goldfluke

I come in myriad ways, seen and unseen, happy and sad, light and dark, expected and by surprise and knock at your conscience, giving a peek of pleasures untold and happiness waiting to be experienced.

Holding in my hand greener grass, the potential of a better trip, waiting for your mind to get fucked… for you to become weak and not want to conform, for your better judgment and sanity to give way… for you to want to be swept away by me and want nothing else but to cross over and embrace me.

Fight as much as you will, you cant deny that without me your life would be placid vanilla, flat, and almost unreal. Try and avoid me as much as you want to, look away if you can, pretend I am not here, wait for me to fade away, disappear, become naught…

You will still need the me-inspired racing heart to ensure that systems are going well, to feel hope, to feel alive.

;-)

she sat there, watching her cousins trading stories, discussing their lives and wondered in her head, what she would have to say about her life which was mostly lived in her imagination with a few bites of reality: how would she explain the disinclination to engage, the reluctance to partake of the real?

suddenly through the reverie, she heard someone actually ask about her… she recoiled physically, looking blankly at the 4 peering faces, the weight of expectation sitting heavy on her puny frame. dumbstruck at the limelight, the balmy afternoon broken by the freeze enveloping her spine, silence choking her ability to think: no morsel came to hand; she had no fodder to chuck at them.

she had not yet learnt to buy time by repeating the question or how to deflect attention or to crack a wise one and ease the tension: so she sat there without hope of ever answering back, waiting for the pain of alienation to ebb, to let someone take the gauntlet offered to her. nothing happened, no one moved, till the cousin who had posed the question, turned away and declared her a wallflower.
thus, the damage was done: not having enough strength or wisdom to know otherwise, that is what she started believing of herself.

To bring at-rest parts of my mind alive, to share, to build on fears, on hopes, to capture what others don’t see, to record the subtle, to let strangers into my mind, my life, my vision, to scare the ego by putting my creation up for perusal, criticism and judgment. To go around in circles, to weave patterns, to jump out of boxes, to reinvent wheels, to indulge myself, to pleasure others, to hurt, to ease pain, to de-clutter my mind, to distract it, to mess the reader's mind. For the present, for the future, of the past, to leave prints in heads when I am gone, to see eyes connect, for reactions, for inspiration. When I am feeling claustrophobic, when I want to be a rock, when I want to reach out and say hi!, to bond to give, to live.

I write.

FOURTEEN
Expression: somewhere all relationships boil down to that. In my brief stay around here, watching people and how associations develop and disintegrate that seems to be the principle pivot, which makes or breaks things. That is what brings people, feelings and beliefs alive. Irrespective of lack of geographical proximity or 24x7 togetherness, the ability to communicate what you feel about yourself, about the other person and about the relationship you share is where it all is at.

The more successful relationships (and we are not talking only in the ambit of man and woman here) I see around me the more I realize that the channels of honest and meaningful expression seem to be the fire around which the richness of companionship is fostered.

Verbal or otherwise, in the absence of honest and consistent expression, distance and misunderstandings are inevitable. Men, more often than not, use the excuse of once stating their feelings and assuming the rest will be taken care of. The excuse is ‘Hey! Do I have to keep telling you? You know how I feel!!!’ Of course, these are the same men who have thereafter been victims of not understanding what their partners want, what they want in turn and how come the other guy his partner hangs out with knows so much about her and he so little.

Let us accept we are in a world, which is short of supply on people who express how they feel. Though tagged a feminine quality (by men, who else) it is one of the fundamental precepts of a strong and healthy relationship. Think about it, the child (who is said to be the purest form of the being) expresses himself at every point: the channels of communication are always on open-mode. To my mind, what men don’t understand (and that is why women are far better at handling relationships) is that if you don’t express how you feel, your feelings don’t matter beyond a point.

But weren’t there successful marriages before us when expression was more a social construct or around transactions. How did those last? The answer perhaps lies in the opening sentence of this paragraph, in the words ‘before us’. When the world has moved on, the nature of the male and the female has moved on, when the roles are blurring when the grey is the predominant color, when temptation waits in every text message, how will the mores of the past see us through?

THIRTEEN

Clicking
through your pictures

Zooming
in and out

Talking
to me and myself

Recollecting
rides to and fro

Enveloping
you in warmth

Coming
home to see you waiting

Riding
the cab when you said yes

Drinking
our first drink together

Hearing
airplanes full of your stories

Competing
to spill less sandwich

Receiving
secret calls from foreign lands

Watching
you laze in your orange tee

Tripping
on you and I

TWELEVE

strangers transcribing thoughts, virtual friends, text buddies, familiar voices, where are you?

on an aeroplane, mohijto meets old monk at the park, warning before kissing you, where are you?

heady romance, noxious anticipation, furious need, where are you?

saturday in your room, lazy conversation, hungry looks, yum lunch, where are you?

pent passion versus innocuous nap: no combat, sweaty brows, perfect union, where are you?

hypothetical situations, spiraling everywhere, belly laughs, your polite best friend, where are you?

walking in the drizzle, the future, the past, snaps, two soft toys, where are you?

arms entwined, eyes two inches apart, seeking less distance, where are you?

brave masks, deep sighs, held back feelings, come back soon, where are you?

ELEVEN
It started with u expressing resentment about me not giving you enough time, about my life being too busy with my own stuff. Went onto my every other reaction being rude and abrasive. Led up to u stopping to look at your actions and focusing on the negatives of mine. Got compounded when u started leaving the kitchen in an oblivious mess even if all u wanted was to drum up concoctions to preserve your youth. And then the TV went away from me. The living room followed to become an extension of your wardrobe. The only place I could stay in the house and not engage with you ended up being the comp. Seeking refuge in it, I try to protect my privacy by sharing my life with strangers…