Questions that must be asked

How long could you sit naked before you felt naked?
After your nipples have hardened from the cold,
and your ankle is snagged on a rusty nail.
Or was it the ringing of the telephone that exposed you?

How far would I go. How long would you stalk her
(the trail of your hatred scattered like confetti)
Shivering shuddering nauseous
You can't have forgotten that the winter is really here.

When does the ghost of a tee shirt leave you?
How do you make it stay?

I lost your musk to mothballs and rat droppings.

The bottom of my cupboard is now well ordered

Clinically clean and empty.

Most importantly, though:
Where would you hide from the cookie monster?

Stay under.

Surfacing at a hundred miles an hour? Cold chills because you are so ugly and so contrived: most of all because you are me.

(It's a simple story. An eerie sense of deja-vu sets in after my crocodile tears have dried on my face. Blubbering through my shivratri madness I squeal like a skewered pig: it's me I'm telling you it's me- so ugly and so ugly.)

A rat almost runs into me, I squeal and jump onto the sidewalk, coming home coming home, and yet I'm not home, not yet . Why is the city so blank? It might be the full moon, the cloudy sky. I look for the clear, blank desert sky. (But why is it so tough to love in the desert?) I'm eternally dwarfed by the giants of yesterday- and there are so many, so varied in their horrifying perfection. The many headed Loch Ness monster surfaced, and I fed it my sword.

Yes.

Glorious self indulgent mellon-collies, and little brown love-sparrows.

I want a thousand words, not this dusty picture.

He leaned over to push a strand of hair behind her ear, looking straight into her eyes.
You look exactly like your mother.
It’s very scary

He stopped to look at the only picture she had on her table.
Is that you?
No it’s my mother
You look exactly like your mother. Except you have prettier eyes.

She squirmed uncomfortably. It was preposterous that an (apparently) self-evident facsimile could be different; “better” was plain sacrilegious. She shrugged impatiently at this obvious attempt to gain her favour, pushing him away.

The further she ran away, the eerier the resemblance became. A woman she’d never seen in her life stopped her in the driveway of the house she’d taken to taking refuge in.

“I know your mother!”
(And you look exactly like your mother)
She smiled exactly like how she was expected to smile, and backed away.

“I dreamt about you last night. I lived inside your body, and crawled in through your vagina. You didn’t seem to do much at all really. Lay around on your back the whole day. And when the day was over you’d spread your legs for me and I’d crawl into your warm insides to sleep.”
“I was so happy.”

Two weeks after she was born her mother’s body replaced her with a disease, and she was denied the diseased milk from her mother’s jaundiced breasts. So she grew without ever knowing the taste of her mother, without that comforting relic of the nine months spent on the inside. Her mother made up for this distance by never letting her go, so while the smell of her mother never left her, the smell was never actualized with a taste of her milk.

A tape rewinding endlessly, and replaying endlessly: the more she’d run away from that strangulating umbilical cord, the more she’d subconsciously crave the warmth of the womb. And her platonic-other-half would dutifully reflect this deepest craving; circling his body protectively around the foetal ball her body curled into when she slept. His mind inflamed with the desire to be part of her, to share her bloodstream and breathe through her nostrils. And the closer he drew her to himself the more he was aware of the chasm between skins: nothing but pure physical proximity can illustrate the alienating mechanisms of another.

For her this gamut of emotions was meaningless, all reducible to wanton want. She spent hours naked in front of her mirror, staring first at her reflection and then down at herself, unable to reconcile the two images. Her eyes called out to her: she was reminded of a face buried in the mud, the eyes calling out in mute horror and desperate resignation. Her water bills ran higher and higher as she stood in the shower for hours on end, trying to wash away her skin, always looking for the source of her dull eyes.

A long overdue explanation:

I don't spiral, it's the inertia pulling you (me) down.

A cold bath in the winter.

A fiery Sunday: with cold sweat that trickles down your back when you stop running.

A lonely day, hair bouncing on my shoulders: the music loud enough for me not to be really listening to it. Whenever I come around you seem to be busy… what are you doing today? The water sparkles in your hair; you shake your head and little droplets land on my face, my throat and ears. Won’t you look at me?

Okay we’ll sit in your garden. Put our feet on the moist grass. Sit under the neem tree, cross legged, far from the nirvana we should be looking for.

It’s always you and me and no one else.

What is this orbit we’ve carved out for ourselves?

Who are you, who am I today? What is this horrifyingly banal banter we’re filling our spaces with?

--x--

My convex stomach fits perfectly into your concavity

--x--

The red flowers of spring are faded and too far.

Must you leave?

--x--

A cold bath in the winter
Steels your nerves
Helped me get over losing my mother

Isn’t it also good for your skin?

a teary eyed confession.

“she was hanged ‘til blood poured from her nose and ears”

And she couldn’t get this image out of her head. On the metro, exulting in her anonymity she closed her eyes trying to picture two four red rivers emanating from her head: two down the side of her face and two cutting through the middle.

Blood for her was her only companion, her ideal companion. Enigmatic and silent, never stopping, ever present. Indispensable.

People think she’s crazy, think she talks to herself in public, but she’s only continuing connections with the only other entity in the cosmos that she can rely on.

A hazy nightclub- all the people she thought she knew swayed in concentric circles, just avoiding her orbit.

Stood next to the bar, she could almost see the pink wristbands that excluded her so perfectly.
All her life she lived with a fear of being excluded. And so she’d refuse to follow, fearing the ultimate exclusion that she knew was coming

She buried her nose in her drink
Why were liquids were so much more real than people?

All she was looking for was the consistently inconsistent

Surrounded by outlines that grew hazier and hazier her eyes started to well up

She tried to blink them away
It didn’t work.

And so, as tears streamed down her face her mind was absolutely calm.
Behind hiccoughs and frenzied entreaties to be dropped home she viewed the world dispassionately, hovering over the throngs of people, taking in the atmosphere and revelling in every sense experience: smells and colours, smoke that swayed with the music

In the car ride home all could do was shake her head persistently
No I’m not sad

Walking into her kitchen she knew what had to be done

How long can you ignore your pulse throbbing?

Knives don’t work, a broken bangle will do, always does

(Spill your blood to stop the tears)

She smiled understandingly; she understood her need to disguise the mundanely necessary as a dramatic Event; to view this as the Opus of her lifetime, if you must.

No, the sea is not real.

She listened quietly, eyes fixed on the watery floor. She let the stream of words wash over her, listening instead for pauses and nodding appropriately. A cold wind was blowing; little colonies of goose bumps erupted all over her bare chest and arms like soldiers standing to attention. Bobbing up and down in the water she swished her tail around unconsciously, feeling the water bubble and ripples down her scales. She swallowed; breathing in the air was tough on her weak lungs. Her fingers were crusted over with blood, but she didn’t dip them in the water to wash them out. Instead she held them out in front of her, silhouetted against the darkening sky.

The pain is always the easiest part. When you are grappling with a dizzying abyss inside, the comforting throb of your nerves screaming is the only thing that binds you to your body; the only handle to hold onto as you fight the antigravity sucking you further and further away.

She watched dispassionately; lights, colours and sounds all floating past her narrowed eyes. The silver flash of metal; the slow, deliberate shredding of her scales. Under her tongue was the shreebroot she was supposed to swallow to numb the pain, but she left it in her mouth, drawing sustenance from its solidity. Her face was deathly pale and she bit onto a piece of driftwood to keep from passing out. But he knew what he was doing, and the seemingly random strokes were fanning out in a pre-determined pattern. The chunks of her lifeless tail were thrown into a bin behind him, and she stared harder at those than at the sickly pinkish-white extensions that were slowly being uncovered.

Then he was done, and she tore her eyes away from the pool of black liquid chunks of her were floating in and looked down. They erupted from her waist, with a black triangle pushing them outwards. Ending with a flattened hard bit, with ten smaller extensions. The ends of every extension was covered with a dull, transparent substance.

“Three nights under the August moon should be fine."

She nodded, nodded and nodded again. Listened till the last splash was barely audible. When she was sure she was alone, she uncovered the most sacred part of her body.

Closed her eyes.

And showed the moon her eyelids.