afterparty
at this point, it is so embarrassing to even say that i am in love.
do i even have the right to use the word, love? it feels like i have sinned myself to have used it so much like complimentary tea served at pretentious academic gatherings.
it is almost as if i am standing butt-naked in the middle of the street when i say hey i am in love. again.
the embarrassment is not in confiding to your friends. it is the truth that you tell yourself.
how long can one not look at the mirror and say okay, this is love.
(i do not even have the balls to say that i am in love so i say it in the passive voice)
i am so disgusted with the word that i don’t even want to use it for the rest of this, if i may call it, a rant(?)
when you are born, and if you are welcomed being the girl child you are born as you are showered with all the love in this world. and then, even before you know it, you are looking for the feeling of being wanted at every space you exist.
you want to ask your mother, maa, does love evaporate? maa, why does your smile never reach your eyes? maa, do i become like you or do i become like baba?
you spend a quarter of your life molding, shaping and breathing life into the fragments of imagination you create out of every person who touches your soul. and then, poof! one day, when you are twenty-three, with only a glass of rum to keep you warm, you gaze from your too big of a room, at the moving silhouettes of people making homes in each other in neighbouring windows, and you say to yourself, where did all the love go?
at thirteen, love meant every Bollywood song i listened to. at twenty-four, it still is all those same Bollywood songs! but a few things have changed.
at sixteen, love was beggary.
at eighteen, you show your body as an act of loving and to be loved.
at twenty, love was narcissistic. you do this for me, i do that for you. (you don’t? well, fuck you).
at twenty-three, love made you knock at every door, and ask, why can’t you love me?
now at twenty-four, the word is like a used paper cup lying in my bedroom’s corner. it’s like the party is over, and i am still hungover. it’s just me and this paper cup with a crescent-shaped lipstick mark on its brim. it is a souvenir from my yesterday.
and then there he is.
it’s as if i left the door ajar after the party was over, and he chose to enter. he picked up the paper cup and placed it on my lap. he sat beside me. i heaved a sigh. we didn’t hold hands. instead, i held the cup and he just breathed into the space between us.
the Bollywood songs stopped playing in my head, for a while. poetry seemed superficial. social media content on love reminded me of cheap makeup.
there is something in that space between our bodies. is it the memory of innocence, i wonder. and thank goodness, it is not the butterflies. or a spark. i can’t explain, but i can only say, after having perceived that, i vouch to write more truthfully from now. and probably, with much less anger.
but if i were to explain, and if you had to imagine, i would ask you to think about the shape of your palms around a warm cup of coffee. the safety between you and the book lying on your lap. the intimacy between your bare feet and the warm, moist sand.
it is not too soon. it is not it is what it is. it just is.
like this rant which made it so far without needing any metaphors like an Arctic Monkey song :P
