We underestimate how places feel about people.

We underestimate how places feel about people. We forget the angles we left our chairs turned to, when we left the office- those chairs carried on our conversations about the files due Monday and Mrs. Preisley's date with Jerry last Friday. Apparently she found a ring in her glass of wine and spilled the drink on poor Jerry's face, only to realize the waiter delivered it to the wrong table. The ring in the glass had developed a severe crush on the wine's taste and didn't quite appreciate the perpetual smell of cabbage on the fingers of where it finally sat encircled.

We really do underestimate how places feel about people. This world has an arrogant charm of its own; it makes us feel very...small. Showing us surreal escapades of people around us and foxily hiding away the transience of it all. The world feeds on one momentary pleasure a time with each trampled heart that seeks validation of atleast ten people around him. He doesn't even realize how many times those ten people use the word 'I' in a day and doesn't consider the quiet corners of his humble bedroom sheltering his crunched up balls of paper which reek of a forgotten dream saying "I will".
He forgets the first time he learned to eat noodles with chopsticks without spilling some on the white rug, he forgets when his mom walked into him masturbating in bed when he was 14- he forgets his room saw him in a black suit for his first funeral, he forgets his room saw him stark naked with a bowl of grapes right below his stomach watching television. He forgets how many times the reflection of his lean body flashed by or stayed on the mirror, catching his eyes look unamused, his hair disheveled or his lips chapped.
He remembers to hide in his room but he forgets he doesn't hide from it.

It's really not just him, we do underestimate how places feel about people.

He spends atleast 6 hours every night pushed against his white pillows, so intimate as if trying to hear truths about his souls and demons through its soft bumps and depressions. He abandons it each morning and doesn't consider the angst of the cushion when he climbs out of bed, not so much as gives a second glance back. The pillow lies dejected  and used like a stagnant walk of shame after an intoxicated Saint Peter's night.

He doesn't hear the girl next to him hum to the song blasting from the bus radio because he spends the entire journey trying to move both his ears without changing his facial expression. He found the song foolish and mainstream Bollywood and decided the chronicles of his ear and their movement was an idea worthy of exploration. Once he left his seat at his stop, his seat lay unmoved and cold devoid the warmth of a human rear; "Cold soul"; the seat remarked, the universe agreed. The girl next to it kept humming.

We underestimate how places feel about people. Swearing and elbowing through our days, cutting lines, falling asleep in metros, getting over hangovers by staying drunk; objects and spaces remain lifeless to us, coping with our incorrigible  narcissism of only taking humans seriously. The universe cracks up at that every time.

Shy sunbathed corridors, tucked away backyard gardens with pumpkins growing in them, the rays of light through glass windows in empty college lecture halls, confetti and shiny wrapping paper balled into garbage cans after a birthday party; we arrogantly forget to notice the details of our everydays because we can only hear ourselves breathe and rely on empty critiques of people we want to believe know us too well.

Imagining what spaces we exist in every single day of our lives would say about us? "Now there's a ridiculous thought", said every human ever.

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How've you pumpkins been? :)
Love,
Nil. 

Elijah.

Like a sudden raspy slap of the coldest swirl of air- her face haunted me, displacing each an every element of stability within me. My flesh grew pale, though the blood within never felt warmer. It was like a sudden rude grip by unnaturally long fingers around my neck, I do not understand how a face can be so hauntingly beautiful. It ruined me for life.
Her brows stayed home, though the lingering questions escaped the chilly calm on her face with just a tinge of a smile. I refuse to understand how her body, so white like a possessed corpse could seem so alive with the unabashed inactivity in her character- by just standing there with those piercing eyes, she was ruling my existence. If moments could bleed, this would be it. 

Her lank poker straight hair plastered the contours of her oval face like a wedding ring too tight for a finger. The streetlamp on top of her head made a halo of her frail figure that stood too strong, too tall to go unnoticed in the nocturnal camouflage of the snoring night. She was the literary equivalent of star dust, she said.  
Somewhere in the throbbing veins of her hand, I heard a universe call and somehow I believed it really did exist.

Ghosts, spirits, demons and angels seemed like myths of the past that crawled away, intimidated by this Mother of Zeus- if we were all to be thin air, she would be chariot swirling the sky.
So harshly real, emitting a flow-charted insanity of sort- I was left crippled, impotent- a wounded soldier whose words were slashed by hers even before I could conjure a thought. 

Nationalities, religions, myths and epics failed to define her aura that was like a walking aurora in the middle of a battlefield with bleeding men and parts of scattered limbs around dynamites. Her presence was so raw, that you lament over the inexplicable reality of her tenderness.

She churned my insides in a way that would set the democracy of my ideas on fire and would establish the anarchy of my emotions.   

And yet what I felt was the casually tossed idea of wanting to die because you were just that happy. And perhaps, right then I realized the original difference between happiness and elation.
I felt the pores of my flesh, the pores of my soul, the pores of my eyes widen up like open gashes of wounds and found healing in the nakedness of my armors- armors of my flesh, armors of my soul and the armors of my eyes.

I stood right there, once the moment had ended, and the sprinkles of its blood shone in the creases of my fingers. The bones of her haunt made a moment bleed, which is now. 

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Something I wrote for the Poetry Slams I've been doing the past few months. You guys are beautiful, to have stuck around :)
I'll be back soon, I just can't tell when.

-After a long time,
Nil.