The forever that people speak of is a curious little thing.
There is a long winding road lined with people and trees and people. Some wear top hats and some hold up their naked feet to check for bruises.
You and I are on this road. We don't have the same forevers. Mine is blue and scratched up from the constant rumination. Like an old cassette, the dear things that people wore out through trying summers.
Yours, you don't tell me about. I ask you if it's black and smooth, like the rocks from sea beds. Like the rock you got me from your trip to Greece and you held it up against the sun to show me how beautiful it was. I said, "it's a dark blue. Nothing is ever completely black." And then we kissed.
I asked you if it was green and neat but you said no and you'd never tell me because it's private and I said ok.
Our forevers are like children left loose at the beach. They run in crooked lines, drunk on the summer and their youth before it slips away. They fall and rise, they hold hands and then fight the second after, walking away in childish huffs. When the sun sets, they fall asleep next to each other, tired but with secret smiles playing on their lips.
You and I. And our forevers. So complicated. So many shades of the unknown. So much challenge, so much excitement.
You and I. I wouldn't expect any lesser.

Silence.
In the small spaces where the texts rang out and the parts of my day where I laughed to myself at something silly or sweet or poignant.

Last night I woke up to my phone buzzing, like the bird at the window that you sometimes imagine.  
There was nothing there, just static. I looked at it, turned it over for a bit in my hand and then fell asleep somewhere along the way.

The morning, my phone was still barren. No ideas crammed in winding messages and no late night missed calls that comfort you - because you know it's nice that someone remembered you once everyone had slept.

You must return. That's how it's supposed to be. 

Somewhere down the road, the trees block the path.

At such a place, people wonder for a bit and then walk away. They make quiet conversations that no one know of. They look confused. Their journeys are cut short.

I climbed that tree with you and we watched the world go by. We couldn't get past, but we created a little trip for ourselves.

I sat there, my arm wrapped around your neck and my eyes sparkling. That minute felt like a long while; one that I wanted to re-live over and over again.

The next time people complained of the road block, I turned away and smiled into the sun. 

I am putting out the lights.

The darkness smells of candle wax. In the borrowed light coming in through the window, I am writing my memories of you. Such that no one will ever see them later. Not even me.

I live under my blanket, I cringe under the weight of all those layers. The cold night air weighs down on me like leftover guilt.

I fall asleep at some point. I wake up to the street lamps dozing off against the pink sky.

You know how you find some cheesy post somewhere - maybe on a social networking site or on someone's status on chat and you think wow, what were they thinking?

Then you realize that there is that one fleeting moment later in your own life, perhaps rather brief, wherein you remember that cliche thing and feel that whether you like to admit it or not, you relate to it.

A lot of people find comfort knowing that their friends (or maybe significant others or family members) have their back. There is a narcissistic yet satisfying comfort in knowing that you are someone's top priority. Then you wake up one day and figure that you were wrong because given who we are and where we are today, everyone is too busy fighting their own battles to help you fight yours.

The cheesy post that I saw a long time ago was a picture of a kid wearing a Superman T-shirt. The caption under it read "Sometimes, you have to be your own hero."

There’s this compartment in my head. A black wooden box, if you will. That’s where I put all the things that go unsaid. All the things I want to say to people which I don’t.

Sometimes they are sweet things that I know will be misconstrued as cheesy. Sometimes they are mean things that I will later regret saying.

All the words melt into each other inside the box, like little parts of me that found no expression.
Sometimes I force myself to follow the 15 minute rule. 15 minutes is how long it takes for me to get over the momentary rage or hurt of something, atleast calm down long enough to not say vindictive things. That’s the time, the black box begins to burst at the seams with the intensity of all that gets flung into it.

The box sometimes gets a rest and the blog becomes another box; one outside of me where in broken, cryptic words I say the things I didn’t get myself to say out aloud.

There comes a proverbial point in all our lives, when we realize that there are some things that no one else will understand, no matter how close they may be.

At times like these, everyone needs a black box.

Just an altogether strange mood laced with jumping emotions about nearly everything. The fact that the world has a weekend coming up and we don’t, people, things, the end of the year –you know the usual stuff that gets you all weirded out when to be honest none of it is that difficult.

The weather is comfortable but a little bit gloomy and while some think of this as a good time to drink hot chocolate and giggle, it reminds me of the stuff that I don’t like or enjoy and then it gets me down. The people around me are being gleeful for no reason. I don’t blame them, it’s just that today I am batting for the other team.

There is a time when the things you have to do become enjoyable and you don’t mind them so much. I am waiting for that time, because well, it’s just far too tiring to go through the day doing things because that’s the only option.

It isn't really a special day, but it's a tiny bit noteworthy in the back of my brain where the tiny noteworthy things stay.

There were some cobbled streets that led to here and there were some blind turns.

It rained often enough and I did quite enjoy walking around, a lot faster that I usually do. I read a lot more than I would have and it doesn't really matter why. I jogged a lot more too. I grew up a little and stopped crying as much. I started revising my arguments in my head before I said them out aloud. I learnt, but not quite completely, about giving people space. I came to enjoy my own space. I realized that while I like meeting people, I like not having them around all the time. I watched a lot of shows and listened to respectable music. I came to laugh at myself, even if it was begrudgingly. I changed a little, here and there, and it wasn't unpleasant at all.

In this space and time, I found myself being happy, both together and alone.
After you cut the parts that you don't like and keep the parts that you do, if you're still happy, isn't that what really counts? 

All the confusion inside my heads spills out in ways that keep getting increasingly convoluted.

I see my energy wash away pretending to be that person –the one that laughs in the right places and says the right things.

My space keeps getting darker until my room is black again. I draw the curtains and the street lights peep in with just enough orange spots to make my head hurt.

In the room at night I find myself making endless lists of pros and cons. I find myself admitting things that I would never admit in the light and promise of a new day.

There’s this feeling wherein you know at the pit of your stomach that everything that you consider happy right now might unravel sooner than later. I try and hide from it, but in the darkness it finds me.

The dead bird

They brought down the broken bird from the shelf.

The wings were chipped in a few places. They blew at the wounds and chalky blood remains fell before them, in a fine layer. The eye of the bird was expressionless. Its head, the colour of cherries, glinted in the white lights of the room. It a had a gaping hole below the neck. You could look in it, into the dark space within.

“Who broke it?” The man asked. His face was sweaty and tired. No one answered. The children stood behind their mother. They looked at their feet and their sickly legs trembled.

The silence was broken by the uncracked voice of the little boy. “It died.” He said and thick tears formed at the sides of his eyes. His mother patted his head but that made him sob.

“Yes, yes it did. It’s never coming back now.” The father said, the anger in his voice was unmasked. He kept the bird on the table and walked away.

The kids buried their heads in their hands and cried, the guilt and bereavement wringing their insides with a tight grip.

There's a tangle of blue bodies. 

The colour chips off, papery and dry at first. It then flows, all smooth and graceful, into a pool at the bottom of the bed. There are thin sounds that echo through the room and then there is the sound of rain. Rain as blue as my body; rain as fierce as the guttural voices that escape.

In the end, it all dissolves and seeps. We are reduced to thick, lucid liquid that darts off the bed into the cracks in the wall. We are now one with everyone else, we are just like everyone else.

The gurgling of the affection now recedes. The space is now back to how it was, no knotted ink coloured arms and no runaway emotions. 

There was resignation in her step and in the quiet between her words. She hadn't given up, but she was on her way there.

Her enthusiasm died a quick death somewhere between two train stations. It just went away, like the small candle flame in homes with power. They took it apart to diagnose the cause and they came back holding the remains of her work in office. They, the mind doctors, held it out like it was a dead animal. Their faces were stony and the jaw of one of the doctors quivered with holding back all the words that he wanted to say. She looked at her feet. It was her fault, they said.

They told her the treatment was expensive and tough. She thought it over while jogging along the sea. Her will to give up was the strongest when it tried to combat wet sand. In her torn thoughts of what she wanted to do with her situation, she forgot that she was tired. When she looked back, she had come a long way. That, right there, in a spark of victory she realized that while it wasn't ideal, she knew she'd fix it.

In the sand caked walk back to the start, she built back, step by step, the energy that they claimed had passed away. 

The children look tiny, like ants in a sugar heap, from where I am standing. They appear to be faltering from what I imagine is the weight of their school bags. The children begin to walk away, behind trees and buildings.

The sky is darkening above them, and me. It might rain; a humid October shower that displeases more than it relieves.

I am still at work, inside a cold building where the coffee is foul. My fingers are icy and numb. It’s like being in a different country. My fingers are punching away at the keyboard, hoping to find some strange comfort from the warmth. The work keeps getting complicated and long winded.

It’s difficult to tell after a point what exactly it is that I am feeling. I have ruled out the obvious –hunger and sleep. The subtle ones aren’t quite sticking either, no stress or depression or disease.

It’s a negative feeling. Like how you feel when you look out of the window and the children have disappeared and the animals have slept and all you see is darkness; bottomless and thick.

There is static on the telephone. All the words that we didn’t say are crackling while we breathe on either side. Our stories, both from our days and from elsewhere, unfold while we stand far away from each other tapping our feet against the damp floor.

There is an urgency to narrate the small details – the curly tail of a stray and the sinking feeling at the end of a long meeting. My thoughts tumble out, rushing through a small chute like rainwater. You are making hums of acknowledgment on the other side. You tell me a few tales; ones that I lap up hungrily, so as to miss anything.

Eventually, it’s all been said. There’s the silence that creeps into most things. The silence that is both comforting and terrifying at the same time.

The phone makes a few more sounds; faraway traffic and bubbling pops. The connections threatens to die on us and we hang up. My face stretches into a small smile; even though the conversation has been commonplace.

Run; fast and far.

They escaped in the dark of the night. They fled, leaving behind a dysfunctional marriage and unpaid bills.

She took a cab and eventually found herself walking through scores of people. Everyone looked at her, everyone smiled. They said, “You have such lovely hair.” Or “Oh I love your dimples” One of the men in a grey blazer took her by the crook of her arm and led her to a table facing the sea. He asked her if she liked wine and when she said yes, he stood up and poured her a glass; looking her in the eye the entire time. The rest of the night was a blur; she vaguely remembered bubbling with stories. He sat opposite, his chin propped on his palm, drinking in every word that left her mouth. He told her she was beautiful and she believed him.

He walked away into a quiet space under a tree and sat next to a couple of guys who were smoking. They offered him a cigarette and he accepted it, making rings of gratitude in the air. When he put it out, he felt strange. He felt drowsy and surreal. The guys around him were talking about a TV show and he found himself chipping in with his light-hearted opinions. They spoke for a long time, hours perhaps, without stopping to exchange names even. He remembered being rather thankful for the non-intrusive conversation. He enjoyed the span of time where he chose to speak and wasn’t forced into it.

The next day, they turned over on their sides and looked at each other through gummy morning eyes. He told her she was beautiful, but mentally shut his eyes tight as though in pain. She smiled and patted his cheek, but deep inside she knew he didn’t mean it.