Where love is Plenty

(1)

You don’t know what to say to me and show me a magic trick instead.
I don’t know what to say to you either, mostly.

It is quite lovely. Because you have exhausted all your childhood stories in the nights you spent with someone you loved, now gone. And so have I.

And we’re lying next to each other on the sand very careful not to hold hands. Because it changes nothing for a person who has to leave. And it’s easier to show love when you don’t have much to give. But when you do, it feels like how a tree might in the last few days of autumn — a drying skeleton of wood with not much life, but there is so much you’re soon going to be — you’ll be leaves, flowers, birds, a drizzle, a fruit. You can be life, a spring.

But you and I are similar. To let go has become easier than it is to hold on, for the both of us. And I don’t need to tell you this. Because your fingers lie as loose as mine. No tension or resistance.
You and I are similar because neither of us is looking for love, but only something that resembles love. We were not always like this. Once we were not the trees of the last few days of autumn but we were like an eternal spring. No, we were like children who play in those eternal springs:

We have loved like how children play in spring gardens — we went out too much with our naive wonderment, and fell face down in hectic afternoons only to come back inside when the sun had burnt our skin. But we went out again the next day and got burnt a little more. But it didn’t matter because the play was good. But slowly, every new burn started to hurt a little more and we were exhausted. You went out still, because the play was good. I went out still, until every burn left a shade of mark and so we became very careful of playing under the sun, and went out lesser, and lesser.
And so it’s true that you can’t burn out if you’re not on fire, but you can’t be on fire too long, and once burnt, playing out in the sun starts to hurt.
Loving you is like that.

And so we have already loved like how children play in spring but found each other standing under shade of a gulmohar tree with no flowers at a yellow traffic signal of a city shining under a march sun. But none of us had to pretend to like the sun, so we stayed. I didn’t have to say anything. I wrote my number on a leaf fallen next to our feet and handed it out to you.

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(2)

One day we’re in a bar on a less than ordinary Friday night and we’re four beers down. It took you the fifth beer and 3 months to finally tell me why you left the home you have known for so long and moved here, to the city of seas. You were running away from love. And that I can understand.
I am thinking very hard about what to say to you. I am rubbing my eyes trying to churn out the right look and the right words. In this moment, I don’t know how to be.
You and I are similar because none of us is looking for love, but only something that resembles love. We’ve spilled enough of it in our lives like coffee on white table cloths. And I don’t want to say anything that’s too much. I want to leave no stains. So I flip a coin and show you a cheap magic trick instead. It’s enough to make you laugh and I no more have to say what I really wanted to.

I wanted to tell you that I can’t save you, that there is no saving. Maybe because it amazes me how you carry your hurt with you like it still means a lot, but never let it show itself. And then sometimes you do, with your face soft with years of living. This is that moment and I want to tell you that saving is a trivial concept and these sack of painful words that we carry are like goods that labourers unload from trucks that transport them to different cities in the quite of night when everything important has stopped and the roads are free.

But I don’t tell you anything, and you’re just as happy. It’s easy to love someone who doesn’t know how to be loved. And here it makes the two of us and maybe it makes it easy,I wouldn’t know. All I know is that now we’re lying over warm sand and I don’t want to hold your hand, or tighten the grip of my fingers around your skin; That will not do justice to the things that I want to tell you tonight. But I wonder why do you look at our hands as I look away?

There are no masks. You are as naked as the first stream of a river that flows down the top of a mountain during summer rains after a hectic winter year. And so you flow down the rocks and make way wherever there is space. Unlike a sea, that needs an ageing depth to house its existence. Not to say you’re shallow, there’s nothing shallow about your existence. Maybe I am wrong, but why else would there be so many paintings of the sea in your house?

Before I met you, there was not much thought I gave to autumn or spring or sea. There were many questions I didn’t want to find answers to, and just let them linger around the corners of my mind as I walked to buy groceries or sat in silent darkness during a short power cut doing nothing:

Who am I? Where Am I going? Where is home?
And then you came along. Standing under the shade of a city tree that no one would otherwise even notice. You noticed me. You looked nothing like love and that’s maybe why we are here tonight, next to each other. You, looking up at the bats and me, finally watching answers to these questions unravel in my mind:

Who am I?

A vagabond running in circles. Arriving somewhere, always. Most times, seeking out experiences our naïve minds cannot fathom. Sometimes, looking for the homely, the familiar.

Where am I going?

To the lands yet unknown to our hearts, or maybe to someplace or someone that feels like home. But one has many homes, and we live in them for the season and time they’re made for before we move on.

Where is home?

In the path no love can ever show, but only guide to.It’s in the vastness of the universe inside of our minds. It’s in the anticipation of a possibility that you’re going to meet someone, or be somewhere that will become very dear to you. Home is in the stories we create in our heads about things that never happen.

But I don’t say anything until I hear the radio playing on a car parked close to us on the road behind the palm trees. We both know the song and so we sing:

“Are you, are you listening to the walls?
They have forgotten how to warm us in the cold of distant lights.

So when I disappear and am nowhere to be found
look through gardens of July
Where love is plenty.”