Queer in the city

I came to this beautiful and equally polluted city underprepared for a lot of things. I thought I'd sustain the changes of the past year and let life be as calm as it had been in the company of the supposed lifelong lover.
The surprises have been insane, the wait for the Uber rides so much longer, and cans of soda have never been more refreshing.
Parts of your being are traded back and forth as you juggle two beautifully fulfilling lives in two cities- coinciding halves that belong together but never make love with their eyes on each other.
I thought I knew people like me because college was a space where the queers are loud and proud. But here in a new city, with no tinder or grinder or queer meetups or rallies, I found my kind again. I made no sound.
Growing up and adulting have been the theme of the last few years, and it goes on here, too. In a new world with a new pace, queer lives are so different, and the issues so varied as the safe space of my experiences evolves into reality.
I had only known young adults fresh out of their teens, screaming for rights, and for the freedom to love and dress and act and behave and adore. Now I know older ones for the first time, and I see a quiet stillness that can only come after years of violent screaming at deaf human walls.
When the rage of the youth subsides, there's a calm on the surface of misunderstood and underexpressed hearts.
There are family phone calls that cannot be answered because how do you explain why you don’t want to think about settling down? You are already.
How do you answer why you broke a marriage? It felt like rape every night.
When the angry age of screaming about why you have to be yourself fades away gradually, the bones are left chilled with a relentless desire to stop having to explain. It’s exhaustion at it’s prime, and no afternoon naps with loving pats on the head seem to help.
Strangers seem more like home than those you work for, live for, die for- all in the space of the seconds that separate pleasure from an orgasm. The gap is a mere finger: Come for me; come to me.
A new city brings its own slangs. ‘Peaceful’ is how Bangalore rolls. So that's peaceful. Quiet. Calm. Not in the best way possible. But somewhere there.
Because when it rains and the clouds each have their silver lining showing from the sixth floor, I want to be a bird and not jump off the window wall that makes up the front of these buildings.
I know cigarettes are overdone and uncool. But sometimes they seem to be the link between North campus, Gurgaon, and Bangalore.
Share one with me?
Puff-puff-pass.
