Enough?

Of late I’ve been sitting with myself a lot
It’s not much of a practice than a sort of homecoming
It’s been a long time since I belonged to myself.

First it was to the fervour of youth
The cries of I am enough
The audacity of changing the world someday
(When all I should have was to change my ways)
Sparkling eyes and fire dreams
And oh, but was it enough!?

Second came the heartbreaks
The ones that I didn’t see coming
The ones I gave back
The screaming retorts of “You are not enough”
Hold this hand!
Marry that guy!
Solitude is loneliness!
Yet the fear of ‘them’ not being enough
Was my constant war cry

Third came love
Patient, kind, warm
The kind that comes once in a while
To take you by surprise
He screamed you’re enough
More than enough
But I am not enough, he cried
I too cried.

Fourth is this silence
It’s like a cold winter midnight
Bang in the middle of June
I can’t hear anything
I don’t play anything
Except listening to my heart beat
A hundred times over
And over
And over
Telling me that things have changed
The softness has been replaced
You have to move on (to newer things? To better things? What is better?)
And reconcile.
Sit down and feel
This emptiness
This tragedy
Of giving more than you receive
And hoping more than hope offers
And yet be grateful to have found something
In the pain of losing it
And tell yourself to begin again
But now with the glimpse of  what love taught you in it’s wake –
I am enough.

End of the year ruminations ft. My way or highway?

With the earth taking a revolution around the sun, the optimists scream new year, new me; the realists scream it’s just a change of calendar; the pessimists might just say fuck it and do what they are doing anyway. I had been wondering for a few weeks, ever since my last post of how I don’t want to make resolutions – which category do I fit into. Maybe I am the veritable cat on the wall – I have always found it difficult to grab a polarized opinion. Being on the fence helps me know that I can always take the comfort of either side as the tide changes without committing to the consequences of each. So maybe, my first resolution for 2024 is to start making resolutions. To be less on the fence and more in tune with what I want. Setting boundaries – or in my case discovering boundaries and setting them.

There was this beautiful quote in Dear Zindagi, Shahrukh looks and Kiara and says, “Agar hum apni zindagi ka steering wheel apne haath mein nahi lenge na … toh koi doosra driver seat par baith jayega”, and I feel this is so important in every context. Boundaries look like fences to us which is why I have always used them rarely, it is only off late I have realised that boundaries are a way to gatekeep my own desires and needs from anyone who is not me – be it my friends, siblings, extended family, colleagues, lovers or even my parents. There is a certain guilt or shame that comes to me when I don’t pour into them. A certain dissatisfaction when I am not going all the way out to do something they want. That’s something I can work on in 2024.

2023 was the year I made a lot of changes. Getting out of residency and its set pattern of ways to finally live in a city, work more independently and live independently opened up a thought process I lacked before. When we are kids there are so many things we learn to live with – my mum got Nescafe for coffee and Tata tea for tea. Now that I am nearing the end of my twenties and living in her own flat and having the liberty to do things on her own, every day I am learning newer ways to do life. I find I like Bru and Cothas coffee. When I want to make a cup of adrak chai, I like to use Brooke bond.

Residency and its toxicity had put my brain in survival mode for a long time – my nervous system was jumpy and I had developed coping strategies that people would not normally choose in a healthy atmosphere. Finding a good Fellowship program and mentor that literally said, ” Happy holidays, enjoy, no worries” when I asked to extend my holiday from 2 to 4 because I was clearly guilt tripping asking for one at the first time made me realise that life actually changes with the boundaries and the consideration to your own self you put in them.

Living in a hostel having the liberty to just open the door and having someone to talk to makes you find a comfort zone of the same routines, the same parties and the same conversations. Living alone and the loneliness that came with it helped me discover things I like to do on my own again. I started writing again (albeit, rarely), no one guilt shamed me for just taking a book and spending my time reading it in a cafe, I could pick up my bag again and wander in museums and streets taking in the culture of things I have never seen before, I discovered I could again cut out the noise and listen to songs and found newer genres of music and newer songs I liked. In a world that asked me to settle I tried dating someone for the first time wholeheartedly who brought a newer perspective to everything I thought I deserved and ways I could be treated – having someone as a rock solid support system to give you the liberty to pursue other things in life was calming in ways I had never felt before. Understanding that even in such relationships not taking it for granted and investing time and effort to keep regular check ins without making it just a part of your routine and vent out was the second lesson. Trying to move on from something that significant quickly by using quick fix mechanisms and not acknowledging I am hurt was third. Breathe, pace out, new lovers will come, yet let me acknowledge that what I had was significant and worth crying over. You don’t lose someone you see your future with everyday, and even in that loss if you are alone – it’s okay. I discovered different ways to do things and the way I liked to do it. I found different opinions on things but my own voice in it. Also, no one can decide your timeline except yourself.

There is a certain beauty in knowing the year is ending and a new one starts – because even if a part of me is realistic to know nothing will change, a part of me is also hopeful that with a new year comes the new possibilities of things and newer ways of doing it. Even if the settings are the same and life is following set patterns and cycles of things – I will get the chance to do the same things in a different way and get a different outcome.

Adios 2023, you were bittersweet. 2024, I am ready for your lessons but I have a few tricks of my own now. I believe you will be a gamechanger – mostly because you start on a Monday. *Facepalms*

Cheers.

Woman

I am convinced woman is not a human
I am convinced.
She must be made of clay and paper
Forever mouldable
Forever weighed
Forever written in
(With no words of her own)
No speech
No tantrum
No opinion
(Her adulation compared with her silence)

I am convinced a woman is not a human.
I am convinced.
She is pitted against each of her own
Like mad bulls.
Sometimes beauty
Sometimes fidelity
A man’s disgress being always pointed
To a woman’s folly.

I am convinced a woman is not a human.
I am convinced.
She is made to fit into sizes and labels
Counted by dowry not degrees
Skin tone and measuring scales
Recipes and confined spaces.
All to be born with a pleasant demeanor.

I am convinced.
I am convinced a woman is not a human
She is a toy for the world to do as they please.
Think less
Talk less
Do more
Silence your mind for all you know
For the doll given to you as a kid
Is the woman you ought to become.

Love

Wondering if I can find a nook
A corner
In your arms
Where I can lie all day
And not count the hours passing by (for once)
I could turn all the leaflets in the world
And there still will be more (aren’t there more?)
Of this life I’ve been dreaming
This love I’ve been growing
For you
For us
Without knowing it’s meaning
Or worth.

I could count the strands of your hair
I could touch all the wrinkles you got in your face
From worrying about letting me go by
For I want to tell you
(Scream)
I’ve come
I’ve come all along
From the days of distance
From the days of pain
I’ve fallen for you
In more than several ways
And still less than one
That I love you
(I love you)
In all the unsaid ways
In all the careful embraces
In all the careless concern
In all the said
More, more, more
Yet less than you love me.

Mine

There are two sides
Two sides to me
They bicker
They screech
They nail each other
Till they can nail
What makes them different
What makes two
When the soul is one
Why the heart wanders
When the mind stays
In some twisted page of a rat race
Why every day feels like another day
That could have been lived
In another way
Why the sky is crimson
Why the leaves maroon
Why the whys I stopped asking
To fit in
Don’t find their voice anymore
Why I have to live in a way
Thats less of me
Less of what I feel
Less of everything I dreamed
Why
Why
Why
Yet nothing can show
How the wheel can be stopped from turning
The sands of time
And watching everything disappear that I used to call mine.

To an Indian parent,

My heart kinda aches
From not being able to tell
I love you
I care for you
I miss you

Hands that clutch too hard
Make you want to escape them soon
I guess that’s how it works
Between me and you

Yet your wrinkled hands are calling me
So are your dreams
Of being cared for in old age
By your progeny

I can feel the years that weighed you down
The wrinkles on your cheek
Dear mother, dear father
My lungs scream out from not calling to you in need

This forced adulthood
This urge to being the eldest daughter
The responsible one
The one my lil one can look upto
Is weighing on me

When all I want
Is go back to the corner of our home
Hide under your hawk eye
To all thats evil towards me.

Yet I cannot do this
Or that
Or anything which makes me look weak
Or undeserving
Of this freedom I have been coveting for far too long

To not being the frog in the wall
To not being the caged Bird that sings
To write my fate
With my own free will

So I can just pray and pray
For you both
And hope your love to stay
Till I conquer the world
Achieve all that I had wished for
Get my fill of it
And be able to come back to you
And not regret it a single bit

For I love you
I care for you
And I miss you
Even if those are the hardest three words to tell your Indian parents when you feel.

Again?

There are feelings

Solitary

Empty

I feel mostly

Yet feelings have no meaning in them.

They are mixed –

Like every other attachment I’ve felt in the past

Careless

Idiotic

Like a summer sunset you would miss out on for the accompanying heat.

But the feelings feel different this time

It’s a strange mix of yearning and guilt

Being the perpetrator and not the victim

Being the loved not the lover

Being the one who didn’t stay

The one who didn’t say.

And now that I feel this

I feel it’s good to have overlooked, over loved, over cared in the past

Because this guilt,

This burgeoning ball of guilt

Makes me feel I have fallen

With no arms to catch me,

Because I had cut them myself.

A summer day

I lost myself on a summer day
Where the wind blew
But the mind stayed
My life flashed before my eyes
Burgeoning dreams and a million sighs
The hands that I had let go of
The ones that left mine
And I came to a revelation
After a couple of desperate tries
I tried so hard to let someone in
Through the walls of fortresses I had built
But in the end all I know
Is only the art of letting go !

© P.G.

A tale of halves

I loved people in halves

I liked his smile more

His voice less

And when the other’s baritone cooed

I like the person he was even less

I loved people in halves

I loved someone’s stature

Loved other’s might

And when in the end I had to choose

In loneliness I chose to reside

I wonder why it was like this

Why my heart couldn’t love

(Fully)

Was it battle scars from previous lovers?

Was it childhood trauma?

Or was it solely

And only

Because i myself had always been loved in halves.

Some liked my smile

Some pulled my cheeks

Some like my banter

Some just liked how I made them feel

But every time it got ugly

And bruises popped up in places I showed them my past’s lair

They ran –

They ran like there was no tomorrow

They ran like a person didn’t exist beyond good times and good words

And all the nights I was left to pick pieces alone

I learnt to build myself in halves

I learnt to love people in halves.

Lost in the city

The password to my phone is still my best friend’s birthday
Who still won’t call me up when she knows I’m in town
Just like the whole past year

The place on the parapet where i used to sit is filled with new plants
(More plants)
Maybe my mother found foliage as an adequate replacement to an absent daughter

Everything looks picture perfect
Yet everything feels hollow
The town that gave me birth now tells me I don’t belong here

The aunties pick on the new colors in my hair
While I shade card the green in their eyes
I feel bare even with the extra clothes I have donned to fit into their small town minds

Some ask me what I did there
Some ask me what I’m doing here (matchmaking, perhaps?!)
A year seems a unit of distance and not time, when the people you held dear don’t know how to welcome you anymore.

The roads are filled with dirt and gravel
I call it indignation
The dwellers call it slow progress to a “smart city” as the city chokes me with forgetfulness and dust

I have forgotten all the ways I lost my heart in
I’m scared to leave my house
(To lose the last resemblance to what feels like home)


When did it become like this?
When did I lose all traces of me in me?
Or is it blessed amnesia
Keeping me from the pain of the past
(Sigh)
Guess I would never know
For I tried finding myself so much in foreign cities
That I got lost in the very city I grew up in.

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