass and thorny mud dips, where the pride is of reclaiming the dirty, the thrown, the rejected, the drunk and smashed heap of pigs with a guitar, crooning to silly dead mean of the long past revolts. How your eyes gleam at revolt? How pitifully naively you indulge in the big fat project of futile trips to the past, kitschy mimicking of hope fuelled trips to glory? Coming in, like a mad little swirling wave, the seriousness of a physicist and the aspiration of a young girl who furiously paints by the sea. Such ridiculous statements, you. Such painful flogging, like a swarm of moths we do. Tongue that stutters while drifting into reveries like you, mind that sticks so faithfully clerklike to the residual prudish modest writing. That which sifted and escaped in three years of rigorous iron-cut literary studies, needed the hoarse barking of a lily you.
In what you and I share and bleed for in our secret conversations, and for all the smirks that others who stuff our blank dazes with, we gladly saved what we both love dearly. Suspicion of my fate has it that someday I might be pounding head similarly on some other grey walls, that could be my only giftworthy promise to you.

Simple till the start of ending

Long long time since I haven't written. So, I see that people stick on only for the cheap thrilling stories of the upturned life of teen-ish girls, I must commit to writing again. Though there's not much of a 'bang' idea to rant this time.
What do you do when you push yourself, consciously into something that you've always envied in others? Does it ever happen to you? You keep staring at a face and the nose seems suddenly so big, like a misplaced cartilage on a mummy's face and the jaw is no longer so sharp and strong. And, when you could only stare and groan in fantasy, plunge in horror tales of unfortunate non-happenings, the beast was so marvelous, little almonds for slits and fingers like glued pieces of symmetric bone. Then, well you boned it and you can't stop moaning about it. Later, its just quick pulses of feverish pretense in the name of love fever. No fervor, no odes, in it and you have it and you know it that you don't want it but you never probably did and were not meant to fall for it. But, while you have it now you must keep it since all do it and you won't get it if you don't act it. If you kept wondering, falling asleep with an open mouth, if something was wrong before you figured it all, nothing was. Perhaps the only problem was an overdose of philanthropic company with a misle of horny deficient toads (of whom you thought you were one). You tripped for the ugliest story and launched yourself in complete earnest desire for sane little happy givings and gettings and might in the between of the gap of the fingers, smell the ginger or fish for a ring and find a Dalloway in the bag, get uneasy where the Woolf dreams went away. But, why need them at all when perfect bliss encounters you very ordinarily. There's no mistletoe, no blood tear sweat either. It's very simple and uttered in plain English. To return, rather to force return from such astoundingly simple encounters is painful.

The French connection

This is about the trip that is just over. A trip to Pondicherry (Puducherry). All those streets and those houses that were yellow and gray and blue. All streets named in French. So many people who spoke french. I was bummed. I cannot and am too exhausted to romanticize about the place but there is a beach between auroville and Pondy where I went at night. It was a fantasy, like some ancient African dance to beckon the moon hiding behind the clouds and the waves roaring, invading the land slight by slight. There are not many pictures of the place because it was birthday party scene and most pictures are of people. Still, I have just put some visual memory for color. It was a beautiful trip because I could still confidently speak french and connect to the french way of thinking and gasping about typical frivolities.
Je me disais que c'etait fini, que c'etait l'histoire. Mais les sentiments sont bien preserves, meme aujourd'hui. C'est comme un grand sac dans lequel il ya des mots pour la meme image mais dont la description la rend completement differente.

Goosebumps, spiked, with oodles of Cheddar

Those ruffles of black soft unkempt boyish neat hair. Even bees hovering around made it seem sculpture. Those little sleep starved eyes carved in hollow slits of the white landscape of your face with high cheek bones and open pores that I could count. Lips were insignificant except for the wine smell that flew through them. The nose was calm yet protruding like some ageing iceberg. It brushed past when you pecked my cheek. Cheesy, I know. The flutter of the heart when people aren't taught that goodbyes never accompany brushing the cheek. A mere mannerism in the air. Or, the hand on the spine, just the right firmness and the correct unsure touch. The other hand admires the curve of the neck while the head tilts and seeks approval only in the eye. The morning sunlight tans it and you are melted pleasant for the rest of my day.

When you fall for the morning microphone

Mornings of paranoia and sudden conscious smiles.
Jubilant when you get little niches to dive in for secure unwatched blushing. Almost wading with the mainstream current and nodding furiously because I hardly even can hear what is being spoken. It is not awe, trust me. It is true love progressing through various stages of all three components: intimacy, passion and committment, except that all this is not mutual and is a fragment of my white board only. Gosh, he is here again, skin swelling and expressions as fluid as flagellum suddenly crystallized. Fake jubilant smile again. Agent M, all clear sir!(What am I, Lizzy Mcguire or some pink shoe? Slap me someone!) Then gradually the shutter fly releases little clothbags of of exalt, all buttoned up. Again radar sense proximity. Please tell me, what is this unidentified walking microphone doing to me since four years, off and on? Then, the villain, all pink bubble gum and agent is all tight again. Victim of inside jokes, heart fluttering like a shaken aspen leaf. Remind oneself, silence is golden. Act grumpy. Don't think of demanding attention...