Keeper

Secrets are gifts. They don’t belong just everywhere. A secret lives where lives Love.

I have my grandmother’s stories within me,
and my mother’s, and yours—
Why do I have yours?

I have someone else’s anger, a tragedy from another place in time
Where I wasn’t, where I’ll never be – except in the future of their past
that is already a memory
Numberless faces read out their stories and not one I could tell not to
Like I could not tell you

“I don’t want your stories!” I scream now when it’s too late—
Waking up from a dream, and sleeping into another
Why do I still find you near?

tsk

they are all growing old
old and apart.
none of them truly excited
about anything at all
and as they stand close,
shoulders touching,
you hear them whisper,
dewy-eyed:
happiness is not a goal.
you nod
and stifle a giggle.
they’re all the same!
all, winners in this game

My dark man. (3)

We sat there at a distance, both missing each other. We could’ve just turned to face one another and talk. We could’ve just talked.

It’s that same place again, and that same part of nighttime where everything feels stitched to something deeper and more calm. We are sitting together: he on the log, and I on a rock. Spread wide above us are the skies, innumerable stars glistening on their soft sheets. The air is cool. I can’t describe how it smells or feels, but I know. It’s the kind of moment one wants to seize, literally freeze. It’s not when you want to think about how time is passing. Because time is not passing. It shouldn’t, now, should it?

I tell myself that you won’t leave. But I know it means nothing. And it is with this thought that the weight of our silence starts becoming torturous. It feels as though someone placed a spiky wire on my bare skin, trailing it down. As it touches my chest, I draw in a quick breath: it has a connection with the void within me. I look at you and you are staring ahead somewhere, aloof, in a world that your eyes see and I cannot reach. And then I realize how you have no idea about my world either. We are equally separated.

We: You and I, the stories yet to complete. I think we are ever-living because of what we have in us. Even though we each carry Words from contrasting entities, we are still what we are for us.

“Tell me one last time, will the sun come?”

“It will,” you say. I think I will then stay for a moment. Until the sun arrives, at least. The log is empty at your side now. I will walk to it and sit there. To feel that warmth again and not shiver. I have wrapped my shoulders around myself. Perhaps the wire will forget to hurt, too. Maybe it will turn into a spring of soothing water if it hits my heart enough times.
Voids are colorless but they are vulnerable to scars that birthed them. I can still hear your footsteps from ten minutes ago. Was it ten minutes ago that you left, or has a century passed already? Oh but the sun, yes, it will come.

Our goodbye was wordless. I think we will meet again.

---

2014

“I did not want to be what I have become. But I like it now… It suits me. I feel I am where I belong. It is Real. It is Me.”I was sitting before him on the road and there was no one else around. When he said these words, I looked at him. I wanted more answers, and I was searching for them in his eyes. They are windows to your soul, after all, but somehow his soul was a locked corridor now– the key to which was unknown to even himself, I suppose.  Read more

2015

“You don’t know how it’s like to be what you are not.”

“I sure do. I have known you for so long and never uttered a word about you. That is the same thing in a way, if you see.”

He turned his head. I stood at a distance from his seat: a log placed in the middle of the road. An empty road– our secret place.

“No,” he whispered. “You cannot see the sea in me. You can only see the waves.”

“I can see the sea,” said I. Then taking his name, I continued: “And I can also sense a storm. Please confide in me now, let it crash me down if it so must. Break me because I need you.”  Read more

---

 

(Like the previous two times, this had to be the way it is, too. The first time I wrote it, I was having a problem putting words properly but hoped it would make sense.  It’s of course the same now.)

 

The universe smiles with me.

“Sea waves kiss my feet. I bend to hold wet sand in my hand and close my fingers for a while to feel. It slips away when I open them again but the lines on my palm glitter with a soft silver gleam. I turn back and night shifts and I find myself in another place. There is no sea, no waves, no wind. But the inside of my hand glitters still. I lay back down and find grass beneath me. Soothing and serene. I touch some strands to gather green. It tickles, softly. Your name I write then, on my skin, and smile. The universe smiles with me.”

Written in response to writing challenge 201: “Skin”. (Write a prose poem using internal rhymes; choose whatever meaning of skin speaks most to you.)

My dark man. (2)

December 29, 2014:

“It is not I who accepted the Dark Life. The Dark Life accepted me.”

He sat on a rock, his head bowed and hands resting on knees. “I did not want to be what I have become. But I like it now… It suits me. I feel I am where I belong. It is Real. It is Me.”

I was sitting before him on the road and there was no one else around. When he said these words, I looked at him. I wanted more answers, and I was searching for them in his eyes. They are windows to your soul, after all, but somehow his soul was a locked corridor now– the key to which was unknown to even himself, I suppose. Read more.

“You don’t know how it’s like to be what you are not.”

“I sure do. I have known you for so long and never uttered a hint about you. That is the same thing in a way, if you see.”

He turned his head. I stood at a distance from his seat: a log placed in the middle of the road. An empty road– our secret place.

“No,” he whispered. “You cannot see the sea in me. You can only see the waves.”

“I can see the sea,” said I. Then taking his name, I continued: “And I can also sense a storm. Please confide in me now, let it crash me down if it so must. Break me because I need you.”

For some time he said nothing. I walked closer to him and sat by his knees. Putting my hand on his lap, I asked him to look at me.

He did. His eyes were red.

He was crying!

I can’t say how it broke me into bits to see him unwrap himself out of that favorite strong shell of his, but I begged my eyes to not show. I was going to be brave, for once, for him.

“I got defeated, ¦_. They took away my child. You should have heard how he cried, how he wailed! I don’t know what to do. Can any man be as helpless as I am now?” Each sob pierced my heart as I heard him speak.

“My baby was snatched away. They ripped open his chest right there. He died among a crowd of brutes. His soul – it didn’t find a flower bed on exiting, but got trapped in a tube of viscous blood instead. It makes me cry. I could do nothing but watch, and watch I did as they pinched his little fingers away. My breath stops when I think of what I saw, but I saw and I am living. Why am I still living?”

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My dark man.

“It is not I who accepted the Dark Life. The Dark Life accepted me.”

He sat on a rock, his head bowed and hands resting on knees. “I did not want to be what I have become. But I like it now… It suits me. I feel I am where I belong. It is Real. It is Me.”

I was sitting before him on the road and there was no one else around. When he said these words, I looked at him. I wanted more answers, and I was searching for them in his eyes. They are windows to your soul, after all, but somehow his soul was a locked corridor now– the key to which was unknown to even himself, I suppose.

“Are you satisfied without having any friends?” I asked.

“You are my friend!” he replied with a smile. I will never forget that smile.

“I know that,” I said his name, “but I am not always there around you, right? I never know where you are, what you are doing, how you’ve been. I worry about you. Who takes care of you when you’re not here? No one. And if that wasn’t bad enough, you don’t give an inch importance to yourself either. Why?”

“I don’t need to. I am happy and more contented with my life than you can imagine. I don’t need these things. Care, look-after, love; these aid other people… People who can’t live without people, who depend on other humans and emotions as a weakling depends on crutches. I have come far from that now. It makes no sense to me.”

How would he know what “weaklings” were truly like, I thought. People need people, they need these “crutches” to walk around this world. Why doesn’t he get it? Or more importantly, how did he overcome this necessity?

He was at ease with his lifestyle, and he meant his words more than any of us could. He could see beyond his time, and yet no future thought worried him. He could look in a glance at his past and go through his early details in a minute– yet he was one whom you’d never find regretting or complaining about his choices (or their causes), or taking pleasure in revisiting his memory lanes for that matter.

He was not normal. Yet he looked more saner than many, some times. That was perhaps because he had given himself to his goal: it could either be absolute good or absolute evil that would complete your life and give meaning to your otherwise worthless existence. He had found ‘It’ in evil.

“Would you come back to meet me again?” one asked.

“Yes. But it will take longer this time.” other replied.

We both smiled as he got up and held out his hand to me, which I gave without a moment’s pause. Standing face-to-face I tried yet again to search him in his eyes, as if their color would light my way too and I’d be able to find a clue. He stepped closer and put his hand softly on mine, slowly whispering a “no”. Maybe he thought I could really do that if I tried?

He turned around then, and started to move away. There was the famous S-shaped scar at the back of his neck which always looked fresh and red, and was so deeply cut a wound that it pained me to only look at it. I followed him with my gaze, thinking of what he was and what he could never be, until tears blocked my vision and I smiled to let go.

[Okay, hellooo. I was having a real hard time connecting words but I also badly wanted to write a story-sort so here goes. Let me know what you think of it!]