I have grown old today

It isn’t my birthday. It isn’t even a momentous day. It is a slow day in fact. I have had much time to walk around, lie down, watch passable movies and even have thoroughly uninteresting meals. I have had a few conversations that felt as good as a second or third smoke does with far too many shots consumed already. I thought of some wonderful things I will never make – I just thought of them because I can loll around in its weak shadow imagining I’m safe, I have things to look forward to, I have hope. I’ve grown old though. Much older than I ever felt, I think I’ve taught myself to be older. I am getting used to things. The pain is dulled. The heartache continues, burning everything in its way, blinding me from what lies around me, but I don’t have to pause anymore. I like it there, the glow that burns burns burns. Here, It once singed holes in my clothes, my tendons, my head. I cried unabashed to let it out.
It never goes. In this realization, I grew old. Wiser by a million years. I have woken up these past mornings and reached out for the bile with my tongue, ever so hopeful it left. Yet, finding it there wasn’t disappointing. It was just familiar.
However, as science may or may not prove in the future, I have firmly established a fact, maybe. No one grows in a straight line, up ahead at a uniform speed, from 1 to 5 to 20 to one-day-you-wake-up-and-you-are-too-old. My growth pattern, traced over probably important phases in my life which were irreversibly spent in a world much unrelated to my then-Present have led me to wonderful charts. I trace them all over my books, over important papers, over files, over stationeries and desks left unguarded with smiting pens of all colours. Everyone asks me what they are. I, very frankly tell them it is in a process of discovery. They always grow into wondrous things – dragons, horses, dogs, umberallas, woman’s face within an alligator’s… opening Rorschachian avenues to those who care. In the end though, there is no pattern and there is no line. These are hours spent veering dangerously all over my life span – 5 goes to 50 goes down to 3, goes up to 10, comes further up to 25 and then back to 3…the pain fluctuates too, with no rhyme. I have grown, and in seconds I am tearing away at my childhood, grappling just as poorly with things that scared me then.
I am vertiginous. I am dizzy. I poke my head into strangers' rooms and squint for similar traces.

Alice's Hangover

After a week of blinding sun, there is always this phase of shadows. Everything I see seems to be darkened by a few tinges. It’s nothing, I tell myself, ‘your eyes are tricking you.’ Sometimes my hands shiver, craving for something to hold – a cigarette, a glass of something quick, maybe another hand. It’s always just a phase, I tell myself, a trick of the mind.

Sadly, I am always true.

There was a moment on one sunny day when she drew her red shawl all the way across her legs. Her feet glistened and her face was bent, in wonder of her own beauty. She didn't want to tell me anything so I stayed and watched. It felt like a moment on another sunny day separated by geography and psyche where I felt that all my fears and all those borders were in my mind. She looked and I walked away.

In my heart I was running, farther away, across oceans, beyond familiar faces, in circles, grueling against my own little miseries. My feet were growing tired as the world turned brown and ugly. My world, a lot smaller.

Then I always see the tiny door and a bottle that says, ‘Drink Me!’.

This is the one game I’m never tired of. I’m forever thirsty now, looking for little bottles in the corners of melancholy. Even drops of salvation will do.

She could be any of the faces I saw. Tiny eyes, yellow skin, high cheekbones. My xenophobic mind mistakes her and automatically labels her an offensive vernacular label even as she holds me back to give me a little something she made herself.

-For you.

I try hard to feel happy, to be nice for the sake of the little present but my palm hides it in the folds of my skin as I bow a reluctant bow.

Among the Rolex-taunting, SUV-careening monks of Dharamshala is a little girl-child with the softest of voice who despises foreigners, even as she and her’s continue to live and procreate in the latters’ land but tries to keep no hard feelings.

Thought exists only as an escape from reality. If you spared me my addiction to thoughts I’d never smoke a cigarette, inhale, snort or inject myself. I wouldn’t read a book; I wouldn’t look at a picture. I wouldn’t cry or go high or low. I would be me – open, wide and unflinchingly mathematic. You could calculate me into a system, break me down and find bubbles that intensify for the sake of clarity because I Will it to do so and you would be amazed at how little I cry for myself or any of you.

But the fact of the matter is, even as it hurt my legs and arms, I moaned and shed tears asking strength and the correct way (whatever that may be) for all those lost. I cried for the girl I couldn’t smile at and the man who wouldn’t let me touch prayer things because I have a high forehead, wide, bulging eyes and brown skin. I cried for the monks and I cried for my lost friends.

I cried so they find their way and hoped the blood they shed fighting back their country was worth it. I wished for once they would prove me wrong because I don’t see how a reluctant Communist Republic would change its mind when it has the power to never need to bow.