I want slow mornings, where I wake up to calm. Where i can fake the turmoil of my existential anomaly as peace of the highest grade.

Where its not so loud that I tear up, in shock and in attitude.

Its soft rays filtering through my baby blue mesh curtains, dappling across my back as arrays of hope in the most iridescent calligraphy that I would later try and recreate.

Its so silent that I can hear my thoughts and I want to hear them.

Hear the unfiltered unfortunates, forgive the unforgettable unforgivings. Thoughts that both choke me and tilt my chin up to face myself, as a muse as a devastating reality. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

My eyes shine in those moments of cacophony as I sit in cahoots with the rays of dawn as well as my own awareness of space and time. Those moments I don't seem to mind my hair flowing into my eyes as if to understand the gloss in them, they don't. They can't.

Nobody can.

I won't let them.

I don't let them.

Then some mornings the discordant noise is already there but its welcoming as droplets of all of my grief on the panes of my window, the fragility of glass rattles under the unbridled monstrosity of the water that has traveled through the space time continuum to reach me and sit with me when I am too far gone to understand the pluralism of my own mind. So it drowns out every single one of them thoughts, I am both thankful and aghast.

Frenimies. They call it.

Friends,

And,

Enemies.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

The world is not divided between good or evil. It's between guilt and innocence. In another universe, I'd know what to say to you but right now I just apologize for not being enough.

I have only ever been fluent in apologies but now they seem like just words in my periphery and not something I truly mean or feel. But true love is always the first of all things, no matter the innumerable repetitions in its forgotten language, because it makes you anew from the sheath of your bones to the tips of your toes. You're rebranded, you are novelty.

It haunts you like a prophecy.

Now I wonder what should I say sorry for, that I wanted to braid our bones together so much that I didn't notice how I bruised your skin under my palm of aggressive indecisiveness?

I live in constant fear that you will one day see me for who I am, look at me like I am a monster and I'll beg you on my knees with my hands folded at the elbow to forgive my sin wrapped up in the flesh that you have blessed with your sacred touches.

Sometimes love doesn't have an ending or a finish line, it just gets quieter over time. The need to say sorry is vigorously clawing at the back of my throat.

Someday, in some form of our reality that doesn't have the familiar essence of our revelry, I will tell you how you brought me back to life.

I want you because I won't have to pretend with you because I have already exhausted my pretences. I have screamed my grace out of the window of our sand castles in windy hurricanes, I have cried my indescretions into your life with enough intensity to freeze you by the door as I wilted away on the couch that was hard to build but harder to leave behind.

All my life I have felt like I am waiting for something that I cannot comprehend yet and in kafkaesque we believe that maybe our souls remember a promise our lives haven't kept yet. Maybe you are the promise that I haven't kept yet and hence I don't belong, hence I live like a huckster in Kabul on a random Sunday afternoon. Counting the change in the pockets of my kaftan which is always less than what I need to go home. I hear the warm breeze rattling the window panes of antiquity and disturbing the baby's sleep.

You become the whispers behind my silence and I become the crescent moon of your honour. When the late night soft soars of winds sound like your voice tinkling in my ears, I turn around every single time because my heart, this honour of being here in this particular galaxy colliding with your stardust and finding meaning in my permutations and combinations of being is sacred and it'll never happen ever again.

The energies of this universe will rearrange itself and reform into another order like how it happens in a kaleidoscope in a child's hand time and time again but we will never be this or here ever again.

My soul is on its knees right now, please ignore the attitude of my body. I know the tragedy is doomed in its inevitablity but I am still hoping that you'll never leave.

We cannot outsource the intimacy of knowing where our cups and plates are, how you like your coffee, how I like my mornings and how we love the rain and the rainbows that follows.

Since our pain of being is too sacred to send out letters of refusal for, it cannot be mere limerence.

"Commotio cordis (Latin, "agitation / disruption of the heart") is a rare disruption of heart rhythm that occurs as a result of a blow to the area directly over the heart at a critical instant during the cycle of a heartbeat. The condition is 97% fatal if not treated within three minutes."

It's basically the heart exploding and somehow it always is, when I build us up to the possibility of never hearing the twinkling of your voice ever again.

In the truth of two pecks, you fail to stop the stutter, shudder after the first. Fail the nonchalance at the spreading smile, for the second.

Time is kinder than pain, it slows, it lets you wear out your older skin to renew in real time, allowing love to linger along the unspoken thoughts.

Come find me when you believe that just love is enough and everything else is just an incentive.

How I find my gods when our sufferings mingle together like star-crossed lovers finally intersecting after revolving in each other's orbits all their lifetimes. In it, I belong.

To you.

You to me.

In our wilt, we love, love and love.

(From the pages of a life gone by, only to be romanticised on deeper nights and busy afternoons.)

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

It's hurtful, it's terrible, still, after all the time and space that has passed between us, despite the timelines shifting, it is clearly gut wrenching to dwell even for a fraction of a moment on the what ifs that are just absence and opulence of realism.

What if you stayed?

What if you trusted my integrity above the norm of your birth as a human?

What if you didn't have the maturity of a grown up when I held onto the naivety of my teenage?

I would have held your hand through all the storms, glaring at the lightning as your fingers tightened on mine in hatred. Drove through abyss of offerings for rasugullas and chai, then ended up wrecking havoc with our shenanigans deep into the wee hours of a morning that would have lulled us into a sleep where we would have missed each other's presence so loudly that, we would have reached out towards the absence of us.

Maybe we could have done good by all our promises of the night that frizzled by the day break.

You could have driven on snow to reach me, I could have laughed at your silliness. I could have written you that letter, you could have kept it forever in the creases by your eyes.

You could have loved me, I could have loved you back.

I know for a fact that, if you stayed any longer you would have stayed forever.

Maybe that is why you had to leave.

Abruptly.

Absolutely.

But if you stayed.

You would have been all my Wednesdays in cafes, we would have sprawled across the tables in calligraphy and sass. In Crudeness and denying cruelty.

You would have crossed borders for me, I would have kept you safe.

No one has ever uncovered my shrouded mysteries quite like how you did, how all my pretenses fell face flat in front of you.

All of it.

All the time.

Almost like you knew me and my patterns more than I knew myself or you for that matter. Yet you blissfully also chose not to know me enough to stay where I was stuck and help me meet you where I couldn't even reach.

If you understood me so generously that you knew the person behind the farce then how come you didn't know the heart that was breaking in the indifference?

Did you choose this cyclone for me to be abandoned in?

You made my pulse stutter, my hands shake in anticipation, it wasn't anxiety. It was devotion, against a fate that I accepted but never chose.

Maybe if you stayed, I would have been markless and pristine. Shining my light for you to be dazzled in, dappling across your chest in patterns of my emotional incompetence and playing fetch with our destiny.

Having the front row seat to the spectacle of your life, where I cheered the loudest and held you backstage as you fell apart in my arms, muffling your pain with my prayers.

10 years ago this guy felt like an absolution, today I don't know if he still doesn't sleep at night, or if he still uses a silly pink tooth brush. You wanted me to get 4G so that the connection never fluctuates, I have 5G now.

But not you.

You saved me first, I am grateful. You ruined me next, I hate you. There is nothing to forgive for there is no apology because there shouldn't be any. It wasn't so deep.

Was it not?

Then why do my nights sing a symphony that sounds so awfully a lot like the enunciation of your name whispered through the winds of past reaching across the physicality and seeping into my present?

I never got to see your holi pictures, I never got to show you my book haul. I told you, maybe we'll never talk again if we didn't then.

You said, we have all the time in the world.

We didn't, we don't.

You said, give me five minutes, I gave you a lifetime, but you didn't return.

We are entangled kites in a hurricane, we tore yet our lines stayed knotted together which you forgot and I ignore. How else can I go on living, knowing that the only person I have ever felt such insurmountable grief over, would never return to take accountability for the tears of all the nights I have spent in time out.

Will this bitter truth stalk the halls of my veins forever?

I no longer remember your number by heart, my memory is fading into the age where I will perhaps just remember you by your name until I depart this lifetime, the notes of your voice distant, the youth of our eyes drained into adulthood, that is shearing through the muscles of my back.

I miss you, sometimes.

It hurts, in others.

Thinking about you is a domino of a humiliation ritual, I am disgusted by my own bitterness. How I was ready to forge my truth to accommodate your start, how I was relentless. You taught me I was not numb, thank you. I was not nonchalant to what went on, I was not the understanding youngest daughter.

I am a landmine you lit a fuse to, we were electrified.

I look for you subconsciously, I don't reach back to old habits that scream at me to return though.

Why didn't we have time? My grief is penalizing that I know you so little, that I never got to see the lines form by your eyes, or your skin flaunting the freckles of an advancing age like a haunting sun.

If you stayed I would have known your mispronunciations and the uneven teeth, I can't remember your favourite colour anymore.

I want to say black, but I am so unsure.

Was it blue?

No, it's mine.

Were you mine?

No, not mine.

In a phase of the ferberising facade where every answer to any question about the existence of you is my knowledge of your name because time is crueler than pain, and I am forgetting you. It's so slow, but everyday I realise it's something new when my heart is tugging at a door that is fusing into my bones, invisible, invincible.

It's what I have prayed for, to forget you long enough to forgive myself forever for not being enough to keep you longer than the timelines limited us to.

Maybe, another time in a far off moment, we will have all the time in the world and our timeworn saltlick of hearts would be lucky enough to stay in the house it calls home.

My best case scenario,

Another time.

Another lifetime.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

Back when I was seventeen, I would have known exactly how to run a country. I knew everything at 17. It's the growing age and the experiences that are tampering with my skill set.

An age where time seemed endless, I went on forever and ever, then some more and still had time left to be mindless and fickle without it crushing on my soul as unproductivity.

I still revert back to the same exact people whom I knew back in the days, they're my comfort people. People have changed, some have abandoned me but in that moment some ages ago they were mine and will forever be mine back then so I live with one leg in the past, always reminiscing the unappeased yearning to return.

Hearts were not so cruel back then, the words didn't hit me like hot bullets back then. I was resilient and restless to be everything more.

Now I just long for the same passion that I feel has just reduced to folds of skin. In my childhood my parents were fine and young, they didn't have wrinkles or a bad knee, everyone was alive too. I didn't watch them frizzle out from my memory, which is the only place they can be anymore. How I forget the sound of their voice with each voice mail I delete to save cloud space. It's scary, the possibility of just….

Leaving them where they stay now.

In the past.

I feel like as I exited 17, I burned my flesh of youth and resistance. Now I conform to opinions and I shatter like glass on the floor every night.

Growing up is the greatest scam of all time but it is a privilege and I am so grateful. I still have love for the same exact people but I no longer can reach them, call it the grown up's ego or just growing up.

This inescapable and inarticulate desire to have something beyond the daily mundane monotony has started to gnaw at my feet and I am afraid it will reach my heart sooner than imaginable and I will not be able to shield it. Rather I would want to watch it get devoured.

I am so scared.

I don't even say my own name with kindness when all I have ever done right is being kind. I feel bad for the people I meet now because somehow I feel like I have left behind my kindness in the kinder age, locked away in some vault that I cannot remember how to locate with a key that is forgotten and a hammer that I don't know how to use.

I am sorry too.

Behind my exquisite confidence right now is the tragedy of a child who lost herself to gain footing in the world and I still wonder on busy afternoons if it has been worth the effort.

I am too much a masochist to even apologise, I want to drown in my guilt and feel the fire beneath my skin everyday. That's the only thing that feels alive anyways.

The naivety of 17 is behind me now and no one will ever knock the wind out of me probably and that fills me with a strange sadness in my favourite shade of blue.

The blue of longing.

Hope as a word seems so gentle and subtle. So graceful, delightful. It's like a beautiful woman with golden hair in soft waves, so soft, so merciful, so lenient. With an ethereal laugh.

Having hope means like holding a hand, a kind caress, a humane tickle. That has the power to lead you into the meadow and soothe you into a childlike sleep. It has a midas touch.

I have hope for everything, I have had hope for a better next day everyday. I hold hope like holding the hand of God, with all my devotion and pinnacle of my faith.

No matter what, tomorrow will be better.

For the longest time I have felt that I can just be better, this is not the end of it because no matter how hard I work or try to make things work it goes sideways one way or another.

The frustration in my heart took my hand and walked me to the door of hope.

And then I realised that hope is not a delicate, ephemeral thing. It's not late night whispers into the sky, she's definitely not holding your hand gently or whimpering sweet nothings of victimhood into your deaf ears.

Hope takes you by your throat and does everything to make it all better. It has flesh under her nails and blood on her knuckles, her face is dirty and scratches litter everywhere.

Hope is a verb, it's an action.

Her hair has the darkness of strength and perseverance. Her lips are bloody, she is going to be there and no one will ever be able to throw her out.

She makes it impossible because she is brave constantly, for you, for me.

She is the best thing, that warms you on cold nights and stitches back together the split flesh of your back.

Then every other day she wakes up and spits out blood from her fight of the night that you couldn't have survived without her back up. She spits out her teeth trying to wash her mouth and she does it all over again so that I don't give it up.

Having hope means fighting alongside her, having her back because she will always have your back. No amount of blood or gore will ever wear her out.

She will rinse and repeat. She will wake up again and push through.

She will win.

One day.

It's set on stone.

Hope never loses.

"I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone."

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

Find me,

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

(See you in the comments.)

My love for you lingers in the unspoken thoughts that you command by simply looking at me with those eyes that seem to have a trapped soul in them, eyes that urge me to move my fingers and free them, when you hold her hands like weaving rhythm in them.

Then you walk in, wearing your polished shoes and ironed shirts with your face sleek with trepidation like you've run marathons to merely reach me in time and my hands flex under the table with agonizing need to touch you.

And you smile at me, my prefrontal cortex collapses upon itself and my tenacity to tether myself to the reality is useless.

I float.

Maybe I can interweave our souls together and share the devastating realities of our lives, trade pieces of ourselves with each other and become whole like how your fluency in silence welcomes my vivacious quirks with the arms of a man I am familiar with since ages.

Even when I rarely know you still.

Our erosion is not polite; it is violent because loving you is violence. When you look at me like I draw you your best days, with the kind of care that I haven't known until you, even the windowsill leans in, anticipating to steal some warmth that has only ever been destined for me to own and that will destroy me and any semblance of life I have ever known before you.

Will you ruin me like a man when I look at you as if you're an answered prayer, a meticulously manifested daydream?

How will I ever learn and remember the possibilities of my absolute desolation when you turn all my defiance into folklore and weave your capillaries into a cardigan just to keep me warm?

In your constituency of monarchs, I am just a powerless queen. A queen only by a crown and not by the act of an election, a queen because you are the emperor of this monarchy. Your devotion is dressed in resistance and you upturn all regulations just to keep me on the throne as you sit at my foot like an atheist offering a prayer to a goddess who doesn't know how to answer to it.

All I do is hold your hand and feel your pulse throbbing under my trembling palm. It is ostentatious of me to hold such pride in the power that haunts the walls of your veins, so I write for you.

Because maybe in the next 200 years to come we'll be forgotten, in the next arrangement of our atoms; you and I will be dust and stardust. But I hope, that someone reads these random musings of my lovesick heart on a summer afternoon, when no one has visited our graves in a long time, when someone else sleeps in the bedroom where we braided our bones together to know that this kind of love exists. Where, in everything meaningless, we have found our sense of meaning in being in love.

Mr. Pretty baby, you told me once that you'll choose me over everyone and you have. You're all I know and you're all I ever want to know.

It's all our nights intertwined and all our days slipping together like my hair on your silk pillows. You're only chosen on special occasions, by special someones. It's sacred. It's holy, it's religion and faith. It's truth or just dare.

Dare to feel more than you can comprehend or handle. Dare to love more than you receive. Dare to just have the courage to be brave for them and by association yourself.

I don't think there are other universes or multiverse where we have everything we want or more, I think this is it. This is all that is for us and if we lose it here, we put a kink in the inky threads of destiny and we lose it forever.

You're the sun to me and when you're near me all the winter in my bones willingly reach out towards you to get warmed up and stop trying to survive and just be. The calm insanity of a perpetual storm.

And as we part I am left sleepless in the silence of our revelry and the anticipation of our goodbyes. I write our stories into the stars and hope to immortalise us together in this moment, forever.

I am scared that this is a destiny that is not mine, I am merely on borrowed time. You will hurt me and I will watch you move on, maybe because that is how it is supposed to be and you are the white crayon, always blending.

Because when I look at you, you look like a man descending in devotion, against the cold ice, you are so warm. They say it's falling, as if the earth's gravitational force could push you any more than the way your love has; dancing in blues then purples and pink did. Your eyes reflect my favourite colours and I love a bit more every time.

I am not nonchalant about it, I care deeply and so inconveniently. But to love is to be an inconvenience and I am rotting on that hill. I am holding my grief in my mouth, hating how it fills it up like saliva when you dry heave and picking apart all your punctuations. I read in between and overall, I lay flat on the ground in exhaustion and let it consume me.

I argue with you in the margins of your letters and you leave more space for me in every other letter. You write six pages when it could have managed in four because I inconvenience you and you accept it as if you want more of it.

Do you?

I call it nothing, you call it love. We smash on the cobblestone of our favourite alleyway where we sneak in on dangerous nights to play a vicious game where no one is ever a victor.

There's blood everywhere.

(An expert from the book I am writing, a fanfiction for the characters made by the brilliant Viviana Flores.)

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

You liked me for sometime and that made me love myself forever.

You loved me in a time when even god didn't. A merciless god bestowed upon me the love of a passerby that passed by me even before I came to comprehend what it was. A breeze on a hot day that chilled my bones enough for me to crave it, in all the summers of my incorrigible life.

You know how some dawn dreams are so beautiful that they make you happy from within and the happiness slips through the cracks of the subconscious night into the reality of the day. That's how I feel every night I let myself descend into that abyss which you left first and I never want to return to but visit from time to time.

In my religion we burn the body of the deceased. Thank god for that, for if I were to be buried and the insects had to feast upon the flesh that my soul departed from, all they'll ever taste is you and they'll look for that taste everywhere after me but never really find again. How I have searched my heart and brain for the memory of how you sounded as it faded under the umbrella of time passing, how a river flows.

Non linearly.

It's not death and decay but blossom and flourish, it's the kind of blessing I have prayed all my life for but never was blessed enough to keep it raining on me, it drizzled and frizzled but left an eternal rainbow for me to look back at and feel the peace that evades me like a weak enemy.

I hope when the gods above fall in love, even their hearts break. My every breath is both a plea and a prophecy. Even they have to survive this longing for something that will never return in the same form, something that you don't even want to keep anymore but also can't let go of, an addiction that feeds on your blood. Something, that is only a show piece in the museum of your ruins, something that is dusted from time to time but also left to dust forever, that too by the choice of the owner.

A piece loved but not cared for. Would I care if it broke into as many pieces as my heart on that summer night that was more cold than what I had ever felt?

No.

But I would turn around and sob my agony of destruction into the palms of my destiny and devoid my self of any destination that could repair what was shattered so fickly, when yellow looked like smiles but felt like leaving without goodbyes, without even a last glance that would have been etched into the tombstone of my memories that are nothing but embers of the flames that engulfed me and never let go.

Sometimes I fan those embers into a tiny flame that dances under my skin just to feel the warmth once again, sometimes they burn me raw and I let it because it's easier than to look at you ever again.

You're all my trembling anguish bundled into the most beautiful fever dream that was always meant to be out of reach of all my manifestations and aspirations. What threw me along the curve is the fact that it dances in sync with my prayers yet it's never accepted by the fates to entwined the threads of my life with yours for longer than the intersection of the past.

I keep my longings tangled in the strands of my hair that I push right behind my ear everytime they become a constant prayer for fulfilment, i remind them to stay hidden, to stay safe.

You sleep on my pillow so safe but you never know how many versions of myself I've ruined just to keep you looking at me. Ours is a church of burnt romances, of late night one direction jams, of early morning goodnights, of habits that we will never let go in the comfort of the dead nights.

I will forever seek you out on every road I travel, you will never turn around to affirm me. I will look for every tangible fragment of your memory in my fading mind and you will blissfully just forget me. I will choke on my breathes and you will simply never know.

You know, how no pain can ever be overcame, it can only ever be glorified?

Thats what I do on nights like these when its cold and a bit too dark when my pillow is slightly wet, heart heavier. For my pain is more in your absence than it is in my flesh.

The syntax for heartbreak is every unfinished letter of love where the grammar is precise and crisp, its equal parts punishment and punctuation. Maybe thats why I maul over it as I drown in it. They chew me into elegies, they're carnivorous for whatever is left of me, they are smiling poetically at my decomposing heart, the decay in my soul is amusing them.

You complained on and on about the pomegranates I never peeled for you but what about the whole fig tree that is rotting inside me all in your name? Guess what, it still withers and slithers everytime the wind that touched you torches it again, now its the stink of detriment and detritus rather than the sweet blossoms. My head is perpetually inside the oven we both crawled into to seek warmth, its just me now. All alone.

Its me and my beloved decay.

Alone.

Forever.

It's october again, moments before it all fell apart that year and my heartbreak has bled through my clothes and onto the road and leaves, now its all red. The red that was once our home is now the red of desertion, its deeper in hue, it's bolder in approach but it never approches me when I saunter past her. Its surrender, its a cop out. Its both fate and despite it.

Its both agony and void.

Its your absence and my ache.

We let our own mortality of feelings commit eternal reassurance, oh the irony. My strength broke into all pieces of the star I am the dust from and your fragile ruin rebuilt your disposition into someone indestructible. When did the soul who was vulnerable in the wake of honesty get lost in the whirlwind of the deceased and where should I even look for him. Trading purity for goldmines, trading loyalty for hard cash, I dont know you anymore. I haven't known you for a long time time yet it still baffles me how that has happened. I held way too much pride when I said I will always know you inside and out, is that why your eyes on the photographs I stalk at ungodly hours of dawn look so dead? Your smile a mockery, a counterfeit of what it use to be?

Why did you take away the light that lit up your eyes like a million stars bursting behind them, what are you thinking with that effacing smile? Where is the person who had the safest hands? Why are they spelling danger signs now?

Is it because you simply don't want me to know you? At all. Why did you do it, when we crossed the line and you didn't want to return?

Today while coming home, on the busiest of highways I saw a stranger who resembled your individual indifference for the crowd around you and I chased him with my eyes as I choked up on my own awareness of your residual resistance and existence in my life. I chased him further just to make sure he wasn't you, I wouldn't know what to do if that happened but I drove 3 extra hours chasing the thought of you instead of my delusions in a parasocial environment.

While I still test out pens by writing you name with it like a muscle memory, you probably don't remember the correct spelling of mine. All our stories are left behind, now we just rehearse our outside face because we have locked ourselves out of the comfort of our own silence. We spoke too much, now we don't at all.

Its a punishment, my grief is not love persevering. My grief is penalizing, its cruelty, its brutality, its reverence for the resilience of my residence. Its veneration for all the nights I think about the unattainable what ifs almost out of habit and every morning I break the habits.

Every october as the weather becomes bleak, the memories rise out of the memorial buried under the pretense of logic and time, the self digestion of you and I, reiterates my claims of how to love is to be violent of the vicious kind, it's ischemic. How can it not when now my soul walks outside of my body and i can't even seek it out, i can't in any case even pretend to recognise it. Now i just ignore its existence like how i gaslight myself everyday into believing that my wrist still doesn't throb with ache in the memory of you from when you pulled at our entwined strings of fate in golden way too hard and injured me for the remainder of my time in this perishable castle of unfinished, unfortunate hopes.

There is a geometry to fate we haven't yet learned how to decipher, read or learn. And you are in the middle of it all, like the way a sentence already knows its last word, the sound a door makes right before it closes. Your eyes are the longest poem I have ever read, and I have never been tired of it.

I hold onto any semblance of attentive care you throw my way as an after thought with fangs and talons, with despair and anticipation. The lies transforming into the truths that were never intended or spoken, only imagined in the rosy world my mind conjured up in the background.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖊

(See you in the comments.)

My own awareness of myself is very dysmorphic, its distorted in my mind. Its not discernment, its deduction, redundancy.

There is a vivid contrast between who i think i am, what i am and how i am perceived. Its all different.

When i am liking them a lot, they are just looking through me. i have been so binary in my thinking that, for so long i thought i could forge my way in, fit in how i am supposed to, that i must be doing something wrong and possibly i was, i am.

I am not the first choice of my friends, they only ever look at me when they have exhausted all their options, am i truely that hazy in the smoke that even in the mirrors i feel transparent? My friend, can i call them that? Should i call them that?

Perhaps not.

Definitely not.

She thought she can find better people, she forfeited me at arguably my worst time in a transitioning life for a new set of collectibles. Shiny, brilliant probably, as i rusted all alone, only for her to grab my hand when all my favouritism collapsed atop me and fizzled out as i struggled all my energies.

Good riddance, because i am fake now, i don't care anymore about what happens.

To her.

That New life had the fidelity of a fabricated lie, but it taught me how disposable i was to people who were put on a pedestal by me, who came first to me when i came the very last to them. I am still here just because i didn't lash out, i revived the indifference like a religion and made it out just a different version of nonchalant.

I remember.

I think about it from time to time.

I hurt.

I don't care.

Sure, people leave and sometimes their heart leaves before their physical reality does. So, i give myself cosmic grace, for, i did what i just had to, to save whatever ounce of my self respect i could after i begged them to not be a stranger.

It is what it is

Even god didn't choose me to be born first.

Never a priority until i am physically breaking for the longest time, physically.

Never a choice, just an option.

The last one.

Is it some genetic make up for me, how i am never liked? They say small children are sweet, truthful, they gauge the vibes of a person, is it that off that even they don't like me.

i have hated children in my despondency too, but i have hated myself first and the best.

i still don't know what i do wrong, i try to manage it, i try to dismantle the entire system and do it all over again like picking each kernel of a pomegranate and trying to place it back together with cements of apologies.

I fail more often than not.

Still the same humming of unseen echoes in my life and mind, whispered lightly like a witch's promise of eternal confinement.

I suffer in confidence, in flamboyance, in fancy leathers and lace.

My ego is greater than my self hate, so i reinvent myself every five years, totally new with a packed suitcase of the past that i open in the silence of a sunny afternoon and drown in it. Valiantly.

i stop my words from spilling out the words of relation when i relate to people, afraid that maybe i would steal their thunder how mine was stolen to the point of my silence. i skirt around loyal reality in favour of making up something, they called it fake.

It's not, i am it, underconfidently.

So, when i am not a choice, i choose to become unchoosable. i leave first, i draw up my walls in each meeting, i call the guards on my thoughts that's calling me an avoidant self saboteur, i exist in the freedom of my own mind rather than seeking the external validation that calibrate my mind to the wrong tune.

Look, I get it, not always you will be someone's first choice, not always you'll come out of a competition with a trophy. You don't have to metaphorise my feelings, I know.

But always, that creates a vivid dream in one's mind, in my mind that i am just unlovable, that something is scientifically, genetically off in my vibe that this happens and hating kids is not it. i guess i am too available.

To everyone.

That is possibly why they go on adventures without me while expecting me to still be waiting when they come back, unfortunately, i leave a version of my emptiness there, just to check mate them in a way of a stalker who looks back at them from time to time, merely checking.

Wow, that is sounding psychotic to me.

It's better than the public breakdowns after which you're called crazy. Since i suffered, i will make it everyone's problem, if i am ruined, i take no responsibility of a tale that bled me. Now it bleeds too and i, let it be.

Indifference.

Accidentally learned and meticulously perfected, no one knows me.

You will know my cafe orders and my political stance, my shoe size and how I hate coffee, but you'll never know my favourite colour, you'll never know how brilliantly I drown in my grown up disgust while being the worshiping statue of self love.

That, my love is the art of not being a choice.

You craft your prudence into chuckles of attitude that you hide in your antics, brilliantly throwing off everyone into a belief that stems from the lounge of your actions where you boil their sins in your cauldron to a perfect balance of salt and sugar.

You play a different character, in every single new circumstance, manipulating narratives as you go. They can't know you because you're not you, yourself. It's not comprehension, it's a counterfeit.

That certainly doesn't make you a phony.

You're ethereal now.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

When there were problems at school, I couldn't just wait to get the hell out and reinvent myself. Be so different than myself that there would be no scope for the same mistakes that happened earlier on. Well as I changed how I was, my kind of mistakes also tailored themselves accordingly.

When things were charged at college I was ready to begin an over 5 year long course all over again and I did my best to do that. This time I didn't only have my foot out of the door, I even had my best pair of running shoes on. I verged on desperation to just get the hell out. Everything came at me like a wrecking ball with all the intention to fulfill its intent and I tried to deal with it how I have always known to.

Run, redesign, repeat.

I couldn't deal with the new people, I was devastated at a fall that I never anticipated. I just thought that I was already below rock bottom so there's just a way out and above, there was no other way than upwards.

Oh, boy that aged like unpasteurised milk.

I had so much deeper to fall into, break my bones and rebuild myself but this time without running away. I had to feel it all, the pain of the rise. It's bittersweet in the hindsight but I remember praying with everything in me for a blessing that'll save me from my own head.

I clung to everything and anything that showed even a tiny bit of potential, hell I have even gaslighted myself into thinking that there is potential in places and people to hold my hand through the whirlpool when there was non. I fell further down the rabbit hole.

There was a point where I was just stuck. Stuck like a mouse in a trap, like on a hinged wheel that moves no where. You know sometimes you try so hard to be ahead of the curve that it just becomes a sphere and like in those cheap circuses from our childhood memorabilia, you're forced to play by the tricks of the time.

God, the self hate and worthlessness that I have felt still sends chills down my back everytime I think about it, it scares me to think about what would have happened to me if I had to stay there. If I didn't take whatever leverage I could find to pull myself up. That is why even when I cringe at my choices, I don't judge myself anymore.

Because by some dumb luck I channeled everything that could have just pushed my head so far underwater that I became fish food, into becoming a mermaid.

We are always going to be cringing at ourselves in the hindsight. That is almost as inevitable as the end.

So, eventually I had the epiphany that probably I cannot just break into a run and get away from it all the time, I mean it is a sphere. By law and mathematics, you end up at the same point where you started until there is enough force to throw you along a tangent. That tangential force is the lesson that I had to learn at any cost. A lesson that was more important than any screwed up timelines that humans have made up.

It didn't matter if it took me 3 years or 5 years or 7 years, I just had to learn the lesson.

One of my favourite quotes of all time goes like,"until you learn from history, it will repeat itself."

And repeat it did, until I sat down, took off my shoes, got down to breaking it down and pulling it apart with my bare hands.

Just like we cringe at our lives retrospectively, we also regret our decisions, even the best ones. Nothing is ever enough. It could have always gone a different way, we just forget that just because it's different doesn't make it better.

Right now, as the year is breathing it's last fire, it's making me extremely introspective. I think that my lesson was to learn to stay, to belong, to accept myself and allow the flaws to peak through the porcelain.

Accept my humanity with the kind of humility that comes to you because the universe has worn you down. It has braided the red and gold threads well enough to be able to withstand your spontaneity, withstand the force field.

I am not sure how far this is right, but this is a very new thought for me. This awareness has always evaded me, I never looked at it like how I am right now. It was the norm for me. I just knew that if I don't like it, I'll just run away from it, pretend that it doesn't exist and it'll eventually cease to exist.

Could be because of Dostoevsky. Could be because my life has become boring for my angles and demons. Whatever it is, I am glad.

Just because I want to be something that doesn't mean I can't be anything else. I can just be a conglomeration of all the best things that I can ever be. There is no limit.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

See you in the comments.

Where its not so loud that I tear up, in shock and in attitude.

Its soft rays filtering through my baby blue mesh curtains, dappling across my back as arrays of hope in the most iridescent calligraphy that I would later try and recreate.

Its so silent that I can hear my thoughts and I want to hear them. T

Hear the unfiltered unfortunates, forgive the unforgettable unforgivings. Thoughts that both choke me and tilt my chin up to face myself, as a muse as a devastating reality. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

My eyes shine in those moments of cacophony as I sit in cahoots with the rays of dawn as well as my own awareness of space and time. Those moments I don't seem to mind my hair flowing into my eyes as if to understand the gloss in them, they don't. They can't.

Nobody can.

I won't let them.

I don't let them.

Then some mornings the discordant noise is already there but its welcoming as droplets of all of my grief on the panes of my window, the fragility of glass rattles under the unbridled monstrosity of the water that has traveled through the space time continuum to reach me and sit with me when I am too far gone to understand the pluralism of my own mind. So it drowns out every single one of them thoughts, I am both thankful and aghast.

Frenimies. They call it.

Friends,

And,

Enemies.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

So I sit quietly in a room now.

Alone.

Atoned.

I sit by the window and let the harsh july sun of Southern India burn through the chasm of my mind like a cotton ball catches the brilliant fire of the matches.

I sit alone like making reparation for something I don't even understand properly, I am caged in my own purgatory of nothingness. I feel nothing but purposeless.

I shed pearly tears for the fictional dictation over my reality in living, I yearn for imagination to come to life and become my life and then I protect it with fangs and fire.

The duality of my sorrows is that they dress up in beautiful metaphors and metastasise through the course of my blood and veins like an incurable disease. My cells forget inhibitation and let it pass through like a trusted friend on a visit after ages of no contact.

But the frequency of my sorrow is always out frequenting the oxygen in my lungs and I suffocate.

Vibrantly, I suffocate.

Like I know not a thread about breathes, I know not how it races through my arteries.

Incendiarism is in my nature, I light my own intelligent legitimacy on fire and lead the fire workers away from the location, send them on a wild goose chase and never let the geese out.

Grief is the world I learned before I knew how to spell my own name, and no grief is not love persevering.

It's just grief.

Sorrow.

Sadness.

Leaves a hollowness in your soul that is never filled out, it's a bottomless pit, a damn blackhole of nothingness.

Void, a perpetual void.

My grief was labelled as indiscipline and empathy was shoved down my throat until I gurgled both blood and gore.

My embalmed sorrow grows veins and branches and vesicles in my solitude and wraps around my ribs and cages it in all the while dirging through my pores and cracks in the muscles.

And I clench one fist on the handle of my blue suitcase and another on the door handle, one foot out the door, always ready to leave.

To bolt.

Fast until my adrenaline chokes on my throat and no amount of breaths are enough for my lungs to not asphyxiate.

Sometimes, the problem arises not from the absence of quietitude but from the truancy of entropy.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic 🖋

Once, you're seventeen and you know what you want. You have all your plans laid out in front of you, written on fine paper in aristocratic script just waiting to be lived. You know that you're going to have your dream job and live in your dream house and be proud of yourself. Just like those coming of age movies. You know it all. 

Then you're suddenly 22 and you have no idea what is going where, you see everything falling flat, you feel like a drowning fish. Like Ariel who walked on earth but forgot how to swim. All your plans are just pretty letters. You are stuck in assignments and self doubt. You don't even know what your dream has evolved into. All you remember is feeling invincible back in the day when you knew everything like the back of your hand. Now, you know nothing at all. 

Worse is, you realize that you are almost everything you thought you would never be in your teenage naivety. You are just as unmotivated, cranky and fidgety today as you saw people be when you had every one of your fantasies on the tip of your shoe. You see that you react to situations in a way, similar to the one you didn't identify with earlier, you are what you hated. You have become your own demon, you are the skeleton in your childhood closet. It's not different. It's just the same and difficult. 

 Do you see what makes it a salt-rub to the wound? Your awareness. 

When you don't have results to validate your hard work, it gets hard to even believe that it was hard work. We are conditioned to believe that hard work is the only work that makes you lucky and pays you your due. But how far is that really true? 

When you fail even your hardwork or all nighters don't mean worth shit. People look at someone with success as if they are the beacon of hope, all their leisures turns into hard work, their faults into quirks. Sometimes all due to a moment of dumb luck. But when you hold no good result you are nothing, even your hard work is fickle, all your value is diminished to your moment of vulnerability.

I remember Mr. Shah Rukh Khan saying," First get rich, then become a philosopher." This applies to a spectrum of courses your life might take and not just finance. When you have marks you can say that you did not study and play around but people will believe it. When you have friends or just people to vouch for you, you're good. There is no goodness in anonymity. 

We are all a generation that is a repercussion of the generation that has followed and developed an entire belief system around all things unreal and magical. Generation after generation, luck is more glamorized than hardwork. Have you ever heard your mother say ," They don't study or would have gotten way better marks.", "Oh she got all that mark because luck favoured" and not because she pulled all nighters and has beat herself enough to leave bruises on her for the rest of her life. Because we all love that Bollywood style of life, the larger than life kind of life, blowing breezes and on point hair. 

Because It's miraculous that way, when a topper of NEET (Indian medical entrance exam) said that they didn't study much and was engrossed in Netflix and all, it felt surreal. Like wow, it's easy. It's just a moment of fairy dust sparkle to crack the country's toughest undergraduate examination. To the people who had no prior knowledge or experience this was kind of a formula that it takes way less. I have been bashed by my parents for my marks years prior to the person making the statement because I claimed to have studied.

"He didn't even study and could do better than you, what did you even do?" 

It's fancy, doing nothing but having it all. 

God's, even the results have been categorised. If it's good and glamorous, then only it's celebrated. No one values your pea on a corn.

No one talks about how hard it is for 17-18-19 year olds to leave everything behind. It's of prime imperative to talk about the dark side of adulting and not just the glamorous coat of things. It's important to give the 20 somethings  the breather to experience and explore things the new way. It's important to let the 30s know that it's not the end of the world. It's just the beginning.

It's more important to reject the entire belief system that's built around fictional stories and tooth fairies. Sometimes we work hard and still fail, sometimes everything just falls short but that doesn't mean it wasn't enough. Just because things could have been more doesn't mean they would have been better. We're humans, we want more, nothing is ever going to be enough honestly. The thing you want the strongest would lose its value when you have it. You would always want to stand on the step above you. 

Don't get me wrong. Ambition in no shape or form is a bad thing. It's the driving force behind all our impulses. But it's also vital that we value the work, we don't fantasize and romanticise the trend of hustling hard but not sweating a drop, we need to move on from our generational trauma and deconstruct the system. It'll take time, we need to give time some time as well but we got to do it ourselves.

If we're going to admire the white coat,we must admire the fact that the person has gone through 16-18 hours of duties, somewhere they have gone 72 hours without food or bathing, and have been humiliated beyond what they could handle as humans. We must take inspiration from the girl with the perfect flick that she spent ages on, the boy in the fancy shirt who burnt his hand on the iron. It has to be a two way road and not just the result that gets the recognition and appreciation. 

We need to realise that alongside the system of glorious luck developed another system of programming minds into believing that when they're praised, it's good. It's the last road to have everything they can ever want, happiness and contentment. 

When you're trained to be happy a certain way you cannot be truly happy with the things that actually do make you feel at peace because you're so busy being guilty of breaking the cascade. Toss it and resist its return. One day, it'll stop fighting and surrender. Keep swimming until then.

Keep swimming, Dory.

Choose the difficult path, succeed poorly in that. Take the road maimed and aged without any guilt of not being different. When everyone's special, no one will be. It's fine to just move on. It's fine to seek confidence from your failures, lessons. 

You're hyper aware of the narrative you have always tried and wanted to escape so much so that you have seemingly forgotten how to actually belong, in all the things you do and all the aspirations you have. You lack a personal touch because you really are losing your personality in trying not to be something. 

This is an ancient folklore, a story as old as time probably and it has no other form because when you learn nothing from history, it repeats itself. Whatever lessons are there for you to learn, you cannot cheat your way out of it, you cannot have a short cut to jump over it. So, all in all the best way is through it. 

Accept your vices but strip them off their power.

Outwit the adversities, outwork the self doubt.

That's my two cents. 

I'll meet you beyond the lands of the living.

From the desk of,

The performative lunatic🖋

P. S. Why don't we all accumulate our cents and become billionaires, aye? Please leave your thoughts for me. 

I think I have all the time in the world to say it. That my nose curls in disgust when you so casually sip on your black coffee, that my fingers dance along the body of the creamer jar to splash dashes of it in the bitter liquid and the bittersweet feelings rolling like a child left unattended.

Instead I duck my head and trace the delicate and cheap dinner plates with my fork but never picking up a bite. I beat around the bush because I have all the time in world with you.

I have fallen in love with your breakdowns and smeared perfection. No one knows that beneath all that gel polished, pushed back hair there is unruly and unmanaged curly locks of midnight sitting on your head like a crown of a dark prince charming.

You're not a prince charming but God has taken his sweet time in crafting you. I watch the shadows cast over your eyes and the impression of your lashes on your cheeks but I never tell you that I will give you all the summer in my bones to warm every winter your skin has ever weathered.

I have all the time in the world to say it.

I think and shift to counting down your reps of symphony on the dark wood table that is the only noise between us like an owl hooting in an abandoned villa.

Then you take my clenched fist and untangle my fingers one by one and trace nothingness onto my palms in a jagged manner until I tune out everything but the feeling of your skin on mine.

You're a late evening walk along the riverside of Mahanadi in the scorching heat of an April summertime, so delicate and delicious in all your woven complexities.

You taste like iced lemonade on my tongue, sweet and cold and tart. But I don't tell you that because I have all the time in the world.

You are redolent of a time I imagined on the good days that lead to smoother nights in the welcoming winds of the autumn air chill. You are symbolic of all my hard work that I have put in to deserve to be loved because you merit me of it.

You touch me with intentions and I am pliable when you're cogent. Aren't we two kids pretending that forever is ours on the playground until an elder jolts us into the reality of the time and drags us backwards inside the metaphorical home against our wills?

I hope I never get to see that because I have all the time in the world with you.

Don't I?

I reckon impermanence does not mean insignificance. Even if I don't have all the time in the world with you and we're just an eclipse meant to coincide but only for a moment, I am glad that I got to touch you.

I am grateful for you across time and space.

Forever.

Find me,

Maybe I am not meant to be, then, why this loud longing of nostalgic remembrance paralyses me, why give the vision when there is no light to reflect the image of it. It's like looking out the dark vastness, and constantly changing the focal length of your eye, to see any semblance of welcome but even the pinhole effect fails at the width of the blinding light.

Maybe, it's white light. Maybe it's no darkness at all, it's just so blinding that no amount of squinting has learned to scatter any less of it. Is it not enough tragedy for the needle of a life in the haystack of an universe? Just living in the unrecognisable structural development. The continuity of everlasting improvements that never ends, nor fulfils, is never improved.

I am not sure if I work any less, if I am merely gaslighting myself into feeling like I am not doing it enough to yield anything alike to prominent results. Even if the what is clear, the how is still evasive.

I try, I try, oh dear, I try.

Still my hands always come empty, out of the box of my dreams, as if I have all the wrong pieces to choose from, as if I am nothing short of an impeccable fool. Like what I want and how I want it to be is a mirage or the reality I live and laugh at, so it never approaches to match the wistful longing.

I was born in grief, I naturally carry it with a little more pazzaz than the rest, I carry it like a comfort blankie from my unwanted childhood, I was never burned by the fire, I was merely abandoned in the aftermath of the ashes and I still feel it smeared on my skin, it is my skin now.

Being so deliriously naive that the unfair partiality felt like your fault, even when you didn't understand, why would someone do that to you, when you have never even thought a single syllable of a curse upon them. But a trauma recognises another and hides it for you to have a livable truth, so I have forgotten too much of my own heart beat and how it broke.

I am frozen in the same delirious natural sovereignty of my incorrigible grief, I don't understand what is general knowledge to others and they think I am being coy, when I am just a lost sock in a battlefield. Unimportant enough to never have a discussed learning, as if it is not worth teaching me. Perhaps it's true. Maybe I cannot be taught the newness of equations, because I am yet to figure out how to unlearn a faithlessness that is inbuilt in me.

I surrendered to gods, I prayed for my faith more than my sanity but I couldn't stay, it was a great place, it was peaceful and for a while so purposeful but I couldn't stop there, it was more a passing town than a complete destination, I blame that on myself too, that I couldn't even belong to god. That I choose faith in inconvenient desperation and not loving choice. I pray for well-written welfare and health, I pray still. I just have not learned as much as I could, they're just hollow habits I am forming. I hope it reaches a pinnacle of growth and balanced reliance.

I want to forgive and forget myself, I want to let go of what I don't remember anymore but it clogs the back of my throat more often than I could thank it for, maybe that'll happen on the judgement day, when I sit by the feet my god and they cleanse my soul of the burial burdens of a lifetime.

Maybe that merciful caress is what will make sense when a lifetime has not. This is the futility of fragile ambitions, where too much seeking is just an ego battle.

I have become peevish and irascible in the twenty something year of my life, what I convincingly forgot, seeked me out of the safety and exhibited my disposition publicly, and I get fidgety at the minor most inconvenience, raising my voice, speaking faster, the burn in my chest and the throb at the back of my neck become all too real.

It's a cop out, for the real meaningful rebellion I could have led, in the fruitful youth of the sequential summers of my winter birth. Even with all my thoughtful, empathetic compassion and comprehension, I act out. Maybe for the child who neither understood the ways of the world around her nor did she think that it was out to get her.

I am proud of her and I want to be her more than I want to be myself right now. She had true courage, the silent sense of strength that I broke with my mindless ramblings, I punished her with my vanity and foolishness.

It's now more imperative to bring her back and save her than to go on with my senseless decisions, she deserves to have the pride in the face of accentuated bullying and feverish daydreams of a better tomorrow and she shall have it.

In the structure her mind weaved and made a safety-net for the older her to lean onto comfortably, and formulate the way out and in the outlines of her deceased courage, she audaciously harboured in a time she knew nothing else, she made me, raised me from the embers and ashes, with her raw hands.

She saved me, it is my turn now, to have a fraction of the fractured temerity and set out to caress her head like she ever only desired for, accept her for every little individual differences she made by just being, in tears and snot, in pain and grace, she was grandeur and visible verve.

She's coming back now.