For blanks and spaces

|{What do you do with the people who live inside you? The lost souls who once swam across the canvas of the universe before they found a home in you and never left. The screams they brought with them, the laughter they kept hidden in the corner of your lips, the whispers of love & life they leaked into your dreams… what about the shivers of their torment that run up your spine, or the grief of their betrayals that echoed in the song you sung. What do you do with the people who live inside you? Soaked in the colourless void of being left alone, battling with the coddling need of affection, biting their listless tongues so you could breathe. What do you do with the people who live inside you? Ravaging through your chest cavity they keep your fears hidden in treasure boxes they made with their own languid hope. They cradled your sorrows when you stood at the edge and stared down at the world you wanted to crash into, the world that was swallowing you whole. Pretending to hold each other close they sewed your faith together. 
What would you do without the people who live inside you?}

For the soul and its skin..

Illustrator : Akageno Saru 

|{A world was created… palpitating at the edges of its existence, bawling out into the subconscious of the universe… a world was created. Of everything benign in thought and tragic in action. It was created with the sands of hypothesis, with the gait of a steady master but an excitable pupil. It was blank till it was colored. And the colors became the blanks the world etched on its very membrane. It took generations and many universes to fill these blanks.
And what was created out of beauty, out of love began to taint like the ripe throbbing of a heart been turned away too many times. Color – an expression of free spirit and wonder, became a dividing line of bad and worse. Color became the death of oneness, it became the death of unison.
Further on it’s membrane, the world found thin pockets that stretched and tore. Pockets of difference; pockets that loved the world but hated its skin. Pockets that understood justice but didn’t agree with the law; pockets that comforted love but not its gender, pockets that rose from a place of oneness – a place that the world had forgotten existed. The world ate at itself, gnawing away at its skin, creating little tears in its wake.
And so through these little tears the soul of the world started escaping, back to where it came from, back to the edges of creation. And all the beautiful colors began to fade; all the pockets began to tear with ecstatic lunacy for their cage was finally yielding.

So when you feel an ache in your soul, for a difference you haven’t lived but a discrimination that makes your cry and break; a discrimination that makes you question your privilege… Don’t be anxious. Hold on to your tiny heart and breathe in the world, you little adventurer. For you are already halfway across to breaking out of its skin. You are returning to the womb.}

For virility and balcony break-ups

|{And there it was, the plain truth hiding beneath his web of complicated lies. It was simple and it stung his tongue as he spoke it, “I don’t exactly care how you feel. I don’t want to care. Don’t make this one of those sappy romcoms you keep watching. If you think this is love, you’ll have to be happy being the only one participating. Do you understand?” He wondered when and how had he become so ruthless. Where had his innocent, beating heart given in to the pressure of being a ‘man’, of making nonchalance an art form. He rose like a tumultuous storm and made his way out of that sun kissed balcony. Grey clouds were quickly rushing to his temperamental aid.

She stood in the balcony, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Her cheeks were burning red, like she had just been slapped, but her attention was held by her cuticles. A guttural rumble forced her to look at the sky. Storm was coming.

He was sitting on the toilet, tugging at his collar and wiping his forehead. He stood up and paced, then decided to sit back down. His mind was wandering faster than he could keep track. He thought of his elder brother and he thought of the times he had to prove to his parents that his elder brother had beaten him blue. He shrugged that feeling off – it was a heavy feeling. He thought of his father, back from a long and tiring day of mediocrity. He thought of the days when his father had walked in on the boys fighting and decided to break the fight up with his leather belt. And he thought of his mother. All he really could muster was her braid snaking across her back while she cooked and ignored the mayhem.

She knocked on the bathroom door. He stirred and sat up. She asked faintly, “How long are you going to be in there?” He pushed his hair back, buttoned his shirt properly and opened the door. Her eyes had no sign of tears or desperation. He searched them, looking for a moment of vulnerability, a moment of helplessness but she blinked with confusion. “Excuse me”, she made her way past him and picked out the purple toothbrush. Thrusting it in his hand she said, “I will be happy. It will be painful and it will take sometime but I’ll get over it. I don’t care what this makes me sound like, but I really did give my 100%, I really did want this to work and I really did think this is… was love. Whatever it was, it was good enough but I think you should probably go now. Before either of us lose our clarity and start something stupid again. Thank you though, for being man enough to tell me the truth”

There it was. Another plain truth and god knows that’s all his tiny heart had the courage for. How could he have done the ‘manliest’ thing and still felt his virility get punched in the face by a pair of big brown eyes?}