Quoting nothingness In his eyes I find myself craving I look at him and I say I beg you to love me Maybe tomorrow doesn’t exist Maybe we get lost in our little world of sadness I lay here Next to you Your back turned towards me I count the moles The freckles The lines I’m trying to remember I’m trying to remember you Your chest rises with every breath And with every breath I sink The night feels long The blanket is cold An inch apart. We’re just an inch apart Yet Here you are Yet Here I am I take your arm Entwine my fingers I whisper, “You are mine.” And you, You’re lost in a fantasy A dream maybe Where I cease to exist. You seem peaceful, I seem greedy. Maybe I should go? But this was home You were my home. …I’m stranded. I try to remember your face Like patterns? Did I engrave myself onto you? Indent, charr? Anything? You’ll wake up Wash me off of you And I’ll lay here Thinking, Was I that easy to forget?
SLING SHOT: Let’s say we loved each other! Ojaswini Trivedi
Barbed chains
I don’t feel me when I’m with you For someone who swayed to your heart beat Stumbled upon the dancing shoes of our lives I don’t feel me anymore like the time when we were true. Like the two loyal birds living in a cage It was real? Right? Even if it was forced We learnt to grow, didn’t we? Even if you were my oxygen & I your only life jacket The last thread the lost hope The only chance at survival But let’s say we loved each other. Let’s believe the two birds lived in a seamless crave for freedom, where the abyss melted into the horizon. Shouldn’t you bring me closer to me, me to me, me to you, you to me? Then how are we here Resentful. Angry. When the thought of leaving you is like breathing in the first gasp of air Like every step away from you, Is one step closer to bliss.
The stranger across my mirror- Have we met? | Ojaswini Trivedi
Colour to colour.
Have you ever felt like you’re walking back into the same pattern.
Falling back into your ex- lover’s arms, the magical appearance of the slender bodied cigarette tangled up perfectly between your fingers after you’d promised yourself the 23rd ‘last time’ or driving without a destination in mind but gradually finding yourself at the corner of that house or person you left years ago.
Or just for a second, answer this-Have you ever broken up with someone thinking that it’s for your own good? And specifically in all unlikelihood, not just stepping away from a toxic, gruelling, narcissistic relationship but a truly genuine one. The comfortable one. Maybe the “too comfortable” one.
You find yourself in a coffee shop.
Wearing your favourite yet only saved for special occasions shirt, the top button unbuttoned. A dash of pink across the cheeks and a tinge of nude on your lips, ordering his exclusive coffee.
Black, no cream, three cubes.
You want him to be happy.
At the sight of you, he truly is, happy. His hands have blots and patches of acrylic, the side of his hands are painted maroon. The colour of my top.
As you sit across him, delving deep into his fancy brown eyes. You keep wondering.
Are you happy for him? Or are you happy with him?
You tell him you can’t do this anymore. You want out .
He’s taken aback at the abruptness of it, but seemingly calm about the words spoken.
The words that poured like sullen wine from your lips.
Distasteful and needy.
The decision that took months of reflecting, internalizing. You can’t pin point a problem, if there was, he would solve it. But you decide to act on this decision. Maybe some things just don’t fit.
Only after the failed futile attempts you realise, there’s never really a good time to part ways.
No perfect day, no perfect occasion. Well, no perfect temperament.
Not for you, neither for him.
Yet, you are sitting at an arm’s length. Probably breathing the eye-gouging regret already.
You tell him.
Blatant. Honest. Guilty.
And then, as the course of time plays, you come to realise that that uncomfortable space, you inflicted on yourself needs to be filled with friends or alcohol or painting classes or gym or girlfriends night out or self help books or romantic movies or just plain loveless sex.
Eventually you succumb to the superficiality of it.
And so, you crave for that comfortable safe space. The eager familiarity. The known face in the crowd. The one who could protect you when you were lost.
Which brings us to the next part.
When the other person fulfils your need, is it safe to call it love?
What happens when the needs are met?
What happens when the needs are not met?
Is it still safe to call it love?
Wait. So are we just using each other? For happiness, money, safety, freedom, security, sex, comfort, loneliness, satisfaction, hunger, redemption?
What if we started loving keeping ourselves out of the equation. What if we just loved with complete detachment.
True love is when their closeness is liberating and not suffocating, when their leaving is tormenting and not relieving.
The patterns evoke, of how you treat them, what you feel and most importantly, how you treat yourself.
The continuous falling back into the comfort, the familiar sensation, the treaded path we walked for weeks together. We feel the urgency to crawl back into that. Our memory cells aching to sprint through those lanes, actions and people. Again.
The uncertainty is unsettling.
For people who repeatedly, nonchalantly say “Love yourself!”
Let me tell you, for those who are listening.
It’s the hardest thing to do.
Worse than the weekly-Sudoku and Mumbai’s traffic post rains. It beats the tragic hangover or even ramming your new car into a tree.
Loving yourself is the hardest thing to do.
Have you ever found yourself sitting in the car as the rain comes crashing on the glass shield. The sound of it, a melancholic tease, the rhythm in the familiarity of life falling apart.
We empathize with pain.
We empathize with our pain and are envious of our happiness. Almost as if it’s a time bound gig of your favourite artist.
But pain. So easy to hold on and so bloody hard to let go.
Trying to like yourself is like telling yourself it’s okay to screw up. It’s okay to feel lonely and sad.
It’s okay if you don’t fit into that dress.
It’s okay for you to walk away.
It’s okay to let go when they expect you to hold on.
It’s okay if you feel differently at the different time due to a different reason for a different person.
IT IS OKAY!
Trying to like yourself is like breaking that pattern.
You detach little by little. You get uncomfortable little by little.
You break yourself apart..slowly.
Giving up cigarettes is like telling that psychosomatic slavery “ENOUGH!”
Revelling in the comfort of ‘too comfortable’, knowing it is stagnating your growth. Break apart.
Tell your toxic ex-lover that you wish him well. That you deserve better!
Buy that goddamn dress!
CPR yourself..
A friend once said, soulmates exist. There’s Yin And Yang in each one of us. The masculine and the feminine energy. And they, are each others soulmates. We are not incomplete. Our partners are not our ‘Better halves’. He/She cannot complete you.
Only you have that consent.
It’s you. Whole. Complete. Fulfilled.
So why the desperate search for completeness and fulfilment from the ones we meet.
Or falling back to the apparent safe haven that is need based, desperate. Animalistic.
The taste of freedom when love is glorious, away from your attached heart.
The demands, the expectations.
The role-play of right’s and wrong’s. Good and bad. Would’ves and Shoud’ves.
It wouldn’t matter.
The pattern will break. We can break it.
Deconstruct. Dissolve.
Only thing vicious in this scenario would be your sole, selfish bliss.
Aren’t we all just craving to be happy?
Honey,
Be your own Superhero.
Erebus and I / Ojaswini Trivedi
Night Sky
Who saves us? What protects us? Or are we just living our lives with the illusion of being protected. Of being saved.
Hurt is the chalice of nothingness, writhing through the voiceless screams. The mind crawled up in a desperate embrace, bleeding, shivering, hangs itself from the ceiling.
With nothing to hold on, with everything to let go. What is the truth? What is right? Who decides what our conscience speaks? Who lives through, who survives the maelstrom of starlit sighs.
I remember that night, alone, terrifyingly-complete. The lights turned down and the darkness eager to consume me. For a first, it didn’t charge at my insecurities with vengeance but tip toed with a docile ambiguity that allowed me to accept it with arms wide open. Night was kind to me. Maybe the moon was watching.
The background rhythm played in sync with my closing ventricles, expanding lungs and perhaps possessed arms. The sanctity of its beauty transcended into every cell, each tissue. Unbiased with the form or function.
Only one song played that night.
“Bottom of the Deep Blue sea” by MISSIO. The song. Ironical? I know.
My feet ached, and I swayed endlessly. Almost as if the night was my guide, the security man outside my window. Convincing me that Pain and Anguish would have to cross the seven seas, climb the tallest peaks, jump across the chasms, speak the strangest of languages to reach me.
I was safe.
As if maybe for the first time, being numb was equivalent to being happy. Maybe sometimes feeling everything is like feeling nothing at all. Like a snake swallowing its tongue. Or a snowball exploding against a Pine tree.
Au contraire, I never felt more alive. Like the first breath of air after plunging out of the water. Gasping, lungful of the escaped nuances- All gushing back into the realms of my truth.
The soothing audacity of hurt comes in unabashed like the lust for love. It’s heavy. It’s bored. It’s engraving.
Dancing barefoot on the wooden floor, with nothing but a mirror around me. It broke my heart in a different way. It crumpled my soul in an unfittingly. I felt distorted, perfectly.
All of a sudden in those frail moments everything I did and didn’t do made sense to me. Almost as if a gospel truth unravelled beneath the sheaths of my eye lids, trotting through my veins, into the earth.
With every move, my heart imploded, it succumbed to the bliss, the night had to offer.
Is that what love looks like? Oh the shear godliness of it.
Somewhere through my illicit affair with the night, as I laid on the floor, breathing the earth, staring into the sky across the translucent concrete above me.
My toes crinkled.
The desire and occurrence of complete degradation followed by the innocent upheaval of honesty, lastly toppled with the cool embrace of bliss.
I gasped.
Maybe, this felt like love, after all.
The Forbidden Fruit of today: CLOSURE / Ojaswini Trivedi
The eternal jigsaw.
There’s nothing in this world even remotely close to what most may call – closure.
We spend years and years trying to find answers to the half spoken sentences and mid-air collapsed promises. The night teases us to insomnia, trying to replay the tape of those incidents, moments, gestures. What could have been, what should have been. Were we real then? or are we real now? We rage and grill ourselves. We hate and condemn ourselves. Toss and turn with that withering anxiety of the unknown . What did I do? What had I done? The uncertainty of the consequences we, at this point are not ready to either accept or let go of. The actions, that are followed by the tell-tale signs of how bleak or bright the future may be. And this struggle gets more and more aggressive with time, when one incident after the other forces you to believe that the problem lies with you.
When after each altercation with yourself, you find yourself bleeding and pleading for comfort. For faith, for acceptance.
Seeking that solace in the pauses, the unsent messages, the U-turns, the walk-aways, whiskeys and cigarettes, drugs and women, people and their optimism.
You nurture that thought. Save it. Protect it. Grow it. Embellish it. WORSHIP IT.
Till it consumes you to the very core and leaves you anticipating the sinful life you’ve led consisting of “clueless grievances” you’ve given to people. The open ended commitments you made, the forsaken narratives you played to ease your broken heart that is out there to seek vengeance and thrive on hate and is desperate for blood.
My darling.
For how long, do you intend to walk barefoot, with cracked heels and lips. Your aching eyes, tired, seamless, need to close. You need to rest. You need to breathe.
Breathe.
That road will never end. Like a mirage that follows, it’s an abyss staring into the sky.
Closure is a myth. You keep running and running only to find that you’ve been chasing a balloon at the edge of a cliff.
The anxiety stems from the thrill of damage you’ve caused to yourself in the process and the reckless continuation of the same in the yearning for solid, concrete answers. There aren’t any answers. Since there were no questions asked.
Since our hearts never lied.
We always knew.
You. Always. Knew. There is no confrontation, as we stood against each other.
We think we deserve to know the truth.
We’ll never know it. And that truth is clenching the thread of the balloon in your fingers and standing at a safe pedestal. That, my dear. Is the time to forgive yourself. To truthfully hold yourself together and forgive yourself.
We’re not running anyone’s races. Not living anybody else’s life. People aren’t answerable to us. We aren’t entitled to them. Closure is not a peaceful abomination of your relationship with them. It’s the last gravel thrown in the grave..by YOU. YOU are your closure. All this while we’ve been chasing the invisible, trying to conquer the unknown, measuring the abyss, justifying the inexistent.
