And then there were stories....

So many stories and yet, they all come together as this one thing. One thing that happens to us, it all culminates and unfathomably ropes and tangles and tightens through the lived years.

Where do I see myself in the golden years? I ask myself that often, seems like if we do get rewarded that time, we should be able to spend it like gems and gold coins... very wisely, savor each moment like drinking the elixir of life.

It will have all led to this, these final years of work done, on this planet. Spent on a beach at times and in a snowy mountain cabin more, because I love mountains more than beaches. Staring out at the sun and at the valley, at the ripples of sea water and cascading waterfalls. Breathing in life and breathing out regrets, they don't matter really, the regrets.

Yes, dear Dream, the idea of you has aged well, I crave you in the middle age and I will carry you into the golden years too. My muse, my thought partner, my sounding wall.

You and I both on the porch of that cabin staring into the wilderness, you and I both on that beach sometimes, marveling at the golden sand and ripples of waves and shells, and salty air and aging skin and creaky bones and rheumy eyes and sweet regrets in between, no, it will not matter the oldness, I feel like it will be agelessness more so.... to sit on the edge of time, to dive off into the unknown and what comes after.

I caught a rainbow today.

 Early morning, while driving to work. I caught (saw/experienced) a rainbow, a perfect one at that, while it drizzled the rainbow formed sharper and more clear ....

I caught it in my sight and locked it in my soul. A fleeting moment of beauty. 

In all the gratitude I feel towards life as I grow older, another annotation, to witness the rainbow :)

Dream a dream of a dream

A recurring dream, I have had it for years now. Every few months it makes an appearance. I am back there in time, where lies all that I fear, where all hopes sprang, where my roots still are.

I am standing on my side of the wall, looking up at that window, trying to catch a glimpse and I can't.
Its shadowy, its humid, its aromatic with moss and dampness, it smells of those years, so well preserved in deep memory.

The anticipation of seeing you, I don't know why it means so much. Somewhere in time a wrinkle happened that remained forever and on its underside everything remains as it was. I have it preserved forever in this dream I keep having.

In this dream, I am still a child and I am awed by you, why you though? I will never be able to make sense of that ... ever. For some reason in you I saw that need for connection. I always need to be the doer, I need to be the one giving comfort even when I need comforting myself (maybe that is one "positive" byproduct of being a borderline control freak??)

Could we have made a difference big enough to create ripples in the surface of time?
Why can I not help thinking there is a vital piece of puzzle that I hold, which if ever completed by your half will change our world forever, at least the part that affects us. Its a secret that was created in our youth, it is hope as precious as gold.

I have to start again , the writing that is...

Things need to be noted down for a reason I cant really articulate.

Life passes by and years get added on and things change perspective so often, you start wondering what even is all this? It is something profound and notes need to be taken, records need to be made and lessons need to learnt.

It is fascinating, the distance you traverse, within yourself and geographically and from who you used to be. The valleys of fear and the peaks of exhilaration. Oceans in between the knowing and the unknown.

But as said before, I have to start writing it all down...

 

Flashes from the past some moments frozen in golden amber of memory
that crazy boy with huge eyes of pooled hope and dreams
Dark honey colored saccharine page from the past

Hurt blue colored shoes in a store window
Never bought but remembered forever
Sepia pink colored summer evenings of warm breathing and fragrant air
Early morning sunshine-yellow colored shoes owned and worn
Like sunny smiles on my feet

Color to remember you by
purple yearning with a touch of peach and a little lavender thrown in
If we could touch colors and devour them too
Would you see me as a crimson tinged with pale gold, with a hint of shimmer?
Would you taste it on your lips and feel it in your soul

To hold another captive in a mind's prison
To hold them up to light and try to decipher
To dissect what each thought means
to try to understand meaning of life
All futile just like colors cannot be tasted and you still know the taste
You kept them on your tongue and they just melted away.

You.

Like an old bathrobe

With no significance in the right now and  right here

Like an old blanket that provided warmth once a long time ago

Now worn through  ... only memories holding it together

Yes, like that, I still pull you out from a treasure box of sorts

I remember you like you probably never were

Only me, that is who I am looking for and all that I survived because of an idea that was you

I see your sepia tinged image, a twinkle of your eyes, a broad toothy smile

A simple joy of being there with my imagination of you

A cozy cocoon of foraged pieces of dry grass, some fly away wool and shreds of cotton from a near by cotton tree - that was the nest we lived in, the utopia of an imaginative mind that often has platinum resilience

Have I thanked you before, have I thanked you enough?

Let me do it now, ritual and all, let me put some incense and bring flowers too

Let me reminisce for a while, say a prayer or two

Then I can close the memory book and try to refrain, until I feel the need to pray for your presence again

Eye of a Storm

Building a home in the eye of a storm

Isn't that what we all do time and again

And the one that chooses to live in it with us

Weathers it all in the name of faith is the one

The one meant for you, the one meant to be

Making you smile and laugh like it doesn't matter

When outside the sky is falling down

The storm is hitting its hardest

And you cant hear it at all

All because they chose to stay, when no one else would

All because they chose to stay to wait it out with you

All because they built a home in the eye of a storm with you... for you...

 

SOS into the Universe.

Tear soaked SOS into the universe
A sixteen year old broken, torn and beautiful imagination
Remember do you, being on the edge of the world with it twirling crazily behind your heart?

Dreams that made no sense at all
The yearning so single minded, it blew all realms to smithereens
Remember do you, being so young you could fall apart and come together all at once?

Language of the hands and eyes
Maybe some lips, but no words whatsoever could define
Remember do you, the gasping and sighing of becoming more than you ever thought possible?

Love songs? Are you kidding me?
They were more than that
They were life songs, the reason for living, the right of the young, the ritual of the old, the being, just being, the opposite of which is, not being at all.

Every girl.

It was written in the sand sometime long ago
It was never meant to be
The pink gold of the summer evening
The scented night mist
The heat rising off the now cooling sea
Just as the moon made his appearance
She was sitting there by herself
Half lit in the moonlight
She thought that pain was just an euphemism for life
It meant nothing to be bought or sold
She would rise again like a sphinx, she would scale the flight of the mighty and bold
She was every girl
She thought it was only written in the sand
It was never meant to be
It was the feeling of shimmering silver dust raining from the sky
The feeling of being so alive
The transcendent belief in after life
The cry of the possibilities.

Maybe I dreamed it all up...

Sitting up in my window staring at the dusty street. The air was thick always, even late at night no matter what season. The hum of the traffic was also a constant, yes even late at night. I used to sit on the ledge of my bedroom window and look out into the distance, where I knew the sea was. Yeah I had my own slice of the ocean view that I could see in the day time and hear its gentle writhing at night. I imagined the ocean was changing sides as it slept. I loved that ocean, in a city full of people, where vagrants set up home absolutely on every piece of land they could find, the ocean was untouchable, open space straight into eternity. The ocean, my ocean, was also available to one and all to stroll, to walk, to simply space out as I often did on the beach. It had a distinct smell, salty, sharp and desperation, well may be it was just me the desperation part.

It was a love and hate thing I had going on with that wretched city. I loved it as that was all I ever knew. The city was like a big bad wolf, an abusive lover, and I knew how to live with it. I also knew where to find comfort and when to run and where to hide if the lover turned nasty and cruel. After all it was home. On some level you accepted what it did to you, it made you feel tough, it made you grow up and it did all that by crushing all your dreams, one dream at a time. But no sir not my dreams, I learned then not to dream at all, you could imagine things, but on a purely external level like good things could never happen to you. But mainly you watched on taking some sick pleasure in all that pain.Yeah the city made a masochist out of you.

I wanted out. As far back as I can remember, I wanted out. I would imagine Utopia (a place like paradise, full of light and love). A lush green haven, to heal my soul inside and out. A place to lick my wounds and set up camp. Where I could dream to my hearts content. I wanted to breath deep lung full of pure air, I wanted to sit on a sea shore that had crystalline waters that resembled life and not tears. I wanted to smell hope. I wanted it all. I would look back out of my window at the city of doom, as if from out looking in and envisioned what the end of the world would look like, it would probably look like this city on any given day.

My city, I am my city, I am a masochist and I cannot help it. I am now where I longed to be, I am in the Utopia I imagined all along. I was so sure I would never make it. The city wouldn't let me go I thought to myself, but it did, but did it really? I carry it in here where my soul lives, I am cynical, I look all around me and grab at sunshine, not believing that this will last. I breath like a greedy child, I take in pure air like I cannot trust I will get my next lungful. I take picture after picture after picture of crystalline waters and crushed pearl sands, just in case I go back into the grey desperation and these pictures are all I have as a proof that once I was here, in this Utopia and I did not just dream it all up.

Magic of Ordinary Days

Spring days as they melt into Summer days,
Huge bright moon at night hanging low over the lake
and fragrant blooms everywhere
Nothing is out of ordinary and still it is all magical

Cherry Tree

Looking at the sky through cherry blossoms, the nature's rose tinted glasses

through the lacy pink, at the blue sky

Looking at the world through cherry blooms

everything is better then

the spring is here, its back

the winter wasn't bad though,

anyway the newness is welcome, the spring is here

the cherry tree is blooming and juicy wonderful words are simply forming, dripping and pooling around the subconscious

The tree doesn't have any leaves at all its all pink, all flowers all girlish and crazy like happiness

like hope, like love, like faith

Looking at the dreams through cherry branches laden and raining flowers

they are dreams themselves

All sweet and fragrant and nostalgic

First time I saw one, a flowering cherry tree that is

It drove me into childish glee to just look at it

Looking at the yesterdays through cherry memory

so young, so fresh, cherry lips yours and mine

Young us feeling our way through each step of new discovery

House

Imagine living here in this house surrounded by wild flowers and thistle
Imagine the sound of the rustling wind and aroma of the sea..
Hot damn yeah, its next to the sea and the mountains and the foggy, salty decadence of simple complexity thats beauty.

I imagine living here as an old old woman, being as wise as the old sea outside. The house will be filled with herb pouches and potpourri, that makes the inside of this house smell exotic like the outside does. I will make hot soups for meals and type out stories from my youth. I will laugh at my regrets and smile at love lost and found along the many paths I took.
I will look outside the window when the wind howls out and the house shakes and listen to the words of the beating tides. The petals flying from wild flower garden will cast magical spells that will carry me beyond imagination, where surreal becomes real.
How can a house say so many things, how can a structure have such a pull? Every time I come here it is like the house calls out, as if it knows me from somewhere or is that some time?? Or may be in the far off future it will get to know me? Is it possible to fall in love with places, houses, wild flower gardens, ocean, salty wind and the mystic fog? I believe that to be true and dear house I'm in love with you....

Intoxicated.

The taste and texture it dances on your tongue, Its like sipping the color, the burgundy red of the wine. And then there is the white one, so tame and uneventful, the taste just doesn't register with me, I don't feel the excitement of drinking the color.

The whole act is crazy magical, the uncorking, the teeny sweet sound of pouring the celestial liquid color, red red red of the mystical red wine. Then swirling it around in the sparkling glass and holding it up in the air into the light to see the color, and anticipate the taste, the taste of the color burgundy.

And as if the whole sensory carnival isn't enough, there is the woman who is pouring it, she is beautiful, with a musical voice as she says things like "fruity, with a hint of spice and velvety overtones marked by sensual smoky base", you had no clue a moment ago what any of that meant, let alone in one single sentence, but right then you want to understand as you sip from the color burgundy.  

The vineyard is on the mountain top and the air is mountain fresh air, the smell is that of fruity spicy quality and you don't need the actual wine to get intoxicated. You feel the color burgundy inside and out and feel light as a kite and flying high as one too.

Haven.

While you were gone
I just lay there staring at the walls and the ceiling
The void, the vacuum that was everything when you weren't in it

Feeling denied of the life force itself
Adrift on an empty ocean of nothing
While you were gone I recited songs of sorrow
Songs so painful they they never made sense

You didn't ask for much
You never expected anything
You liked me for all I was and you loved me more for my flaws
It doesn't seem like asking a lot from anyone
But that's where it is so deceptive
The seductive high to be loved like this, its addictive

While you were gone I realized
Life as I knew it
Existed because you made it possible
To take one day at a time and weather it
You created a haven, for a run away soul like mine

From a battle that went on too long
For wars that were never meant to be won
For nightmares that were more than real
While you were gone I wondered, if you would return at all
While you were gone I thanked you anyway for getting me this far

Highway through Nevada

Dry heat and scrubby fields. Silver stark naked sky, not a cloud in sight. And the moon hung there a burnished gold ball of need. The trees that silhouette in the moonlight look like deliberate cutouts, like apparitions of themselves thin, twiggy and ... desperate woman souls of ages past.

Driving to Vegas through this landscape feels like a journey through a tunnel of extremely painful pleasure. You open the window of your car and and you can smell it, the aroma of the desert. The description of a beautiful haunting desperation.

You can easily imagine a a tiny home somewhere there among the scrubby fields, a newly wed couple that live there and try hard to make ends meet. She is a raven beauty and he is an intense sort of a cowboy. Their home is a dilapidated little place with broken window panes and creaking doors. But each night in the gorgeous desert wind it transforms into a paradise. Then one day he comes home after a hard day's work and finds her gone...gone forever with someone else with more money in search of an easier life. He sits alone in the house with no lights on, only the moon light from the copper moon sweeping in through the open door and the windows.

The pain he feels is a sound of the coyote cries in the far away distance, the warm desert wind and the moonlit glow.

I am always on the look out for the cowboy time and time again when I travel through Nevada, I keep trying to spot him in the dark distances.

This is the way I feel all the way until the dark dark night is suddenly split to shreds by the blinding lights of Vegas, the territory of the raven beauty. This is where she lets it all down, her guard, her shame, her inhibitions. She reigns here in all her glory, writhing in eternal seduction, and wanting more and more and more ...

She is bejeweled and more glorious than the sun. He is lonely and aching and he is the desert himself.

Escape Artist

I am an escape artist

Just call me the Queen of 'De-Nile'

I slither through the reality like a wisp of smoke before the fire

Autumn days like now and here

Pressed tight to my being

Numerous rainy days persevered

Many years lived and learnt

Forgetting is an art

Remembering is a skill

I exist between both of those

Where fantasy unravels her wings

So here we go again, I remember a day a long long time ago. It was an evening and I was on the beach. Walking through tiny rivulets at the very edge where waves would just touch and go.

I was with a friend. Both of us teenaged girls full of dreams. We talked and talked about random things. Just imagining what the future would be like, being so scared of the unknown, but excited even more by it.

Do you remember dear friend the time we spent being crazy together. The way we rebelled and dared and defied boundaries together.

I still can remember the smell of the cigarettes you smoked, and I tried too but I never could. I never really swallowed the smoke and exhaled it too soon. I remember your false bravado. The desperation to finish the pack before you went home. You never became a smoker, so what the hell was that all about. I know it now, it was rebellion, to break free of the ties that hold a girl back from being a girl.

I remember being girls. How vulnerable we were. Do you sometimes look back and ache for what was, do you hold it in your memory like the inheritence of youth, the privelege we shared.

Do you remember getting drunk on gin and laughing till we thought our jaws would freeze that way. Where are you dear friend, I talk to your shell from time to time, but the pearl within is gone. Is this what grown up you is now?

So when do you laugh because it feels like it

When do you make up silly stories about things that might be.

You scare me now, I am starting to feel you never really existed, that I made you up..like everything else I did at the time.

Or is true and I can flatter myself, that I made you be like that because I reflected in you....whatever it is I miss you....girlfriend..

Mumbai Saga

I went to Mumbai after ages, may be I let too much time slip away, between then and
now. But I felt the disconnect very harshly. My mind and eyes kept searching for spaces that did not exist anymore. Every corner I took I expected to see something that wasnt there anymore. But then again whatever I was looking for was it ever there, or even back then it was just an 'impossible imagined'.

Where there was angry red

I saw incredible hues of copper

Where there were hard edges I saw shimmery crystalline lines

I saw beauty because I felt it

I was young, I was naive

But I still regret nothing

For then I was capable of imagining the impossible...

Now its a heap, a dusty heap of unwashed remains, of stories told over and over, of afternoons that scorch and nights not cool enough.

Over crowded than my most wildest imagination, there are no corners to hide in, no spaces to dissolve your thoughts into. Its walls upon walls of breathing human flesh, striving to survive.

Then again, places and faces change all the time, based on our own perceptions.

So when I walked those streets again I tried to be who I was..

A long ago girl with wide brown eyes

Wild crazy streak that frightened herself too

a song that went nowhere, nowhere near the truth

A long ago girl with syrupy dreams of dew

Hazy lonely afternoons and wasted summer nights

A long ago girl searching for divine
Walking on the streets and reaching for the stars

Her thoughts like tumbleweed made of leaves and grass and straw

A long ago girl, long since forgotten

Like the city that swallowed her whole

A long ago want, a long ago need, a long ago taste of the salty bitter sweet..

Spinner of golden silk yarns

Tell me a story in your honeyed voice
Let it wash over me, one word at a time.
In your rumbling tone.

Tell it like, you mean it.
Every emotion intact.
Make it flow into sentences that will wrap my being, around your little finger.

Make words out of feelings, make them golden with your voice
Tell me a story never ever told before.
When dawn of the world was crispy fresh, when you and I were never there
You heard it from a wise old man, a story that changed you forever since then

Describe her laughter, that girl you loved, tell me exactly how she looked at you when she hurt
Tell me then how you said goodbye to the best thing that had ever happened to you
Tell me then, give me the reason why you had to leave to conquer the world not the one out there but the one you hid within

Tell me a tale that doesnt even pretend to explain it all
Tell me the tale thats a journey in itself, where destination is a mirage to begin with, its the story thats important, it holds you, it moulds you its designs your faith

Tell me that story in your drunken barritone
make me shiver from the anticipation
Shatter every myth I ever held about love, life and beyond
tell me your story with your eyes half closed, your lips moving like an angels
Make me unlearn what I have learnt before this story you tell me now
It never really mattered the yesterdays before today that are long since gone

Tell it to me over and over, let it wash over me
like a high tide of sequences in other peoples lives
episodes of scenes palyed out like intricate filigree

I love your stories you story teller you
I love the decadence in your simple truths
all it takes to make me feel,
feel like a human thats lived for centuries atleast,
like a half burnt firewood waiting for rekindling
Its your story of infinite stories,braided together in your wistful gaze as if you see it happening all over again.

Journey

Its just you and me baby
And dont for even a moment you ever forget it
We have come a long way together
Its been hard sometimes, but even that was fun, come on admit it

We were so many different people all through the years
Right from the city called Mumbai to right now and right here
It was like reincarnation each time we moved along
Fighting and laughing and fighting some more
Like two wildly fluttering flags of freedom in high winds bound deeply together

We will still find ourselves there in the dark sweaty, crazy, starry, windy monsoons of Mumbai
Two clueless young people on edge of reality
Talking to be heard and screaming for understanding
Needing one another so much, it felt like insanity
You and me baby, two hard headed peas in a pod

Then on to new places in a wintery frigid, snowy, drafty, spectacular, Minesotta
Remember will you, the optical illusions
Of fighting for space and cuddling wasn't close enough
The summers, the springs, the rose gardens
And unfailingly returning winter, the wet shoes, the warm coats, hot chocolate

On and Ahead to the Granite State
The mountains, the valleys, the feathery, lacy snow
You and I fused together, no matter the words they werent needed anymore
The weekends in Maine, unspoilt secluded beaches
The walk in Portmouth, the coffehouse we would visit
You would drive for hours to get to these spots, cause they made me happy
How could I ever thank you for the wordless devotion you showered upon me

They all fuse together the other places we have been, be it Chicago or for a while in Big Apple
The Chicago windy gusts, us cowering on the north shore drive
walking like two crazy drunks to keep upright in the draft
Why did we do it, just because we could, deligently walking in a road made of snowy soup
The Manhattan crowds and gazing at famous buildings
Feeling so lost and yet secured with you beside me
Living in that place on Long Island, I waited all day long for you to return in the evening

So you see now its just you and me baby
Bound together soul to soul
We were so many different people in one life time alone
Now we are here on the far west coast
We walk in sunny, breezy, opulent San Francisco
You and I travellers of ages
Hand in Hand
Words dont need to make it to the lips
As long as we are together..