Take Me to Sleep

You live with your heart,
Your brain is a fucked up place.
You think too much.
Don’t do this
Don’t do that.
Maybe just try living.
You expect too much.
You’re enough.
You don’t have to achieve in order to be worthy.
You think too much.
You do too much.
You laze around a lot.
You are not fucked up.
You create fuck ups.
You don’t have to do this.
You’re not supposed to do that.
Just breathe
Just live
Just smile
Just laugh.
Don’t stress.
Don’t cry.
It’s okay to cry if you get fine
Don’t cry, my child.
You’re loved.
Why do you make the people around you prove that they love you?
You love too much.
Don’t do that. People will break you.
They suck your energy. You let me get away. Don’t do that.
You think too much.
You’re special.
Dream big.
Life isn’t a dream.
Reality sucks. It doesn’t operate like those in books and movies.
You dream too much.
Dream but dream as per practical standards of dreaming.
You think too much.
Live life as it comes.
Don’t stress.
Don’t cry.
Don’t fight.
Just exist.
Just be.
Just smile.
Just love.
Just live.

*STOP*

I am dying. I die every time I know I have fucked up but can’t make it right.
I die every time I cannot do things they are supposed to be done.
I die every time I don’t rise up to the expectations of the people around me.
I die every time my loved ones are disappointed in me.
I die every time I fail.
I die every time someone leaves.
I die every time I love the wrong person and take ages to move on.
I die every time I do not achieve my target and fulfill the needs of my people.
I die every time someone feels bad because of me.
I die every time I have anxiety. I die every time my brain becomes my own enemy. I die every time my heart and head fight to the point where my body gives up.
I die every day. I die every time. 

Your pieces of advice and words and care are all correct and provide reassurance but years of being an achievement addict, an addict to seeking approval in order to feel worthy, an addict to make things right even when everything is crumbling, an addict to the idea of not needing anyone and just being there for the people sometimes makes me cry and my head hurts and I die with pain and in pain wishing for death Everytime I cannot say I am fine or I will be fine.

Take me to sleep. I don’t want to wake up.

Honeymoon For Home

I wake up with a smile on my face when the sun is about to rise and the sky has hues of blue and violet like the color of your shirt reflecting on the Marine drive of Bombay.

The clouds sing songs while they pour today while our hearts sing songs of love.

As the morning cup of tea touches my lips, I am reminded of the warmth of your touch while you held my hand while walking to the lake.

My bosom feels the compassion of love overflowing.

I am on my honeymoon.

I can’t expect too much from you. You can’t be my best friend, my lover and my wildest fantasy all at once.

Stories of lust speak to me on a soul level. In one complicated emotion.

But darling, you have been all of them at different points in time. And time my friend is relative and it is always borrowed.

Present is the only gift we have and you are my borrowed love from the universe.

We don’t talk routine anymore because of the warmth and heat we both radiate with our hotness and are to be blamed for Global Warming.

We are two misfits trying to love when life is busy.

Love in my very strong opinion is a personal thing and more than about us, it’s about our own selves and how we evolved together.

But as there cannot be a day without the night, we wouldn’t be who we are without the universe of us which we have created.

We are like two birds on a honeymoon reaching out to each other with our passions at it’s peak.

It’s the fireworks and explosions of our love that we both seek.

My neckline feels the traces of your fingers running over and there are temple domes rising on my skin.

I feel your hands pulling my waist while I make coffee in the kitchen.

I experience your presence while you are no where near me.

You are my home and I am on my honeymoon at a place longing for home.

While the home never existed at all.

Photograph by Neha Thureja

Apocalypse

When I close my eyes, I feel the touch of your fingers on my lashes.

There is a scent of wet mud and hot sun in my room.

I have no room.

The feeling of your touch goes away as soon as it came as if it never was there and then, right in the centre of my chest a little towards the left, I feel a void that marks it’s existence every now and then.

I lose my sleep over the replayed flashes.

I have neither roll nor camera.

You come to me in the silence of the dark when sleep sits peacefully in my eyes.

You conquer. I am no longer myself.

Your being overpowers my existence and I become like a torn leaf in a storm that you bring and I go wherever you take me.

I have no where to go. You leave.

I dance to the full moon and sing to the sun rise and shine brightly like a fresh flower in the morning making everything around me romantic and exquisite.

One fainting breeze of you.

Spring of life becomes an apocalypse.

Dear one

Dear one,

Do you see the sun falling behind the dark clouds by the side of the sea?
I feel the warmth sun radiates from being behind like you steal a moment to kiss me on my shoulder and when I turn around to hold your hand, you are not there but your presence leaves it’s essence.

Dear one,

Do you see the moon shining bright tonight? The stars are all being lazy and hiding behind the darkness of the sky like you whose first love is darkness and lust is my presence. But you know that love always overpowers and you leave traces of your fingers on my nape while you submerge yourself in the darkness of your demons.

Dear one,

You know you are my drug and yet you fail me each time. And I, no longer rely on you for fleeting alive moments. I would rather be a monotonous muse.

Fine Wine

I painted my imagination with you in mind,
Unfortunately, it was all black.

Cloud of thoughts that floats over the canvas has colors of us which merge to a rainbow.
Black was not your imagination, it was the sky of shackles keeping us apart.

The colours were long lost when you said ‘school is over’, each day, we now fight a battle of our own which ends in either white or black.

O my friend, how do I keep you?
You are young, wild and free,
Reach out and achieve the fame,
For souls like you can’t be tamed.

Why any of us has to be tamed?
Why do we need fame?
I am just floating with the wind of the universe
Sitting with you writing a verse.
Darling, let the wind paint the colors on the canvas of our lives,
The blacks and the whites are just feathers of time.
Love like ours is eternal.
Imagination is like fine wine.

Note: The piece where I am the muse and my muse is my co-author. This is not a poem. This is a WhatsApp conversation.

An almost all this while

We are a generation of almosts,

We almost achieved what we dreamt of,

We almost dated the one we loved,

We almost made it through.

We are a bunch of people who abandon things at the last leg.

We are the people who seek Independence while being co-dependent.

We are the people who love but don’t hold on to it.

We are the ones who believe that there is always a second chance.

We leave things in the hope of them coming around.

We are not alive. We are neither dead.

We are an almost all the while.

We are almost dead while being almost alive.

And my weapon.

It was raining when you looked me in the eye. Your presence makes me feel the best and the worst about myself. You are beautiful in peculiar ways. You are not handsome. You are not good looking either. You are just you who makes me feel things that I can’t really comprehend. I have loved you and I continue you to love you so much. But we are not meant to be, can you see it? I have been seeing it for the longest time and there is terrible looking thing called hope in between us binding us through invisible threads of time. But I see them breaking, one atom at a time. It is scary so as to how much I want to feel your heart thump against my ear and how much I want to choke you with my hands and let go of your love.
Whenever I said that you have hurt me, all you said was that it was just a bit of love. Darling does love hurts? I have been told that only allowing you in the walls of the temple will hurt and there’ll be river of red flowing but there are oceans of saline water creating waves while the heart bleeds nothing but love.

The ones who love us really know how to hurt us.

We are closer than ever yet so far apart.
I am lost in this Galaxy, don’t try to find me. I will be the star burning so bright that the light will be the cause of the death. Darkness is my prey.

And love, my weapon.

Universe is musical

Universe is musical. Nights are calm and beautiful with music pouring in the silence where the silence is silent with notes of music playing around as if they are hugging. As the sun sets and the moon arrives shining bright radiating poetry. The universe is musical with stardust pouring from heaven when the bird coos early in the morning on a winter when the sun is about to rise. The trees sing songs of a home in a whisper which you listen when the heart and the mind are not separate but one in a moment. The wind speaks to me while it kisses the folds of my hair, making love to my eyes making them close with the anticipation of beautiful dreams in reality. The universe is musical when the music of the heart syncs with the musical silence of my room where the dream catcher reminds me of discovery of the music of the heart which was all within me. Universe is a personal concept making love with life in the silence of music where the silence silences.

Sing because life is all about feeling the notes of love floating. :’)

Fairy Tales

There she was, sitting by the window

Listening to the fairy tales her mother told her.

She would watch the birds and become one of them.

There she was, listening to Harry Potter and pictured herself as Ginny falling for Harry at the age of 12.

There she was, watching Disney princess movies

She thought of herself as the princess.

Her dad made her the princess in real life.

There she was, being Hermoine in her 12th. She became one for real.

There she was, being Mitchie from Camp Rock in her graduation. She became one. “This is me” became her favorite song.

There she was, falling for a guy and getting her heart broken. She turned to Geet from Jab We Met.

She is her own favorite person. A broken heart makes her smile even more.

There she was, growing up, becoming a woman,

She became a warrior princess instead. She fought her battles. Won some. Lost some. She remained the princess nonetheless.

She again fell in love and created a fairy tale.

She pictured her favorite love story with the guy she loved.

She sees the reality. Knows fairy tales don’t really exist. Yet she lives in one.

Her life has always been a fairy tale even when it was not.

She is a fairy tale.

She is her own fairy. She has a world of her own.

Who says fairy tales aren’t real? They are.

For her.

All she did was to dream one.

Our love is wrong timing.

Neha: Darling,

You’re the sunlight in the North Pole 

That doesn’t exist half of the time.

You’re the wind that blows on the cold chilly nights.

Darling, you were never mine.
My heart belongs to warmth and bright days,

You are too dark for me.

I shouldn’t be the one you should chase.
Love for me is transient and permanent at the same time.

You are too lost to know that,

Let’s not waste time

Karan: And all this while,

I thought our love was like wine. 

Tasting better with each passing year,

With each year worth a lifetime.

Neha: You say it’s wine,

It just kept on getting sour with time.

Warmth, love, and care were just layers beneath the frost of our hearts.

The sun is never enough in poles.

Karan: I chose to live with it, 

While you chose to leave. 

You continue to live,

While I die daily!

Neha: It’s all a matter of time,

You’ll learn to live after you’ve died.

I died a long time ago.

This time, I don’t even exist.

It’s my soul fighting for life and for sunshine.

Our love is nothing but wrong timing.