Conscience

(The following is in response to this writer's cue, from this amazing page on Facebook.
Link: http://writers-write-creative-blog.posthaven.com/daily-writing-prompt-kGW1D7 )
The scariest place I've ever visited, is my conscience.
My conscience, where all my masks, all my pretension, comes undone.
Where all my lies, white or not, get refurbished with the strength of reality to look me in the eye.
Where there is a series of situations playing on a white screen. Situations where I've let someone down, hurt somebody intentionally, turned a blind eye towards a person who needs my help.
It's a room.
I enter the room naked.
Sans any ostentatious facade.
And when I open the door to this almirah which seems to be bursting at the seams, all my deeds come crashing onto me.
A room which despite seeming massive, feels like it is warping and shrinking. Which despite giving me enough room to breathe, seems to be choking me mentally.
This room does exist. Despite being fictional and purely a part of my imagination, it is somehow a part of reality.
Every day, me, a person scared of the repercussions of all my crimes looks in to this room through a keyhole, partially mortified and partially curious. And right when I feel my hand at the door knob trying to unlock the door, the fear of bearing the consequences, the pain of re-living each misdeed I committed, grips me and I turn away. Procrastinating the exploration of that room to another a day, a day when I'll probably be ready to face the fact that no matter how mighty high my thoughts might be, my shallowness has, sometimes, been overpowering enough to lead me to commit deeds that invite me to nothing more than self-contempt.

Am I allowed?

This May, an event occurred in my life that literally shattered my existence for a week. Up till now, I have been trying my very best to push that incident into crevices of my mind so that I could comfortably live in denial and let my thoughts swirl around anything else but that incident.

I had a dream.
Something very precious. Something that I held extremely close to my heart, something that had impregnated my soul in such a way that there was nothing else that I thought of, every waking hour that I spent in solitude.
It was an institution I wanted to join. The love for my dream transcended into obsession so rapidly that in merely a month's time the wall behind my bed rest, had a picture of this institution. Each morning when I woke up, it would be the first thing I saw and every day I felt I was closer to realising this dream.
Then reality made a grand and exquisite entry just like a villain does in a movie, only difference being my life was the movie here.
I was 400 persons behind the final cut-off for that institution.
It broke me.
This has been my first experience of rejection/defeat or whatever you choose to term it as.
I spent two odd days wallowing in self-pity and drowning in a pool of tears.
The feeling of having lost clouded my judgment and my sensibility. So much so that the fact that I got into the second best college in the city, seemed like an act of condescension by god.
It's been five whole months and though I pretend to, I still haven't gotten over. The place I wanted didn't come my way. Yes, I did gain on  a few good professors here which wouldn't have been there in the place I wanted,but the gnawing pain still refuses to go, refuses to see sense.

Coming back to now, there is another institution I want to go to in the future.
But I'm scared of thinking of it.
I'm scared of putting up the picture on my bedroom wall.
I'm scared of wanting to be in that institution.
I'm scared of imaging a life there.

I am scared of dreaming.
All I keep asking myself is that after what happened earlier this year, am I still allowed?
Am I still allowed to put up a picture? Not only on the bedroom wall but in my mind?
Am I allowed to dream?

Your's?

(I know this sounds awfully twisted and full of paradoxes but read between the lines.)

I have always wanted the sort of love that drains you emotionally.
The sort where the turbulence defines it. The sort that takes you on an emotional rollercoaster everyday. A nefarious, sadist devil who is reveling in the angel-devil syndrome.
What I believe, is that in wanting such self-destructive  love, I have succeeded in processing what was merely a fragment of my subconscious into my feelings for you in the conscious world. Rather into what I perceive our love to be.
You drive me to a cliff. To the point where you make me want to have nothing to do with you.
But yet, that pain of hating you, knowing how much you love me lures me back into being your's.
Each time I decide that this is it, a slow, gnawing pain, paradoxically an agonizing thrill which is making my feet turn away, entices my heart to run back to you.
I want to stay away & I convince myself to do the same but then the hate I have at that point, condems me to a sentence of staying with you for longer & I can't ever seem to find the will to reject the sentence. 
And I know that being with you, makes me feel like a slave who doesn't even mind being forced into slavery rather enjoys every moment of it.

I hope you see the love, if you're reading this.

The thing with me is:

What are we supposed to do when something is absolutely not in our control?
When little incidents are spiralling out of hand and escalating into a convoluted self-esteem damaging issue. What do we do then?
Be a pedestrian and watch from the sides as our mind tries to make a yarn ball out of the most non-serious situations?
Or step in and try and resolve the conflict.
And what happens when we fail at that?
Are we supposed to lament that?
Or are we supposed to let the latent masochist inside us, use this inner turmoil as fodder?
And if the inner masochist is triumphant, how long is it sensible to let yourself harp upon that one insignificant issue?

The irony here is that I know how insignificant this apparent catastrophe is, but I also know that it is crippling me to the point of no-return. 

What is love gurl, I don't know.

As they stand before me, my parents are quite the painted picture of a love story from the 80's. Not being shy or rather not being a hypocrite, my father holds my mother in his arms and I can see bountiful measures of love, right in front of my eyes.  
On the 13th of July, they celebrated
21 years of having met. As a child, I never truly realised why this day held more significance for them than their wedding anniversary.
As a teenager who has been a part of the generation which was the harbinger of western sitcoms or dramcoms and romcoms to the Indian television, I've grown up watching Mondler (Monica and Chandler) and idol worshipping them as the ideal couple. The whole process of falling in love was made into a phenomena because of those shows.
So the whole concept of being in love, atleast in my eyes, involved  adventures everyday, gifts, loads of surprises and great dinners.
Now coming back to my parents.
On this 13th, my dad ended up reaching home at 11 in the night, my mom stayed up for him and they had normal, home cooked dinner.
No gifts, no exquisite dinners or anything.
Just faith, hope and reassurance & a commitment of standing with each other, which was conveyed by just that simple late dinner.
My Mondler has been re-defined by my parents. The fact that they met because of an arranged match but knew the moment when they saw each other that this was "the one", makes me realise that day of realisation, of actually seeing your soulmate in flesh and bones is always going to triumph over the day they were legally bound to each other, in matters of importance.
So here is to people who make me see love through the glasses of realism.

Bombay Rains

<p>Being a Mumbaikar, the <i>most cliched topic that you can talk or write about are the Mumbai rains. </i><br>
<i>And falling prey to that trend, here is my ode to the weather that suits this city better than the name Mumbai. </i><br>
<i>Come June and the whole city pins it's life upon the MET predictions published in the newspaper. </i><br>
<i>"Pata hai? 3rd se hoga barish! Paper mein likha hai"</i><br>
I love every possible aspect of the torrential pre-monsoon showers. <br>
The yellow hue which the sky wears in the evenings as gigantic, grey clouds which seem pregnant with rain, gather. Yellow, then transforms into a beautiful orange. <br>
It seems like in those fleeting minutes before sunset, the city has been dyed in that orange colour. <br>
And as twilight descends, a light drizzle starts and before you know it the drizzle transcends into sheets of rain which come cascading down accompanied with flashes of lightning. </p>
<p>There are varying attitudes towards rain in this city, the working class has excessive disdain for rains because of the soaked appearance you have when you walk into your place of work after having been caught in an unprecedented shower.
For me though, that feeling of being soaked holds a special charm which can't be replicated by anything in the world.
And as long as I am going to be here, I'll keep loving each bit of it.

Second class in Suede

I love talking about my shoes.
Honestly they are all that I've got.
No not honestly.
I have a lot more apart from them but speaking strictly materialisticly they're all that I've got.
Clothes do matter to me but the charm that a pair of shoes bears for me, is unmatched.
I am the proud parent to a beautiful pair of suede kitten heels in a dead nude colour.
Yes I sound like a cliched girl who wears pink and gets a manicure weekly but my weakness for shoes is probably the only give-away in my otherwise tom-boyish countenance.
So a few days back, I had to get on board a Mumbai local during rush hour, wearing this pair of lovelies.
The only thought in my mind was "Not a single sole (pun intended) should touch my shoes".
I had to, quite literally, tip-toe down a gangway, which was crowded enough to drown a person.
So somehow I managed my way across to the other door of the gangway, to find myself precariously balanced near the foot-board and even then the only thought across my mind was "what if my shoes slip off my feet?" My life was a mere trifle for me in those moments of 'shoe-protection' it seems. :P
Despite all my efforts and fine balance moments, they did get damaged, near the heel, only the left foot though, thankfully.
And although you would categorise that frayed spot on the heel as something dismal, for me it was nothing less than a heartbreak.
I haven't given up yet. There's a shoe doctor who repairs shoes and delivers them back to your place. Off to look for his contact details for now.

You. Ms.Awesome.

I need to write.
And I've nothing to write about.
So I will just write about my worthless notebook.
That doesn't even sound remotely amusing. :/
I miss my bestfriend.
She is an amazing lady.
Yes lady.
She isn't a girl. Girls are immature. Still in the process of learning. She is more mature than I would ever be. She is just perfect. If she had been a man, I would marry her. And no kidding when I say this, she has the most perfect hair on this planet.
We have had a major fallout just once.
But that apart she has been with me. Through my worst and my best. I idolize her.
We always consider our female bestfriends as our sisters until a major fallout but truth is I always look up to her as I would to an elder sister.
She is my person.
And she will always be.

(I know this post is average, but what I have for is never going to be average.)