A grief observed - CSLewis

One.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessnss, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met J. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

Two.

On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it—that disgusts me. And even while I’m doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent J. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over. Thank God the memory of her is still too strong (will it always be too strong?) to let me get away with it.

For J. wasn’t like that at all. Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. Passion, tenderness, and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure—and there’s another red-hot jab—of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as J.’s lover.

Three.

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much J. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.

Four.

It is like a door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean?

Five.

For those few years J. and I feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens.

We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat—or breathe.

Six.

I cannot talk to the anyone about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of all non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. And not only in boyhood. Or are the boys right? What would J. herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all?—no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it . But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defence. 

Seven.

An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the family, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t.

Perhaps we ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.

To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happy pair I can feel them both thinking, ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now’.

Eight.

At first I was very afraid of going to places where we had been happy— But I decided to do it at once—like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference.

Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of J.’s lover. Now it’s like an empty house.

Nine.

One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone. How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!

When I speak of fear, I mean the merely animal fear, the recoil of the organism from its destruction; the smothery feeling; the sense of being a rat in a trap. It can’t be transferred. The mind can sympathize; the body, less. In one way the bodies of lovers can do it least. All their love passages have trained them to have, not identical, but complementary, correlative, even opposite, feelings about one another.

We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine. The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation (‘You, Madam, to the right—you, Sir, to the left’) is just the beginning of the separation which is death itself.

Ten.

Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop? Unless you assume that some other means of communication—utterly different, yet doing the same work—would be immediately substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones?

I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?

Shes gone. She is gone. Is the word so difficult to learn?

I have no photograph of her that’s any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions—waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking—that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Eleven.

 She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief. Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them—that is, in earthly life—they appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes,  the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘J. is gone,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’

It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’

Thirteen.

If J. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared.

Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much.

Fourteen.

Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. One flesh. Or, if you prefer, one ship. The engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I assume a harbour? . Such was J.’s landfall

Fifteen.

I have to be knocked silly before I come to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture do I discover it himself.

And I must surely admit—J. would have forced me to admit in a few passes—that, if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better. And only suffering could do it. But then the Cosmic Sadist becomes an unnecessary hypothesis.

Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now?

Sixteen.

It’s likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards. And I shan’t know whether it is or not until the next blow comes— when, say, fatal disease is diagnosed in my body too, or war breaks out, or I have ruined myself by some

ghastly mistake in my work. But there are two questions here. In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, or because I only dream that I believe them?

As for the things themselves, why should the thoughts I had a week ago be any more trustworthy than the better thoughts I have now? I am surely, in general, a saner man than I was then. Why should the desperate imaginings of a man dazed—I said it was like being concussed—be especially reliable?

Because there was no wishful thinking in them?

Because, being so horrible, they were therefore all the more likely to be true? But there are fear-fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment dreams. And were they wholly distasteful? No. In a way I liked them. I am even aware of a slight reluctance to accept the opposite thoughts. All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just a—mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment.

Seventeen:

Suffering. It is harder when I think of hers. What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War

One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is. What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Will she come back?

Eighteen:

J. was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made even brighter

Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I’d had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep; and after ten days of grey skies and warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned J. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.

Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his love' when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’

Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about people who leave us? ‘Them as asks’ (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’) don’t get. Perhaps can’t.

Nineteen:

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had J. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to J. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many roadblocks.

Twenty:

For a good love contains so many persons in herself. What was J. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier, co-star, temptress, my sun. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal. That’s what I meant when I once praised her for her ‘masculine virtues.’ ‘It was too perfect to last,’ so I am tempted to say of our love. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic—as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it (‘Not happening!’)

 But it could also mean ‘This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.’ As if God said, ‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.’ When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on.

Twenty-One

And then one or other leaves. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off— something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation, then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, loss is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.

Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concerned about my memory of J. and how false it might become. For some reason— the merciful good sense is the only one I can think of—I have stopped bothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. I don’t mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don’t mean even any strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.

Twenty Two:

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop.

Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.

Still, there’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. I’ve read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it myself. I am sure J. wouldn’t approve of it. She’d tell me not to be a fool.

Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. But that’s not the whole of the explanation. I think there is also a confusion. We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself.

I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh.

An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often—will it be for always?—how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again.

They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved.

Twenty Three:

In so far as this record was a defence against total collapse, a safetyvalve, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago.

That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat

Here, for instance, is a new phase, a new loss. I do all the walking I can, for I’d be a fool to go to bed not tired. Today I have been revisiting old haunts, taking one of the long rambles that made me so happy. And this time the face of nature was not emptied of its beauty and the world didn’t look (as I complained some days ago) like a mean street. On the contrary, every horizon, every stile or clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my pre-J. happiness. But the invitation seemed to me horrible. The happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way. It frightens me to think that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all, to reach a state in which my years of love should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal—something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus J. would leave  me a second time; a worse loss than the first. Anything but that.

Twenty Four (2 and 4)

Did you ever know, dearest, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.

Still, there are the two enormous gains—I know myself too well now to call them ‘lasting.’ Turned to  my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to J., it no longer meets that vacuum—nor all that fuss about my mental image of her. My jottings show something of the process, but not so much as I’d hoped. Perhaps both changes were really not observable. There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time.

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order

But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I’ve described J as being like a sword. That’s true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have balanced it. I ought to have said, ‘But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered.’

Twenty Five.

Imagine a man in total darkness. He thinks he is in a cellar or dungeon. Then there comes a sound. He thinks it might be a sound from far off—waves or wind-blown trees or cattle half a mile away. And if so, it proves he’s not in a cellar, but free, in the open air. Or it may be a much smaller sound close at hand—a chuckle of laughter. And if so, there is a friend just beside him in the dark. Either way, a good, good sound. I’m not mad enough to take such an experience as evidence for anything. It is simply the leaping into imaginative activity of an idea which I would always have theoretically admitted—the idea that I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in.

Five senses;

an incurably abstract intellect;
a haphazardly selective memory;
a set of preconceptions and
assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become even conscious of them all.

How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

 Twenty Six:

I need Heaven, not something that resembles it. I want J., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me, however, their danger is more obvious

The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is gone

For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still there—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life—that’s one way it differs from novels—his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about.

Twenty Seven :

If I knew that to be eternally divided from J. and eternally forgotten by her would add a greater joy and splendour to her being, of course I’d say, ‘Fire ahead.’ Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged never to see her again. I’d have had to. Any decent person would. But that’s quite different. That’s not the situation I’m in.

Twenty Eight:

I often think that J sees me. And I assume, whether reasonably or not, that if she sees me at all she see us more clearly than before. Does J. now see exactly how am I? So be it. Look your hardest, dear. I wouldn’t hide if I could. We didn’t idealize each other. We tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it.

So can you. Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives—to both, but perhaps especially to the woman—a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

Twenty Nine

The epilogue is still incomplete even after putting all this down.

Thirty

I wont write about this anymore – Lenoidas never fought his own wife, the Spartans never fought their own armies, and as for the last time we met and you told me I was one of those persons who wouldn`t want it to happen, let me tell you. You were wrong.

- i wouldn`t know where Lewis began and i ended or otherwise.I could relate to him and he could to me. 

Her

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth —that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in  contemplation . In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way— in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of her, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory". My mind still clung to her image. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she still bothered I knew only one thing—which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my dearest. Had I known then that she now had someone else,better company, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. " love is as strong as death." This intensification of inner life helped me find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty, by letting me escape into the past. When given free rein, my imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. My nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character. Their world and their existence seemed very distant and the spirit reached out for them longingly: In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment to let her in, answered her calls. thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories are all that's left.

Frankl - Me

The night

It is just this black..
A dark velvety blanket..
Which hides me from the world around..
This black enslaves a part of me..
As I stand beneath it..
It waits like this huge monster..
Not the bad kind..
Not all monsters r bad ..
This monster talks to me..
It talks abt light.. Abt how people dislike him and love the light..
Of how the tiny little twinkling stars..
So many of them..
Hide
When they see the bright glow..because they r scared of being burnt..
So they come out in the night..
Coz they like the shade ..
The stars like the shade.
You were the night to this star J..

Sparrow

Ok so its world sparrow day today and I'm planning to write a note for you to read.

So when I look at a sparrow I think of you. (well everything and everywhere I look I see traces of you - a song I've sung a lot of times- anyways)

So wat is it in you that I find common with a sparrow.

Sparrows are small, plump, brown-grey birds with short tails and stubby, powerful beaks. They chirp sweetly, are happy in their own world, dont ask for much, you see them you have an undeniable need to smile. They aren't bothered by eagles, vultures or infact anyone and once you look at them you just dont want to stop, you see them jumping nd they are so damn cute when do that.

J is a small, plump, brown-grey human with short tails (patience) and stubby, powerful beaks ( you know what this means). She chirps sweetly, is happy in her own world, doesnt ask for much
you see them you have an undeniable need to smile. She  isn't bothered by eagles, vultures or infact anyone and once you look at her you just dont want to stop, you see her jumping around when she's chirpy nd she is so damn cute when she does that.

Sparrow
You

Hdk

Godzilla

Go.out like the snow..

Let d foolish city know..

The winter queen has come..

Summer tidings..foolish bum..

Magnificence is on her way..

Silly Godzilla ..go away..

Coz she's mine to stay..

Stupid.Godzilla go.away

Or jankosaurous will slay..

Stupid Godzilla go away.

Let her bee

Well I imagine the first ray of light...
Is tat coz ure white...

Or it was but a dark.. surreal night..
That passed in front of sight.

You, the laughing breeze..
You, that carefree ease...

Ur sound..
The world would freeze...
Smiling world,
 say cheese..

Forget the day..
Remember d week..

The way she flows..
Valiant
meek..

Gulaab jamoon ..

Wen she says..
Its like a spell..
For happy days..

Magic is she...
The queen bee..
World, please let her be.

Orgasmic Price

Its difficult for a woman..so wonderful..to let her true desires come out..in this wild wild world..

We constantly see what's happening..these insects dont let the flowers bloom..
..
 Closed doors.. Ur eyes n mine..
The souls already
unclothed..
Unscathed..
Unexamined..
 hold hands..
Soft flowers..
put lips and taste them..
clasp the other hand..fingers interwine..
Forever waiting to be closed..
grab u closer.. ur chest brushes mine..
pull you even closer..I hear you breathe.
 let the hair loose open.. let the river flow..
 unwrap your tshirt.. Unclasp the bra...
As Ur spine..ever so erect..
Feels a chill.. Run down..
. A blossomed flower
...Fresh as dewy grass..
as the first rains..
I kiss them lips..while tongues make love ...
...
let my body rise....
My teeth ur neck..
As I leave my mark...
And then ur breasts..
sucking the fruit so ripe..
nipples stretch ..as I get real high...
My hands then hold ....
As I sink my face..between two legs..so mute..
U gasp..u shriek.. As I suck you in..
Ecstasy arise...
Orgasmic price

---------------------------------------------------------

I love them.lips
A peck on them tonight...
Seeing u, in bed every-time..
invokes passion unbound..
the surge is involuntary...
as wat rises..
 wants to meet u as it's end..

---------------------------------------------------------------

.. too tired to find words yesterday ..

came ur lips..
Strawberries cheeries..
Ripened..
Filled wid passion ..
Nd burning desire...

I forgot my promises ..
And I kissed those lips..
Mine on yours..
One over another ...

as u responded ...
I tasted ecstasy..
A mouthful..
My tongue found a mate ..
And it rolled over yours...

kissed ur neck...
And as I moved down..
clasped ur burning breasts..
bodies one..
found a way inside..
Bodies stripped of clothes..

Mind of thot..
Me inside u..
U inside me..

Heaving..
Moaning..
Living..
breathing.

-------------------------------------------------------

Thighs..
Aah highs...

Tall cliffs..
The what iffss..

Heart dips.
Red lips..

Unclothed you,
Baby blue,

these legs,
Whiskied pegs..
I'm  drunk on you,
Fall in ur arms..
Daisy farms..

butt cheeks cute..
Imagination ..now gone brute..
Let me see more
I implore


-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh c'mon you ...
Oh yes you...

U dewy eyed girl..
Wanna have some funn..

Ye fun...

While ur daddys not home..
Do yu wanna have fun..

I'll teach u play..
The guitar ..
pretty clay..
I'll mould u away....

Away..
Away
Away..

Little girl..away..

The C minor there..
The 4 th string here..
Oh c'mon here..
C'mon here..

U little girl..
wanna have fun..

C'mon here..
Oh c'mon here..

I'll teach u to make..
A happy poem...

A few birds here..
A galactical object there..

And those dumb boys..
Will swoon here and there...

Everywhere..
Everywhere..

Everywhere..little girl..

Theyll swoon everywhere..

So, little girl do you wanna have fun..
 While your daddy's not in..

Lets get this done..
Get some fun..

You.

You,
The smile, the face..

You,
In crowd I gaze..

You,
I see, Inhale..

You,
The wine, that ale

You,
The colors ..their glow..

You,
D woman i know..

You,
below starlit skies

You,
My truthful lies..

You,
The artic heat..

You,
Evening songs, their beat..

You,
The frolic, the fun..

You,
Cloudy sun..

You,
Forever and more..

You,
My story, my lore

Letters

....

You know..I received a string of bad news from friends and family..

It just doesn't feel right.. Hearing all that..hearing people cry in pain and moan .

The heart is heavy..and I feel real sad..
A gloomy cloud on my head ..
And then there's this
this thot of you..

Maybe u didn't have to hear this..
maybe you did..

I dunno..y  I thot of writing to you.. I can't explain this - this little mumbling why..

You were happie all this while..please forgive me if it bothers you..
It shouldnt ..

I'm just writing.. Ranting.. U know..

I'll sleep in the warmth today.. Then maybe their pain will be mine.. And I'll gulp it in as my own and see them happy...

See you happie.. Makes me happie..
The picture is so beautiful..
...me

 Sad news from loved one sits so heavy in ur heart and even heavier when there is nothing you can do about it.

When ur heart is suffering from sad news the only thing u can do so to allow it.

Let the pain go through you, envelop you, take you with it. Sit there with it. It just wants to be recognized, heard, known. When it gets what it wants it will lift off and fly into air like helium ballons and pop eventually into thin air.

It's ok to suffer, it's ok to be sad. Take care if urself - don't suffer more than u have to - no need to inflict further heaviness into urself.

Just be with what's there.

Her

 I wake up n I read this..

The mind..maybe..is at rest..
But ur words are so soothing..
A lost bird
found it's nest..

You are so good..
Is it something you can learn..

The breathin pauses..
Takes d right turn..
Your words..
the rain..
On all that within me burns..
Yearns. ..

Takes turns..
To walk within ur calming ferns..

Thank you ....

Me

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5th of Jul, 2014
Early afternoon,
In your company,
to what purpose?

Dear,

Is this how it feels like when Air meets Earth, the deep unmovable roots meet the free air who`s travelling ceaselessly – miles upon miles to meet a darling, who'd give a purpose to this endless travel
– show him how roots are and how settling down-  too has its longings – how the one with roots, seek to be moved – how the air – seeks the very roots, when opposites – having in abundance what the other craves -  meet and devour upon each other..the thirst – is it finally being quenched..would you know?

 dreams out of nowhere bump into reality and embrace her like a lover who`s been sorely alone –for a very long time..a really long time.. finally fused – in a way you would not know where one begins and the other ends.. they probably never want it to end…The dream wanted the reality and the reality wished she could dream.. the world constantly in opposites, why?.. why is it a never ending circle ..the carousel you call it..the routine.. what it would take to break from it? Would you know?

I`m constantly brimmed with thots of this.. and here they overflow.. did you give me a medium to finally flow.. did you know that the dam was full and it now did need an outlet.. to let the water flow.. let the water flow to the very oasis you build in this desert … this desert of a mind… where they saw a desert you built a dam..full of water..full of you and then it flows out..uninhibited .. the desert – would you think be a rainforest –will that dream meet the reality ? will it meet you?

It is difficult to put what the mind thinks on a piece of paper…because my mind doesn`t think in words..it thinks in a language unknown… unknown to the very thinker – is this language known to you – would you know?

The font begins with an I – so does everything of late – would you know why.

Me


------------------------------------------------------------

The rain transforms the oasis and itself too... I then owe you among many things a thank you..
Lost in the very forest, now my home..

I'm still lost,  with you around it ceases to haunt me.. .your presence.. .. I would write paragraphs spanning pages n volumes.. And then end it all with a thank you.. Before you.. Bones ached at the very thot of writing.. It's difficult to explain wat is so obviously felt.. It had been sundown for long

----------------------------------------------------

There are no clouds today. Just the full moon. The moon, it seems just wanted to gaze at earth..with no puffy white..grey..wet..clouds.

I too looked at that picture again..or I too let you look at me again. I tend to wash my face each time you do that..so I can atleast look a little fresh...the minds a 100 years old but I'm just 24 physical years.

But I'm just a stone faced brown rock to you..the rainlashed forest... The hungry tigress..the sunflower.. The sun gazing flower..

I was walking behind you to the library..in the train and then the bus.. I did posses the auto guy too..

I wish I could be your bed... You'd come to me to rest..to put ur tired mind..restless body. Or is it the restless mind and the tired body to sleep..

I could see you read all the time..both of us..in solitary company.. The bed and the woman..they'd call us..Id laugh when you snore .. Ill creak.... I'll see you dream and make them come to life..
Let me be your bed..

English just has a few words.. Theyre not enough..not when I callously use them like this...

So I signoff in French today..

Incroyable comment ètes-vôus.

Hdk

Has the doctor recommended me to you, yet.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This picture..

The cheerfulness in ur eyes..

I keep staring at them and I see them looking back...

If I could only hold your lovely face in my hands..you would then look at me and then see the way I see you my dear, then perhaps you'll never question me..never ask me to stop...never ever ..

Then you would see the restless storm and the flower that you are. Then you would see that ure the nucleus to my atom and also the universe to my whatever that is..you are the beat the symphony is missing.. it`s all incomplete..

Dont you get the point..

Hdk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
...
There's nothing in this whole wide world, universe spanning galaxies that makes me so happy as thought of you, your being.

There are no truer words than these.

I see you as being so radiant..that theres nothing but smiles when I see that picture, every thot that is dark ugly which keeps binding me down is forgotten. They all run for cover everytime I see your wonderful face..how do I tell you this.

The plain puffy soft dewy clothes..I would so love to smell them..smell them all nights away.. Coz theyve touched your sparkling skin.. How do I tell you how fragrant they are ..
.
How do I tell you that inspite of the illness..I slept with a smile on my face ..I woke in the morning feeling happy..Coz I knew how you looked that day..

A 12 hour work day .. Sweltering heat .. A tired body and mind.. They still lighten up with your thoughts and knowing we spoke today...

Oridinary turns into brilliance in your presence..

I would take a minute with you and stretch it into endless years..just to be around u ..

How do I tell you this..

Lets take one trip and celebrate your wonderfulness each day.. I would tell you how delightful you are..how I even know how perfect your little toe nails look..how crazy I can still get.. Lets sing songs ..yell them while we're riding a bike.. Lets.dance like crazy nutheads on the beach sand...

Lets get high on dope and conquer this world over..
Lets unlock all the madness we've been holding in all this while and breathe this world out...
Breathe our world out ..
How do I tell you all this..
This is not imaginary..you are every word that's written...
Hdk

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I just had to turn around..to see her sleeping right next to me...
It's like you accidentally spot a supernova among blackholes in an infinite universe..
I just had to look at her and fall ..
fall deep within that infinite universe until that supernova cushioned my fall ..it always did..

And then I could just pass through - marvelling at the brilliance of creation..these are times wen u want to see the creator.. Kiss his hands..

Jaan key .. Hehe

You're the best.

Hdk

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Everyday - I come home - weary of the outside world.

 I know who will speak what - I know their conversations - I know how they'll end - There is a back and forth in the conversations that is amazingly predictable. Look at the chatter between left and right and you can see it. It’s a bit frightening that I see it before it even begins.

It seems the world is on auto pilot J, it seems these guys are ok with it.
Never mind them.

We're here to talk about you eh . So since we're talking abt materials..

I realize that what I write is only 15% of what I actually feel, the geek in me says write the same thing 7 times. 15*7=105% - the extra 5% is lost in translation.

Would that make sense J, I think to get you to read something once is an effort .. I could deceive you to read something twice. But id fail for the remaining 5. Vain attempt eh.

So it seems you literally get only 30% of what I want you to get. Unfair. You dont get 70% of it..

I'm sorry for yesterday night - I feel my mind is going to places where it cannot return from. It's a funny and a scary thot. It's like wat u told yesterday - that it's ok to hallucinate if I'm knowing that I hallucinate.

Incomplet ion in completion

Hdk
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, I then sit down - like an emperor just about to be enthroned.
A gladiator whos fought all his petty wars.
The man in the desert, whose done seeing arid lands..
Or if you dont want to figure all that..just imagine me, you know my plight. You know how well I'll sleep tonight. You know - how I've longed for this..

Your one glance, just at me, for me, at me. The rigid body was fluid again..the summer it now seems never came...it was just rains honey...your eyes raining at mine..endlessly..through time.
Such a feelin's comin' over me ...
It's wonderful the way I see..
You're the nearest thing to Heaven that I've seen
I'm right there at the top..looking down upon everyones who've not seen you yet.
I see why alcohol doesnt work on me..I emptied an entire bottle and still was sane..it's you I'm high on...your magnificence - the sound of your words...
Y dont u see it.
My excitement has eaten up everything I want to say.

your name - 3 syllables - each weighing heavier than the other..why would anyone part with any syllable and call you .... I prefer them 3..

Lets please.. do this everyday till we die..please...talk to me for sometime and remind me how wonderful you look...

Hdk

--------------------------------------------------
So you would something intense which uve read all day or something that would calm ur nervous system down..

A gushing waterfall, words which would break rocks or a small rivulet which would flow unnoticed but would still balm the ground it flows from..

Like ur little words when you reply...

Nice..
Hmmm..
Reading...

So I immediately choose the latter.. Although it is the birthdate  but you can have a quiet day, the one with all the introspection..

I remember the last brthdate d one in April.. Where again the house found me alone.. I had.cleaned d house and celebrated with good food..

But that day was blessed you were talking..

You're busy today.. May burns..

I didnt know 30 days have passed between the 2.. It seemed I.skipped over them.. Although the valley I skipped over was deep.it was waiting for me to gulp it down...like a hungry beast....but my feet still felt the ground on this side..

Your side..

So we'll wait for June 9th for another burst.. It would probably rain by then...I too need some rain drops .. It's been burnin for a long time now...

Will it rain..

Hdk - incomplete thots
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi...
It seems like a long time since we spoke last.. I wanted to tell you how much ive thought about you J.. It's happy birthdate tomorrow.. my monthly date of being happy..

My health has taken a turn for the worse and my work doesn't stop.. Apart from the big lot I had there are 2 more added.. I did wish to.call you.. But then waited for you to call... Id b happy if the call had come..

J you are this endless ocean..constantly tiding over..smashing rocks as you come on shore, harbouring ships..on the outside.. On the inside you are calm and deep..at times violent and intense and there are times when ure this whirlpool..You feel you are going about in circles..but it's riding you to heart of the ocean.. I'm enjoyin that ride J..

Sometimes I feel I must write about all the funny things that keep happening around me.. But then I dont..

Sometimes I feel when I am as exhausted as like a few of these days..I feel I would turnaround and find you standing.. I would wrap myself around you..head on your shoulder..I would stay like that for sometime... It would end the exhaustion..

I'm hoping the study routine is going good.. You can save ur commute time..efforts to get ready and the energy of traveling in the heat if you objectively think about my request that you come here

.. A quick mental exercise would tell you that 5 hours each day would be saved..

A happy birthdate in advance.

Hdk

------------------------------------------------------------

We're at the 15th floor...

The fields I see from the window are breath taking...
Even for a dumass like me..
They seem so awesome...
Endlessly.. there are just these green pastures..
Just run your eyes over and those are all you'll find...

So I called you ..to talk about them

My health took turns at being worse and ok and worse and now I'm breathing ok...
We lifted a real huge cupboard of iron..8 floors down and 15 up...Sofas and wt not..

Dealing with
mechanics..
watchmen
tempo guy
labourers
carpenters
electricians
plumbers
And all their jokes...

Everyone took turns at getting hyper - I just kept moving them along

After the first batch of extensive shifting.. I sat down ..there's a patch near the staircase where the wind is just awesome...so I called you the second time...

It's ten right now after 4 batches of to and fro... We've emptied one house and filled in a new home
I'm just catchin a breath ..so writing up to you...

We did have the one rupee Pepsi .. D picture I sent.. The red one was kachi keri (it is green I know but this one was red)  - so that one was for you...

And now we just realized somethings not right with the water connection - so we'll end up in the pool it seems...

All through the day .. Looking at the wonderous scenes..it felt more like you were the one here and were probably wondering where Hardik was..

The place breathes your name each second..

Hdk
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Is it Farewell to the Prof.?

I'm sitting in one of the rows and you are talking about a subject albeit passionately..
You speaking endlessly for 45 minutes..isn't that awesome.

Haven't I always dreamt about being there...

I remember your first day..the night before - you preparing for the first lecture ... Reading reading reading (yes I know the very first lecture was in the girls college) ... You were happy the way it went. One class had just 3 students u said and then how they would randomly come to you for assignments..

The long train trip and even after all that - you would still at times ..come over and meet.. and sleep the afternoon off..

the shopping for your college clothes..sleeveless no sleeveless..

The other professors adopting you..

Some student writing something silly..some asking for your numbers

The pain professor in the Kutch trip..you crying in the train boogie (cute)
Your students jumping in the second
The rice plates at the udipi (wen mom was not home)
..the sambar sipping..

Working brought a different kind of satisfaction in you..I had to be less worried.. The money and the independence you felt..

Working also reminds me of your temp thing at that place where they made awesome learning with fun material for kids (had a store in Raghuleela).. You worked in a warehouse.

But then it's your last day tomorrow.. I dunno how it would be..I dont even know if wat I write makes a difference .. Never mind that...

.. But I a PhD is coming. Id have to call you a doctor then .. The college just lost a gem - why don't they see it I'm still not sure..Never mind them.

I would proudly say she is a woman..a student.. a professor..a doctor..

How proud I am of you

Hdj

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

..my head in ur lap..
u ruffling my hair..
 talking gently about how life is.
The forest grew quiet in waiting..breathing slowly .. awaiting your words..
.  Weak in my knees -- with the softness of ur sound -- I hear u as d world falls in place ..
..how could you do this..
..ur touch has me rolling between worlds..
As i comfortably leave this and enter my dreams..
You made me feel quiet in my bones..
You stopped the chaos and d burning stopped..
A forest fire all around..while nothing touched our ground..
In ur lap still - our eyes meet...
My body loosens - all it's grips..
I can see nothing but you..
....
How do u handle so much care...
We are a different pair..

Hdk
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We met the deers, the falcons, the owls and the jackals..
The snake house scared u..
The Indian python dared u..
The tortoise family met u..
The alligators..almost felt u (,haha_)
 there was a herbal habitat..
The one wid the greenhouse nd greenynet
You tried the bike
People took the hike
That's where I clicked this
That's where u picked this
The shirts black, the jeans is blue..
You smiled and the place turned new..
The flowers glowed..and the air blowed..
Sunshine around..Magnificence - Behold
Magnificence - Behold

------------------------------------------------------------------

Limping
"is anyone down there" you yelled looking at the bottom of the pit.. All you could see was dark blanket.. but you felt there was someone downthere..nd you yelled again...
I was there listening to u all the while.. After u yelled for the third time - "yesss" I groaned..
"you'd have to.come out of there " u.commanded ..
"it's so nasty, smelly and hellish..how do u even breathe here" ..
"go away" I silently said "this is how I like it.. Some people prefer the shade"
"she's just another girl" u reasoned..
"well is she now? ... She's my reason, she's my answer to the world, she's the light at the end of tunnel - I was so close to it - until it went out - just like that... I have dreams about it now..
I'm running..I'm running.. I'm running ... I'm.running.. The more.I.run.towards it the more dimmer it gets.. I trip..I fall..I'm bruised I'm battered but I'm still running.. Clutching onto that one glimmer..as it gets dimmer...
Sometimes I do reach there.. And I see a faint shadow devouring my light.. I see that shadow gulping down everything I ran for.. As I see my world crumbling down right in front of my eyes..theres nothing I could do..I just have to stand there and see it..
People say its a blank page.. And I say I've used all my ink in the previous one..
People say u have to let go..
And I say there's no honor in that..if u won't stand for what u kno is your truth..who will..
So I ask u.. many have coming asking if someone's down there ... And many have gone"
" do this one thing u say, take my hand, hold me tight..come outside and see the sun, because wen u will see it ..youll stop running..the small lights in the tunnels are for d blind.. U aint blind..bask in the sunlight..do it once"
I'm not.convinced.. You see a palm coming out of the pit..you grab it and out am.I..

How does it go then.. ??

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Today's note wouldnt have words like alone, sad, you the types right.
It has to be something cheerful - I sense a wierd kind of brain activity when I type cheerful. Maybe I should type more such words.
One other word that would register in my brain is crunch..I actually sense something wafery melting in my mouth..
It's amazing how u can play around with words and wrap away the reality and create something new.
One other word would be crisp.. Something brand new..a word which is about freshness...the crisp breeze.. The crisp mood.. The crisp love.. Haha.. It boils down to it ...
The days I realize words dont come easy I create something silly like this..

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There will be short-round puffy clouds.. That the cotton fields in the skies would produce..

There would to b the one ray of light..that would filter through a dense banyan tree

There'd be - cold moist beach sand..from yesterdays high tide

You can smell the warm crisp coffee beans which id grind to make ur coffee..

There would b then the moon - red-orange-blue and then white.. popping out from the black canvas of ur design..

We'd see the one drop of dew..on the yellow sunflower ..
dew -  the only remains of a dark glowing night, when the sun met the moon

.....................................................................................................................

The world saw it
I didn't

The red hot stab you feel when the world gets the only thing you wanted..
Everyone gets truckloads of it and you're left standing at the other side of the gate.

The hungry kid outside a restaurant...
The caged bird looking at the sky..

Yes today I'm angry..because  while the world sees it..
It doesnt see it the way I do..
It would never
You know it..
Good chance when they read all that's written..they'd know it too..

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think that love just sorta happens. I think you're with a person for a whole day, you see her strut through the amusement park, you see her talk abt her ideas, you see her smiling at the flying birds, sipping that sambhar gently with the spoonn and u can ..hear her brain say 'yummmm' ..maybe ure at the beach talking.. Lying down looking at her face and then suddenly when all that is gone you think..damn 'i love her, I love her, I love her, holy shit this is it". It's like a blindspot you can't even look at it. It's like a color you can never describe. Haha its amazing...keep smiling all the time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last night I felt you brush my hair as I slept...the silent night was deafening then I heard you murmur something about not thinking too much. You told me the joke about the ma'am  who said "I will remove the dress" I was laughing as I slept .. I told you about how I kept the picture of a buffalo to get yu to smile..you asked me to shut up.. So I brought ur marksheet - my eyes were tired to see the score..but you told me you were brilliant - I obviously believed you. Then something called 'ushakal' came to my head - I can faintly relate it to a picture of u and a friend.. I dont even know if it's true..I ask you to go - it's too late in the night- the real you no longer approves of me - you didn't budge. Even the memory of her does only wat she wants. I oblige - partly becoz I love her brush my hair and that it's only she who can tame the wild horse which is my brain.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

you looked most beautiful not when wen we went out .. Not with all the posing..not wid d made up hair..
You looked beautiful wen u sat down next to me early in the morning for the bus to Pune..
Wen u asked me how your French fries tasted wen v wer alone at ur home..
Wen u tasted the sambhar wid yur wrigglin tongue at the udipi..
Wen u came from college tired and would find me waiting..
Wen u played wid goo..wen I played wid pee-poo-di and u would give me tat stare..
Wen I hugged u from behind at my place and scared u wer mom/dad/dadu would see us..
Wen I gave u d set of comic books..
Wen d first time I layed my lips on yours..
There's an endless list..
Spoke to dadu..he sounded disappointed in me.. Everyone sounds disappointed in me..

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello !!
Id like to tell you that this not a work of fiction everything I write is for real. Ok.
Hmm..
I sit down to write, I find the you that is with me sitting across. ' I spoke to the real you' I tell her 'shes got a tummy problem again' . ' dont worry she's not pregnant ' you assure me about you.

'It's 9th - happie birthdate' I wish you, you seem slightly pissed off. ' you had to wish her before wishing me, it's almost 1030 now - u spend most of your time wid me and then wish her ' god please dont make her angry. I'd try to reason that the actual u and you are the same, but wen she's angry she wouldn't reason to god,

' I can sing a song for you - wanna listen to oh my baby ?' I ask- a special song for the special day. She brightens up and I sing oh my baby for you.

You listen like a kid listening to a his favorite lullaby..I sing to please the angry goddess
 'im sorry my baby for being sucha nerd' the song ends..I stand up and kiss your forehead - you're wearing glasses today- hair tight in a bun..  - you're happy and then yu disappear.
'ask ur real u to get the tummy problem sorted- she hates puking'

Happy birthdate

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Everytime I want to write.
Back home, from office, each day, one thot, your note.
Do you know J how I come to write each day. I sit down someplace - it's a huge house when it's empty - I see you sitting right there in front of me.
I ask ' wat do u wanna read today' -- 'u know I dont make special requests throw at me wat u can'

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What should she read today..I wonder...
She knows I wonder wat she looks like today..
I wonder wat she taught in college today..
Having her green tea in the isolated cabin.. Wondering why the world outside was so wierd..
Disinterested in their discussions..
Disinterested in them..
Homeward bound after the last lecture..
Music meets her on the way..
As she's lost in the musicians  world..
Traveling home..
Her physical home..coz her minds always drifting away...
She would have lunch and then sleep..
Hearing Agnes say "peep peep peep"
I have the xam papers to check she wonders as her tired body finds comfort in the bed..
The spine rests.
Temporarily..
Tea then would find u work..
U'd then work n work..
Dinner..
my post
Sleep.
Well this doesn't seem right hon..
You wake up..
I grab you.. We go juhu and I see u play in the sand..
The afternoon we spend in the forests..talking..talking all the time...
It's evening now..
I say..go put on your dancing shoes..I take you in my arms and we dance the night away..
Your day my day

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

People say pamper urself..
So Id say lets write poem abt urself..
The madness which is me..
the insanity which which is me....

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was a starry night ..
 Wid d moon so bright...
I held ur hand...
Those shy fingers ... The twinkling eyes and d warm glance and d slight sighs...and I  knew tat day would never come bac and so I held u .
..I held u tight..and u looked in my eyes and there was a story...a story untold abt a bird of flight who never flew

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I would keep her in a book, wouldnt that be apt. The book would have her eyes - the endless roaring sea's..the book would have her sounds - the chirping sparrows found...the book would have her love -- my soul wrapped in it hardbound.. sing book would have her memories - the songs I would sing out loud.. The book would have her madness - her laughter unbound.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May the 15th

All day long - there was this churning inside my stomach...nothing felt right ...

The undying..unquenchable thirst of your voice too, wasn't felt today..

And so it was a strange day, should such days not be striked off from the calendar - wipe the slate of their existence. I would look at him and say,

"you sir, you dont exist, please begone, be gone"

So the Christian calendar never has 15 th May..

But that's the first half..

I come to you in the evening and you do open the door...I try knocking everyday..sometimes the door opens, sometimes I'm left staring, star-less skies..

It did today.open.and behold the sunshine..I could even hear you behind that veil..

"Its me" I said.."the nerd"..    

"go away" she says I'm busy..

And I'm just happy, happy I heard her..

I leave, closing the door behind me.

Bang.

Ohh there's the thunder I hear each time she's around..the skies have already started celebrating her presence..water being sprinkled on those high trees..shrubs... The wind kicks in -- the birds are doped too coz they wouldn't end chirping - "he spoke to her ..yes, yes, he did" ...

The joy.

The churning in the stomach..oh god damn it..

Among all the celebrations..Mr.May 15 was standing ..behind a table..

"Sir" I called "yes you sir, listen to me - I was so naive to have asked you to go, you know how lovely people in craze are..or is it crazy people in love are..forget that." oh the stammer...

I'm carrying the calender..place him in the center.. May the 15th at the.centre.. She spoke to me.. May15th..

"Sir,  special"...

With may 15,
Hdk

The book... all that is and remains, random

Water..

Drown..

Empty

Town..

Smiling

Frown..

Powerless

Crown..

A gloomy

Clown..

A tree not

Brown..

No adjectives

Just noun..

As heaven

Falls down..

For a woman

Around ..

Everything surround..

Submerged thots, still aground.



------------------

Its getting warmer here J

I can no longer sleep with the fan switched off
altough it was windy all morning
but the summer is dawning with the warm afternoons and cloudless skies.

I had stepped out to fix the flat tyre of my bicycle..
its been giving me a lot of problems lately ..
perhaps i can never take care of things i like.

i had more than 10 rotis today for lunch at the cornerstore..
i am getting a li`l fat too

the cycle guy joked while trying to fix the tyre
that the back tyre can no longer bear my weight.

you would join him in pokin at my stomach wouldn`t you.

i gave him a grin - thinkin about u

I dreamt of you again this afternoon as i slept beneath the shade..
and when i came back home - i made an extra cup of tea - for you..

i was hoping you would come barging in the house..like u always do.. in my dreams..
so that extra cup..
you never came..

I filled it - in the pirate cup we bought at Essel world..
i was hoping we would talk..
about anything..
maybe we would talk about planning a trip to someplace..
talk about nietzche and his madness.
about you..
maybe remember something crazy we did - together then - alone now.

what would i not give to hear you now - right now.

I haven`t spoken to a soul today - i dont intend to - it doesn`t really matter.
But i wish i could talk to you - hear you sing your song.

Never mind.


------------------------------------------------------

Theres nothing more beautiful that my eyes want to see..
ur company helps me regain my awareness - as if from a distance there's a voice which says.. "come bac to ur senses"..

I end up coming back to you - my senses..
.......................................

 just wanted to hear you..

The watering that my garden needs lest it go dry,
those green leaves - turn yellow - brown - fall off,

lest wat was once a garden with playful children,
then a rusted monument..

the earth - so blue - stops spinning and time pauses..
yawns

The terrace -  I'm sitting and writing is waiting for you to step in -
in all your glory -
and then we would let the sun set,
the breeze would blow again... your fragrance..

They're all waiting.
As you barge in - time would flow ..
Tick tock tick.

My mind - would unclog - a beggar throned  - I would sleep well tonight..
Let those words flow,
for once ..


--------------------------------------------------------------

It's keeping the flame burnin...

Y m I fumblin...
Tumblin tumblin..

Missing stairs in my mumblin..
 I'm turnin n turnin..

Learning unlearnin..
As super N comes hurlin..
Taking packages ..
for my dear Merlin..

I has to b smilin..
And keep tat pilin..

Cute smilin..
crazy smilin..
The humpty smilin..
The Dumpty smilin..
No matter wat just keep it pilin..

Like a lazy violin..i
Ur Soothing smilin ..
Keeps dialin..
To my heart violent..

So please..dear i
keep smilin..
Keep it pilin..

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Free the mind..

From those webs.
Those ebbs..

The light..
 I see..
 is you..

I'm but ..
an observer..
The universe hopes
 on you..

Im bruised with that devil too..
Ur acquaintance though..
Has set me through..

On a path of happiness unbound..

So,
Lets walk..
away from the ground..
To the skies and the seas..

find the pod..
Of which we are peas..

Then maybe ..
We'll decide..

If mankind - needs saved..
Or burnt in their pride..

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Sleep...
Sleep.. lil dreamer..
Sleep..

U sounded so cute..
A little sparrow tut tut...

Whispering with sleep mulling..

A chirping cuckoo..
Coo coo..

O honey !!

How wonderful are u...
How very wonderful are u..
The woman's sound asleep...
Mighty eagle flying deep..

Kissing the sky..
Mighty mountains fall as heaps...
D dreamer I m ..
You're the dream

Hdk

----------------------------------------------------------------


Smile
Smile
Smile smile smyleees
Smile
Smile
Smile
Smile
Smile
Coz threre aren't no tears in heaven...

Dope
Coke aine
Dope
Meth ainne..
Dope..
Mariauaaannaaa
Dope
Hee roo inee..
Dope
Dope
Dope

Coz we're all high in heaven..

Love
Love
Love
Love
Love
Love

Coz there aint no hate in hate in heaven...

Oh plz smile.. Coz there aint no tears in heaven..

Hdk

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I remember the first time I touched u..
Softer than silk..
my senses brightened..
felt human...
a woman completes a man..
she is my yang..
I see her draped in silk..
whiter than god..
The wind flaps it around..
I'm her's now it cries aloud..
as it blows away..
I see her standing ablaze..
Her radiant body ..
churning the landscape..
The sun the moon the stars.. revolved around ..
 birds sang aloud..
garden of eden
touched ground
I see her standing..
on an ocean blue..
The  waves are sensuous ..
from her touch too..
As they rise and fall -
I see tempest unbound..
They seek her glow ..
Those Oceans hollow..
Beauty ain't in skin..
Beauty ain't your show..
It is d bright smile ..
The laughter..
The world around
gone slow..
I dont love you
Wat I love..
is ur mind.
the stares you give me..
D nights we didn't give a damn..
D first time I touched..

Hdk
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You,
Again.

Beautiful,
Bargain.

Thunderous,
Rain.

Enchanted,
Brain.

Lustful,
Terrain.

Speeding,
Train
.
Ecstasy,
Refrain
.
Your thots,
Nourishing Grain.

Your eyes,
your nain.

Hdk
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Writing in bed..

Ma eyes still red..
Blue blue blew blew...

I think of yew ..
Your face so dewyyy...
Ur hair so mew mewyy..

Your fragrant self..
Blumbybidy clumby delf.

You this coffee ...
This coffee you..

Hot and sizzling..
anew anew

As I pour you inn...
My body bin...

Is fresh as new...
New new..
New new..

So do u see ...
wat u did to me..
I'm still in bed..

Wheres my coffee ..
Oh wheres d bed..
 Brrubu brruu bu..
Brrubu brruu bu..
Hdk

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I hate goodbyes
The teary eyes..
The heavy heart..
The.cold throat and the worries that last...
The deep ..
The forgotten past
Of lost love and unfulfilled vows
Hdk

----------------------------------------------------------------------
She's fat as a rhino and
 nasty as a bull..

She moans like a hippo
wid nasty tummy full..

Silly as the white
donkey-monkey-mule..

Love doesn't work
will hate lift this blue..

All I ask is for my friend to reply once.. I ain't so bad ..I ain't so rue (nothing else rhymed)

Hdk

------------------------------------------------------------------------

With sun in her eyes and moon in her gaze..

The star lit voice ..d laughter amaze...

Her cloudy hair... Misty and daze..

I think of her d galaxial way..my madness my craze

Hdk

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let me take away this one last day...
 Let me try and recreate d spring day...
Let there b no regrets my love..
Let me try n bring back my lost love...
Let me not cry this one day...
Let me sing for u and make dis a good day..
Let me see u sparkle ..
in d sun..
let me hold ur hand
while  v r on d run...
Let me rip apart all dat i hate..
Let me just.rightfully make my claim..
Let me show d world i can b happy too...
Let me show u..u can happy too..
Let me unwind from all d messy weeds..
Let me fly and show d world my deeds..
Let me love u ..b u and show u all d right..let me clean all d dust from d night...
Let me n u try and live one day..like people in love who cry for one another each day...
Let me break apart all d silly boundaries..
let me show u .. How much i truly care.. Without u i cant b truly there...
Let show u how wat u say matters too..
Let me show u ..how we can win d world.. U n me could clean d blur...
Let me tell u how this will never stop...of how i cry each time u shut d shop..

Hdk
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

U said u'll call. .. . .

U
obviously
didn't.

I kept waiting for tat call
But u
Obviously
Didn't

This always happens
It
Always
Does

But i still fall for it
I
Always
Do

In sickness in pain..for d ring i await..

It
Never
Rings
Morning to noon to twilight to d next day n then thereafter..

It
Never
Rings..

This slowly translates
Into
An
Endless
Wait

I always fall
For
D hopeless
Bait

Then I called
As I
Always
Do
U answered and said
U said u'll call. ...

U
Never
Did ..

Hdk
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh god she looks so great..
There are 3 next to her draped..
Oh I see just u ..the purple woman bait..

The magic in your eyes..
Make them frosty -.these summer nights..

The cream pants down..
See me hurling all around..

Oh woman you are dope..
Your sweet ear lobe..

I'll eat it just out..
Running frantic all about..

Oh this nasty tea cup..
Filled whisky right up..

Oh god I'm so high..
I see her laughing ..oh my..

Oh my baby dont go..
Dont  let the world know just know..

That uve come around..
Or they'll just burn it all to ground..

To come see you..
The purple shirt the pants cream blew..

Hdk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

...and then the universe inside turned on its head..
The little thinking elves they all went chubby red..
The Santa was no longer grumpy..
Ohh u sadness - go take a dumpy.. (haha)
Did someone just turn on the light..
Na ..she just wished me Morning! - D morning bright..
Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------

I relate u to the colors..
The colors to you..
So wen the festival came,
I had to come see you..
To drench u ..wid a splurge of water..
To.color you my rainbow..
Your paintbrush.. Your slashes .. Your paintings...my first encounter with the understanding of colors..
Be it a cliche.. But you brought in colors to my life.. Your paintings made me see your world.. I fell in love wid ur paintings first
So if u dun wanna meet me.. Sit and paint something.. Paint your heart out..
I do that in my writing ..
You do in your paintings..
Even your afterglow inspires me to breathe and soak in the world..
And honestly you completed my picture..
You're the best
I hear u reply faintly : "you're the best to  "

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