A Guide to Swallowing your feelings.

Swallow your feelings. Scoop them neatly and don’t let them spill or leave a stain. Chew them quickly – don’t savor them – just long enough to make them an unrecognizable mush before pushing them down to be dissolved in the acid below. Start small, just the ones you can handle: sadness when someone dies in a movie, anger at tech support. Those are the ones that make sense, that go down smooth.

Others are harder to swallow, the complex, multi-course meals made of layer after layer of uncertainty and guilt, warring flavors of disbelief and longing to believe, fear of getting what you want and fear of losing what you never had. It’s okay if you can’t choke them down right away, if they get stuck halfway and leave a lump in your throat, if they make you sick and some of them leak out through your eyes and nose or burst out of your mouth when you least expect it. It happens to the best of us. You just have to build up a tolerance. Consume them little by little, and before you know it, you’ll have room on your plate for something else, something better.

Just as you can’t remember the time before you ate solid food, soon it will become second nature. One day you’ll wonder when the last time you cried was, and find you can’t remember. That’s great, you’ll think, no one can hurt you now. No one can touch you. You are a pristine and impenetrable fortress of stoicism. Everything is blank and immaculate.

Carry on and don’t give it another thought. Not until someone asks you how you feel and you don’t have an answer because you just don’t know. Not until something happens and you laugh when you were supposed to cry because somewhere along the way the wires got crossed. Not until someone is sitting in front of you, spewing their feelings and begging for yours and all you can think is what a mess they’ve made in the place you’ve worked so hard to keep so tidy. 

You have the gentlest hands and when your words touch me, they do so in whispers.

Each time you pass me in the hallways of cyberspace and brush your arm against mine,
I stop and wait for my beating heart to steady itself.

You will never be mine. 
And you will never not be… 

“I’ve never met someone who can match up to you—and I don’t think I ever will. 

I can assure you that none of them take my breath away like you do.

And you really do.

People say it all the time: ”you took my breath away”

But you actually do.

I often forget to breathe around you.”

holding on

A love letter to the unsearchable

The winter holidays when I was 12 turning 13, my mother unable to “connect” with me anymore told me I could have a pen pal and she pointed at the classified section in the local daily. I looked through but instead opted for the up market magazine version and found Pankaj Sood, who worked at the wallem ship management company in Hong Kong. He was much older and perhaps didn’t expect an almost 13 yr old to write to him from Bangalore claiming to have lived in Vienna, proficient in Kathak and sitar, an arts student from the university of Vienna. Too good to be true??

    firstly, I had a lot of strange people living in my head and 2. I loved the Atlas and a proud owner of the 15 piece encyclopedia. At the time I thought it was cool to live in Vienna, perhaps after a Nazi chapter in my school text. Hence, I wrote away feeding poor Mr.Sood lies after lies…he did write back, on scented paper from a foreign land. I was excited, drew hearts and crossing arrows on the back of my book, hummed “chupana bhi nahi aata” under my breath…in all, he was the coolest, he treated me like an equal, he was kind…he liked Hindustani classical and thought this sitar playing, rich Vienna NRI kid in Bangalore was just as equally cool. Sometimes, when you lie you begin to believe the very lies you feed. In reality I was the gawky, fat, zit faced, patchy 12 yr old and an “employed adult’s” attention and company was like hitting the adolescent-teen jackpot. Time passed by, he probably figured I was a lying retard and stopped writing to me. I moved on, the earth rearranged, my waist got smaller, my breasts grew larger, my front yard filled with flowers, I found someone and then a few more and am sure he did too. The only remains were his address and name safely tucked in very tiny script on the last page of my diary. I also believed if I couldn’t read it no one else could…not much to say of myopia either.

    Now, I had to find him…I started with Facebook and the search threw up 500 odd pankaj sood’s, I am definitely not demented to “friend” each of them. I wouldn’t “friend” him even if I did find him. When you find someone you pick up right where you left off (if you can remember where) but the novelty is almost always followed by disappointment. People grow up, experience new things, change. The best friend you played lock and key with is not the same, instead she is a mother of 2 who is holidaying in Goa with other moms of 2 and is extremely worried about her growing waist size. Such is social media it allows you to ‘get to know’ someone by scanning their profile for five minutes. You can quickly grasp political views, favorite bands, and writing proficiency. Sadly, this is good for evaluating the people we meet as adults – we’re getting to know them for the first time and have low expectations to begin with. It’s the ingrained cynicism that comes along with growing up. But would I risk knowing Pankaj Sood is on his second child and first divorce. These newly minted information will engulf the memories I have of him, they have the ability to burn them memories alive.

     I know my curiosity will not be curbed but I am glad there are 500 pankaj sood’s and he could be the guy who “likes” Pinot Noir, Bach and Fante or the pankaj sood who “likes” pink floyd, beer and bongs. I am happy to keep the memories confined to foreign scented paper and pointy handwriting where things went slow and the lighting was always flattering. Be well my dear one. 

Atavistic

for words like books come to you when you need them most.

In the social sciences, atavism is a cultural tendency—for example, people in the modern era reverting to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time. 

its a lonely world of frightened people.

Bach:Toccata and Fugue in D minor

I weep for the indifference of the flying fish
I weep for the sadness of yourself
I weep for Bach
I weep for Grandfather's clock
I weep for weeping
because no one cares
I weep for the lack of friends
to play with
I weep for the man who held my psyche
in his fingertips
I weep for I was sold into captivity
long ago

This too shall pass...

There will be that conversation you’ve been putting off for as long as you’ve known you’ve needed to have it. There will be those words that you’ve rehearsed over and over–in your car, in front of your mirror, in your bed in total darkness while staring at your ceiling–that tumble out of your mouth inelegantly, tripping over each other to make it out just so you can get this over with. There will be that ugly ball of thoughts that hangs in front of you, the thick, opaque cloud of words that formed in between you, through which you cannot breathe. There will be that moment where you try and scoot away, wanting to disown everything you’ve just said, ready to scream at the top of your lungs just to cut the silence.

         And there will be that moment, that brutally delayed moment, where they respond with a shrug, a sigh, a casual dismissal of all that you just implied. They will demonstrate with unintentional precision just how uninvolved they are, how little they have emotionally invested, just how very little this has all mattered to them. There will be the moment you struggle to physically scoop up every humiliating statement you made and all their brutal implications and cram them, hurriedly, back in your mouth. You’ll fight back tears as your cheeks fill, blotchy and red, like a veteran alcoholic. You’ll linger on the cusp of wailing, of running in any direction until your lungs ache–but you won’t. You’ll shrug and vaguely shake your head, pitifully mumbling something along the lines of,

“Oh, of course…right. No, no, that’s cool.”

You will awkwardly walk away, feeling the burn on the back of your neck as you know they are watching you with a combination of pity and discomfort. You will play the situation over in your head again and again, physically cringing every time you think of what they must think of you now–what they must be saying, through cruel laughter, to their friends.

But it will pass.

the night the poems

came by to say

hello

the walls were stained mellow with

grief

and bottle of curdled wine,

dusty with dead spiders

sat about like memories best

forgotten.

literally metaphorically.

Stand perfectly still.

Wait.

Wait more.

If your heart starts pounding against your chest, this might be an indication that your heart wants to push forward. Take a step forward for every pound of your heart. At this rate, you’ll be across the room by daybreak. But after all, distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Close eyes to exit...

If I was there with you now,

we'd giggle like little kids and then

you'd tackle me and we'd roll around on the floor

until the end of time

We are so quiet

like water

sitting so still and waiting

to be splashed into

Pause

It’s a damned drag when your

Brain and your words get

Weary and you stumble about

On a blank page

Time to collect my honors

Yet?

Or will I piss off everybody

And go for another

Twenty odd years?

(I could collect a few new rejection slips on the way)

but meanwhile, I believe I’ll take a

late dip in your spa in the

moonlight.

Its been a great run and, I think a

Worthy one,

So now I’ll follow my belly

Down the stairway and into your

Yard and into the bubbling water.

This precious thing isn’t over yet.

It could be that I am just warming up to the

Battle.

With you, with me, with life, with death

Itself.

I warned you long ago that I’d

Always be here to disturb your fondest

Dreams!

And now its into the foaming spa as

New poems

Begin to

Swirl and build

Within.