Maps

Let your soul travel till the veins on your wrists start to look like subway lines.
Let your heart wander till the sound of church bells in different cities start to sound like a song.
Fall in travel, before you fall in love, because only the ones who have wandered can tell when they are home.
Kiss lips of strangers and fill your mouths with them till you realize that you are swallowing little parts of them and you are changing to become a sum total of each one of them.
You’ll understand why your dreams don’t really make a lot of sense. It’s because they aren’t yours alone. There are other stakeholders.The ones who are responsible to make you tuck your hair behind your ears the way you do today. They are the people who take a hit in someway when you decide to stop breathing. You affect them like they have affected you.
What’s wrong and right, dear stranger? Do we really get to decide anything after all? Have we not been decided for already? It’s funny how we think twice before we choose the flavor of ice cream but for once don’t question the course of our lives.
Therefore, travel. Find out if travelling is overrated. Find out if people can really change you. Find out if maps are nothing but tricks to make you lose your mind, because travelling is a paradox, like art. No matter how much of it you’ve done, you’ve not done it enough.

Travel, in your own little ways. Travel till you don’t smell like your perfume but like your conscience. Travel till the lines on your palms remind you of maps and not of fate. Exhaust yourself. Become and un-become a traveler,because there is no particular city in which one should die. We should die a little and live a little as we move on from one world to another, until we all begin to look like maps.

Her name

You’ll never find her.

She’s changed her name.

She’s changed like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, only backwards.

She’s changed her perfume,
praying to God that the smell you think of when you suddenly wake up at 3:30 AM is not hers anymore.

She’s changed her eye color,
so that even if someday you chance to look into them, a different her looks back at you.

She got the piercing off,
so that every time she looks in the mirror, she isn’t reminded of how you did drugs off her belly button.

She’s changed her address,
so that even if you knock, it’s not the right door.

She’s not your graveyard anymore,
where you can go and pretend to die when you feel like shit.

She’s just gone. She’s lost information.

She’s changed her name.
You’ll never find her.

.

Hence, words.

I haven’t been able to write anything in a long time. Honestly, I’ve missed writing, and I hope it has missed me back too. When I write something, I keep typing furiously looking at the keypad of my laptop, trying in tiny efforts that get extinguished within the blink of an eye to convince myself that it is as good as writing with a pen and paper in hand. As I finish typing each word off, I realize it isn’t good enough.

It isn’t good enough because the words come easy here. It didn’t take me one complete second to write down the word ‘Love’, or two and a half seconds to etch the words ‘He repaired me.’ permanently onto paper. It didn’t take my hands the effort to glide over the rough paper and move along the curves of the alphabets. I didn’t have to lift my hands every time I wrote my ‘i’s’ to put the little dot on the top.

So I do realize that it’s a compromise. A big one indeed.

Writing down makes you realize the immensity of the sentiment that went behind in associating meanings to the words. If you look at it, at the end of the day, words on paper are ultimately representation of sounds that have come to mean something to us over the years. If you keep going back to the start, in the end, nothing would mean anything. No one knew what the word ‘meaning’ meant at the beginning of things. In the end, it is all a big oxymoron.

I’m talking about the importance of the words on paper. Where am I writing about it? Well, on my laptop. So I do realize that I’m a severe hypocrite.

But there is one thing I’ll always realize over and over again.

We needed to explain each other what we feel in our silences. Hence, words. We needed to know things other than silence, in order to truly recognize what silence really was at the beginning of things. Hence, words. We needed to remember over centuries how our souls communicate truly only in moments of absolute silence. Hence, words. We needed to understand someday that no matter how many words you write on paper, there is never going to be a complete translation of thoughts. Words never capture everything. We needed something to remind us that in the end, our only language is silence and everything else is just a charade. But for every truth to exist, there also must exist a lie. If there were no words, would we ever know what silence was. Hence, words.

I needed to do something about that feeling in my heart when he looked at me. I needed to give it some tangible form so that it could take the silence from my heart and put it safely in his. The only legitimate thing I could ever exchange was silence. But what do I trust my silence with? I can’t trust silence in the hands of silence. There are so many silences floating around him. What if he picked up the silence from some other person who doesn’t feel about him the way I do? That is why I entrusted my silence in something else. Something that distance could carry without attenuating sentiments beyond repair. Hence, words.