Letter on NYE.

Dear inexpressive container of a sensitive soul,
Things don't HAVE to follow a pattern. You might be the loner on New Year but you're also the girl who enjoys sitting in a club and writing in her journal. You don't need to do things because that is what is expected of you. You can defy clichés in the less hipster and unpopular ways.
You might hurt at nights but what is important, is living in each moment, soaking it in. Not, counting your breaths till you die.
The most simple things can actually be the most comforting and happiness inducing, if you allow them to work their magic.
Don't chase. If you need to, pursue. But don't chase.
You do you, and this time not as a catchphrase but really. Do you. Because nothing else will free you from the pain except the comfort of being yourself.
Don't bring the sadness upon yourself. It is always going to be in you, to move on. So move on.
And don't get dejected. Count your blessings.
If nothing, you've working limbs.

Aim and work. Aim and work.
Brood lesser.
Hold in your hands what really matters and dust off whatever doesn't.
Force yourself to do the things you're afraid of.
And easy, please go easy on yourself.
Self criticism needn't transcend into a nasty self harming session. Stop directing malevolence towards yourself.
Stop seeking affection by making yourself sad.
People aren't going to pet you all your life.
I end with something I already said. You do you. Please, do you. Or there will be a bottomless pit of pain waiting to suck you in.

Yours truly,
A potentially more clear headed future self.

Love is...

You activate parts of my heart that I didn't know existed. Watching you breathe, slows down the pace of my life. It's incomprehensible to be in the same room as you and not touch you. This isn't lust, its love. A glorified support system.

I see people my age, questioning love, questioning how real is love, pretending it's a utopian entity. And I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry and I feel blessed that I can experience what it feels like to make an eye contact in a crowded shop with someone and sense a cosmic wave pass between you two (no exaggeration.)

Love is not unreal. Love is not a lie. And sit your punk ass down and stop pretending like love is a straight up depression inducing drug. Maybe you just have not experienced it correctly. I'm not saying I have a really perfect relationship, I've terribly sad days too but even on those sad days, I know how strong this abstract notion makes me.

Love doesn't make the world look more beautiful, it gives you sustenance to live through the ugliness or the strength to beautify it.

Maybe this post makes people categorise me as cheesy, unscientific, or even emotional. I don't give much thought to the label, as long as I'm wholly experiencing something so different and positive.

War.

I have spent all my teenagers living under the garb of hypocrisy. Being strongly feminist, reinforcing that I don't need any saving but somewhere inside, I did need/expect someone to come save me.
Now that my teenage years are actually behind me, I feel happy I didn't meet someone who'd force the rescue flavoured alcohol down my otherwise teetotaler throat.

See, my point is quite basic. Somebody else can't save me because I know exactly what I need. I know exactly what I am fighting. I know exactly which battles I'm going to never win, no matter what. I know where I am going to emerge victorious even before the actual act of engaging in war begins.

IF, God forbid, I would've met someone who "rescued" me, I'd see myself only through their eyes, to never learn my struggles on my own. To never learn how to manoeuvre through the tricky and painful maze that society seems so ready and willing to construct for me. Forget these serious things I wouldn't have learned that examination stress gives me serious bouts of acidity, because someone would always be around neutralising it.

I'm glad I lived through it alone. I am glad I faced my demons without a metal armour weighing a ton which I probably wouldn't fit into and end up dragging around all the time.
I am glad I chose myself as my only warrior.

Definition: I'd rather you see my shoes.

Have you ever felt this way?
This way where you want to walk barefoot on grass and you want it to tickle your feet?
The way where you want to hide away, but  you still want the world to find you.
The way you want to feel someone's skin against yours.
The way you want to stir someone's soul but a certain part of you feels like it already has done that.
The way where you want to control how you let it go?
The way you want to refrain from communication because you want to see who really cares about you?
The way you want to find an answer to this plaguing, unformed question in the pit of your stomach?
The way you wish you could erase your past?
The way you wish, to hide, hide away all your guilt?
The way you wish this white cloth hid away each bit of you but left only your shoes out?

My mother never really did my hair.

My mother never really did my hair.
Two pigtails, nice and tight. That was my usual.
One thick plait when I felt especially adventurous.
I had hair that reached my waist.
At 10, my hair was half of my 4 feet stature.
So the pigtails.

My mother never really did my hair.
She never really played around.
She never really did a French braid or a waterfall plait.
Just like my education system wouldn't let me drop a science subject to study psychology.
She stuck to the two pigtails and so I stuck to science.

My mother never really did my hair.
And once I got it cut, I think it was the 9th grade, it became a staple ponytail.
My baby hair interfered and the ponytail looked ridiculous.
But years later at 19, when I was away from home for 6 weeks, it made me realise that change in every form, is tough and ridiculous to accept.

My mother never really did my hair.
But she did teach me how to roll it up into the nice working-class-lady-bun.
She did teach me that no matter what ice cream flavour my society served to me, it was completely okay if I chose another and enjoyed it.
Despite whatever backlash my choices made me liable for receiving.
That, even if I were expected to stay at home and tend to the house, my working-class-lady-bun was one step towards wanting my own career and life.

My mother never really did my hair, but in the pigtails, the plait and the bun, she helped me do life.

Slice of you

There is a limit-less sea, between your lips. It is endless and it is beautiful. Every time you laugh during speech, this sea seems more overpowering to me, gaping at me, swallowing everything around it. I hope you catch me staring, and probably realize the magic that you hold, between the one part of your body that you categorize as completely non-monumental.
The boundaries to that space, I want to run a finger across them. Make that walk. I want my finger to trace where the pink of your lip dissolves into the wheat of your skin.
You are ostensibly unaware about my affection, about how I feel that the space between your lips, might be by the panacea to the poison that the bile in my liver fills me up with.
Nirvana might lie just there in that darkness, but this struggle is miserable. I analyze each action and reaction that you make, expecting so much and yet so little. With each accidental eye contact, I catch myself wishing for you to be entrapped by the depth of my eyes in the same innocent way in which the infinite expanse between your jaws has me reduced to a limb-less spectator.

Tomorrow morning, I might have forgotten this paradise of sensation and feeling that you have, unknowingly taken me to, today.
Tomorrow I might just find faults in your teeth structure, but today I wish to roll around in the gloriousness of your mouth.

She undid her bun. She undid her bun.

It was an unusual obsession,
Something you wouldn't realise till it was pointed out.
Her bun.
Her locks were evasive, while they stayed in that bun.
Black, brown or orange.
No one ever found out.
It seemed fairly normal,
like a sweater made of yarn,
That her hair was never open,
but always in that bun.
"Damned bun!" He thought,
Dreamed each night of black molten lava pouring and gracing her shoulders, if she ever undid her bun.
Her reasons were misleading,
The sweltering heat, she said
But only she knew the bun was,
Where she hid her hurt instead.
The bun held all the stories, she hadn't spoken about.
The bun held all the fury, she had never let out.
The bun held all the pain, that peirced through her pores.
The bun held all the sorrows, that on her heart had left sores. 
The bun held all the failed dreams, like pollen in a dandelion.
The fear of being found out, the fear of being discovered
And her hair never left the bun.
And then one day she thought, she could undo the bun for him,
Facing him she stood, gathering all her courage,
Closed her eyes because this,
Would feel like pulling a molar out with callipers without any anaesthesia.
She felt something loosen, a wall break down,
The dam had been broken & the water came swirling out.
But her hands hadn't moved, hadn't even touched the bun;
Aghast,
She opened her eyes and saw the satisfaction written on his visage.

He had only tugged at the stick holding her bun.

A distant heartache. Letters from nobody.

"There is a lot going on in my mind, even though there is barely anything going on in my life.

I love the idea of falling in love. Maybe that's why such shifting affections. Most of the time, my feelings don't get reciprocated because I read too much into someone's friendliness.
And the number of times this has happened is a little too high.

I can't understand what is with this plaguing demand for attention.
It is awfully shallow how someone's attention should determine my existence. On one hand, I'm all for wanting to be on my own, and all that independent woman jargon but give me attention and I turn into putty. My heart, my soul, everything belongs to you.

This giving in, is followed by a burn out phase, where I start fearing the oncoming onslaught of affection from said person and I run. Run in the opposite direction.
This is becoming a pattern and a pattern for this, isn't really a healthy thing.

I don't know is this a passing phase or is this who I am. Sometimes I attribute it to growing up, or being a lost soul or being mentally stuck to being a teenager.

But whatever it is, I hope to recover soon."

Deep inside.

In some convoluted heart, a miserable emotion reigned in all its glory. It was less of an emotion, more of a sentiment. What is the difference, you might ask.
A sentiment, is just the less passionate version of an emotion. If emotion were a dark haired, dark eyed, bipolar beauty, sentiment would be the more sober version of that woman after attending rehabilitation.

It had started to feel like an emotion again. It was like an ocean wave, rushing towards the shore and becoming a tumulus, powerful emotion and the very next instant, it was retracting from the shore to go back to being a sublime and muted sentiment.

An undying obsession with wanting admiration. Admiration that would lead the admirer to ruin. An admiration which would destroy the admirer and empower her to a whole new level. An admiration which would mark itself by the twists and turns it made the admirer's wrist take while he held a brush, soaked in paint. An admiration which fed on his happiness and fed her with arrogance. An admiration that left him drowning in misery, with her being the only glimmer of hope, an only chance of survival.
An admiration that makes the admirer's blood run dry and fills her blood stream with an intoxicant.

Ah the pleasure, of having ruined someone's life. By not belonging to them because this emotion, admiration, is not love, no ownership exists. Destructing someone's inner temple where deities of self-respect have received adulation all their lives, razing that temple and filling it with turbid, putrid waters of self loathing and feeling an immense pride at having reduced the admirer, a monument, before he met her, to a mere pile of ruble.

The glory of having been admired and having become immortal in the work of the admirer.
The glory of being a muse.
The glory of being a conquerer.

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.

Good Morning Wali Auntyji!

Which realms of darkness has selflessness faded into?
Or is it just that one is so involved in self that thinking away (less) from yourself seems like a rabid concept?
My personal belief of how you need to walk over people in this "cash-bling-more cash-more bling" world tends to get contradicted.
Contradicted by what I see.

Contradicted by Good Morning Wali Auntyji.

Well that does sound weird but yes I've re-christened my bus supervisor with that title.

This lady replaced our original bus supervisor.
The original one was a creep. Like really!
At 6 in the morning, she used to stare at every individual in the bus with an unfathomable expression and to this day I swear it scared me.
Like freaked me out.
She gave me negative vibes. Really polluted ones.
(Again maybe it was just a matter of perception. But yet.)

Now anyway coming back to Good Morning Wali Auntyji, on her first Monday morning, as I entered the bus, she said something which sounded like good morning. But given the fact that nobody has done that ever before I just dismissed that as my brain having over-exerted.
And then another child got in and she did say the damned words after all!

This "Good Morning" practice went on and she hasn't stopped yet!
I'm just curious to see will it last while she lasts?

This is what set me thinking, about selflessness.
Her job profile nowhere covered that she had to wish children in the morning, all she is getting paid for is sitting on a seat & supervising the children.
Some don't wish her back, some give her a confused look, some do wish her back, but none of that deters her.
It's like a small greeting such as a Good Morning with a smile, first thing in the morning, does make you happy, not so significantly but it's a positive start nevertheless.

I guess I've reached the answer to my question then; No selflessness hasn't faded into the realms of darkness,  there just isn't enough light shining over it. :)

Hope and Change and Love

"If it's gonna be a rainy day
There's nothing we can do to make it change
We can pray for sunny weather
But that won't stop the rain."

-Please Don't Stop The Rain
(James Morrison)

This was one song which I chose to skip, everytime it played on my iPod. But today, half exhausted & in a condition that made my eyes look as hollow as that of a zombie, I didn't really feel energetic enough to reach out to my iPod & change the song. So I let it play.

So I feel like I welcomed change!
Change is a positive thing. We all agree to that! We all say that, does anyone even believe in that?

This 'change' was like a car, it dropped me off for my date with 'hope'.

Yes I'm philosophical right now.

Why?
Well I just had a good day. :P

I mean really I know it's not a personal diary but after so long, I felt love around me, wonderful sweet love around me!
(No reference to making love. :l)

It is such a beautiful feeling! :')

So maybe that's what makes up our life.
(Deliberate error cause it sounds 'cool' :P)

Hope and Change and Love.