Damage

you're the word i curl up with these nights
i hear you like a hiss emiting, and then a sigh on my lips
come, i'll take you home
tuck you in, or if you prefer all those things
that i'm so much better at.. i'll lick, tickle
talk with heads on pillow all night

damage...i'll put my fingers inside you
and watch while you cum, squeeze around my fingers
while arching and taking my finger with you

damage.. we'll curl up
we'll sing badly, eat disgusting food we don't cook
sit like the threesome in a movie who take time outs
between sex to play word games
(the third one can be more damage)

damage.. i'll watch you sleep
let you sit inside me, let you watch me cry
we'll entwine fingers.. damage.. you'll be gentle
with me.. after all this time, you'll give in

damage.. we'll put this down
to time, to knots of unseen waves under the ocean
that came crashing too high..

damage.. we'll talk
unlike anything i've done before
and let me tell you a secret
if i like you a lot
...
i swallow

I can see the perfect couple: freudian insights into personal film history

A few years ago I had in woeful writerly ambition written into existence what for me was the ultimate couple. They were about two or three chapters old, Indian and differing shades of brown, and unfortunately (for them) bestowed with a daughter who was keenly observing them with the intimate knowledge of a child and an adult's knowledge of relationships. She watches her mother drive herself to almost suicide and sickness, the isolation of her parents in their own universe and ofcourse water shortage in the house. I am in that sense a child of 80s cinema (yeh tera ghar yeh mera ghar) not really able to buy into the neo-liberal look of love today where wealth plays such an important role. (and to be frightfully honest I look at my ex-lover's continuous griping about money all through a time when he was supposedly having two affairs and his current other's desire to buy a house in a posh part of town, and I see my 80s ka pyar with candle on pastry duboing like a kagaaz ki kashti)

There were very few explanations for the perfidies of the couple that I had written, no back story except that they seemed like two people I didn't know too well, but who seemed intelligent, the man in love with a creative beautiful woman (because there were some signs she was a writer), and they were for reasons beyond their control (even the male protagonist’s control) trapped in marriage. Maybe if I had written further I would have unraveled the mystery and discovered - it is the fault of patriarchy embodied in the man, all his fault, off with his head. Or - she's a weak, sniveling idiot, she stopped writing/creating, off with her head. Or - heteronormativity, off with that moron's head.

Either way I don't know, But visually I saw the couple a week ago. On the Ugly Pant steps in Bangalore, two friends of mine walked up and looked like what I had once long ago imagined into existence. Perfect, down to details, her stylishly draped sari (my character too wore only saris), her curvy delicious body, his kurta, the lean, serious face and the straight lines that set her off. It was a tableau, a mise-en-scene (ugh.. the demon of film theory in my head) that was perfect.

And then they spoke. She blasted all lingering abstractions of angst I had momentarily attached to her skin, by her snarky wit and beautiful ability to simultaneously shrug at life and live it. And he by being so gay, so caught up in his impending fuck date. Attached to each other, but not in that way, my beautiful couple came crashing down, my incomplete unread novel (thankgod!!) smiled like a sweet but momentary lover who tucks you in and turns the other way to go to sleep.

What can seem so real, can sometimes be so completely far from the truth. So was it me that I had written about, me idealized as a short curvy woman, instead of a tall gangly one. My lover idealized as Indian and same, not separated by markers of culture and identity. And in that simplified universe, I lived out my real problem for 2 or 3 chapters. She was not seen. He was not capable of more than comforting her for not being seen. She atleast was getting that comfort.

All my adult life, I have avoided somehow, with self deprecating wit, some amount of active interest in everyone's life but my own, to so-to-speak not be self-involved, almost narcissistic like I've seen so many women be. Precisely those women who have been the other women in the guy's life... this was how I was not like them. I didn't and wasn't only talking about my own life. The nightmare of this compulsion pursued me into various other relationships, where honestly looking back now I wish I had just said... What I'm feeling right now is just me, excuse me, but thats true. I don't have the space for you.

Today in an almost forced condition to consider myself and only myself, I have to say.. I wasn't seen. Not just my new found kinks (spank bdsm anal), obsessions with other lovers, newly found friends, books that had suddenly become a part of me, movies that emerged re-explained in my head, and those huge number of things that I had discarded as no longer part of me. But even beyond these things, that might to some extent atleast have been glimpsed. For the longest time, I wasn't really seen by a lover more intent on comforting and mothering the invisible pain of not really being loved for what you are, but for some wonderfully benign abstraction of yourself in his head.

Why Gwen Stefani rocks

Pain; strange is my favourite kind of sexual experience

Persistence of memory, Salvador Dali

Allow me to warn you how I go through pain. It begins very easily .. anybody who sees me in the moment just after the blow has always said.. you look so good, you sound so great, almost relieved. And then drip by drip, your pain across the skies begins to fill me. I hold onto that first moment with such amazing desperation, almost willing for that first cataclysmic moment of pain to repeat and repeat, because that I can deal with. Its the slow aftermath that gets unbearable. That return every day of the ghosts that first caused the pain, till it gets almost boring on your lips to say it again, but somehow not for your mind to dredge it up.

So I dreamt again of the way that this whole other relationship started, that I filled the blanks with details of what I have gone through earlier. So I felt that creeping crawling monster of discontent and pain all over my skin, so food turned tasteless in my mouth, sex too easy and not good enough even if the body is exploding with a decent enough orgasm. So it feels like I'll never feel anything good again, it feels like the rest of the world has stolen anything good and real from me and taken it away for themselves. And abandoned me totally .. to a place with twisted bitterness where I'll never be able to relate to anyone really again.

People do say useful things to you.. someone said, the one time i was sleeping with two women, I didn't tell her because I thought if I did she would dump me and sleep with ten men. One said, that the thing that upset him and led him to break of ties was that someone refused to acknowledge that there had ever been a relationship, and that he regretted most breaking off those ties. That he wants to learn French now for some semblance of a connection. I see a photograph of this man that he's talking about .. and mentally say on a dating site that photograph would make me say ...ohmygod, another chuth.

But look at pain.. can you ever really say what it will make you do? Because you can't really say what it would make you feel. Someone wants to take it away from you, make it theirs .. or simply have it happen to them. All I can say is .. I wish I could. And then again I'm almost getting fond of it, this gross hard ball of pain in my chest .. I hate it at times, and willingly bounce it around. It makes me want to be alone, it makes me want to be with people, it makes me want sex in situations that would surely be hurtful to others (which considering how this all began, I'm guessing would be some kind of karmic inevitability but i'm willing myself to break off those horrible patterns)

It makes me regret so much, suddenly grasp for a simpler solution. It makes all memory bad.. all of it. Not just one year or a few months, all of it. Its made me want to hurl myself off a building, to suddenly jump out of a moving vehicle .. to externalise it in some way.
It makes life slow .. it makes it feel that it will never get over or less. And I'm guessing it is becoming less by the day but then again maybe it isn't. It definitely seems to have grown on some days into something that I can't deal with. Its made me not breathe ..
and most of all...
its made love disappear ...
its just ended it slowly killing it off day by day. the invisible thrill under the skin, the ache for a person...its killed the very thing that caused it.

its made words empty .. as if they don't contain anything...
it wonders how or why is it possible for people to cause this and not say anything to you..
it becomes a pet, a squiggly constant companion.. it grows, diminishes, the strangest thing make it burst into flames that then consume you .. the most painful of stories put it to sleep

and most of all...
it makes it feel like life will never ever go back to where it was..
what if i'm permanently changed and disfigured by this?
it goes beyond calculations even of itself.. it loses memory of the strength of its own desire, crippled by circumstance it feels like its going to kill something so young, so small, so beautiful... the desire for life that i felt suddenly more than a year ago...

that it would take that desire that brought me here to this page, that made me cum on the beds of three strangers .. all lost in the next morning, that it would take my multi faceted pleasure in sex and kill it... and that is what i suspect is the desirable solution for many people.
and as much as i feel the pain cringe at being given this name...part of me knows that to be true. as much as revenge is written out of the story, it becomes part of it because of the almost mathematical nature of the next bend in the tale.

in an almost operatic sense i don't want to feel it in bits and pieces anymore...let the crescendo arrive.. let the wave break.. lets hear the fat lady sing...

i hear she's good

if there is an apocalypse beep me..

Buffy makes the apocalypse ordinary, an everyday activity that has to be dealt with. Sure, the world is ending, it was yesterday and today.. and it probably will end tomorrow as well. The thing is, what are you going to do about it. Are you going to quip your way through it - banter that exercises the brain to the point that the heart just sort of collapses as the runner up for your own attention. Or bang mirrors in random restaurants or kiss your reflection or generally have some kind of asinine communication with said mirror. Said mirrors I believe congregate at meets in far off cold cities in europe and generally compare trends on what girls/women breaking up do these days. Ofcourse it gets a little confusing what with the multiple reflections and them accusing each other of stealing their stories.

Little worlds are often jolted of course, very often. For me twice in the span of less than twelve months, and this is not counting the minor jolts in the middle or the general quakes of terra firma because of a relationship and sometimes even others over this time. Am I used to it? Hardly!! But this isn't about the imminent or ongoing apocalypse, its about what you say about it. And in my case, my conversation extends beyond the ridiculously high highs and pathetic lows with friends, to random communication with strangers.

One of the more exceptional ones has been with my new landlord, who in a very concerned voice asks me .. But your husband hasn't yet seen the flat? And me, beyond a state of wanting to dissemble, in a very distracted response said - Oh him, he's gone.

Where has he gone?
He's gone
... silence...more silence...
repeat .. eh.. he's gone....eh.... away ... he ...eh.. travels a lot .. (not a lie .. so why didn't I think of this earlier)
So he's gone (idiotic repeating)
Hmmm (now i'm worried, does my whole carefully constructed good married Indian girl (with nosering) image all for the sake of moving into a fairly decent flat with large rooms, become one of the casualties of the apocalypse)
But behold the strange response from the Muslim from Kerela, who I suspect is having a hot torrid affair with his sister in law, while his brother is away in Dubai (where else?) ....
So he's gone ... Hahaha ..
To which honestly all I could do was start laughing. You can pretend to fit in, twist the details of your life around to squeeze into some absurd conventional expectation .. but if you don't, you just don't.

The other interaction was with my real estate agent.. who looked at me, at a friend standing nearby and said ..
Woh kaha hai? (since he's actually met the alleged 'husband' and knows that he does have some corporeal reality)
Having gone through the complete inefficacy of 'he's gone'.. I decided to have an elaborate story this time, that I launched into complete with details of Phd, faraway land, travel and sundry details, stopping short of producing some kind of documentary proof. Ofcourse it was just as convincing .. and he eventually said..
Accha, to aapka koi aur flatmate hoga?