Freedom Tastes Like Flowers

I've been trying to feel the way you would feel things:  Unafraid of building homes in people,  until they begin to feel like roots that hold you down.  Restlessly making goals without plans,  and goals without plans are just dreams,  so that's what I have: just dreams.  Your love for meals half-cooked,  and fights half-fought  follows me into every new life I step in.  I'm writing songs for my plants in your absence  just in case you're watching,  because I want you to know:  I'm living the life you left behind in me.  But just in case you think  I can't love anything anymore without thinking of you,  I want you to know that right now we're close to summer,  and the flowers keep blooming in my front yard  as relentlessly as the ringing absence  of your apology when you left,  and they're making it hard for me to think of things  as complicated as sadness and anger and you.  But I've been trying to feel the way you would feel things,  so I suppose it's okay if I take a moment and rest,  because I know I'll fall in love again  come every summertime...  like you.  © Ashka Naik

This evening I sat alone on a park bench, Clair de Lune pouring into my ears, rain breeze softening as she leaned into the curve of my neck.  I sat looking unintently at the trees stretched out far beyond me, leaves swaying in grace as though Clair de Lune was pouring onto them too.  I sat unintently as the big birds flew home, followed by the small ones, and everything was music. Everything.  And I wondered for a second if I was finally comfortable with this overwhelming feeling of being alone in the universe. Of being one with the universe. But then I noticed the empty space next to me. If you were here, this would be perfect. Wouldn't it? No missing pieces.  Mother says I pay too much attention to the details. That this is how I pluck misery off of the unwitting tree of existence, and stuff it in a drawer to rot. Because that is what misery is: a dying wish. Irreversible. Malignant. Perpetual.  Mother doesn't know the details are an art. The details are the only reason to stay alive in a world where everything is measured in categories.  But this evening I sat alone on a park bench, Claire de Lune pouring into my ears, rain breeze softening as she leaned into the curve of my neck. You weren't there but the piano notes sat next to me curved into the shape where you should be. Everything was music. Everything.  I can't wait to go home and place this evening into my drawer.

My mother has a habit of stopping and stooping over to mourn every smashed flower she sees on the sidewalk, and if you try to ask her why, she will purse her lips and stand up with a sharp inhale, open her mouth twice, and quickly walk away, giving you your first lesson in how to be a perfect stranger : never say anything that ends with a question mark. My mother still owns every single pair of baby shoes that she spent her youth chasing with her dainty, friable feet. She says that they remind her that the smallest of things in life are the only things that matter, and the only things that fade as quickly as time fades, and in the end, you are only lucky if they leave a few memories for you to curl up with in the night. My mother stopped buying expensive diaries the night my brother was born. Her lips are bruised with the weight of sleeping novels that gather dust inside her mouth, but she'd rather spend all her nights singing lullabies to help her baby sleep, than writing poems to help herself sleep. My mother raised herself to be an artist, but now she strays away from the paint section in stationery shops and pretends to not know the difference between red and crimson when I ask her what color the dying sky was the evening she wed my father. She shakes her head as though it wasn't just the sky that died a crimson death that day, it was the artist inside her too. A mythical legend that only colors inside the lines now and walks like her feet are stuck within a stencil. A thing that ends with a question mark. A smashed flower on the sidewalk.

I remember Tuesday mornings as smelling vividly of home-cooked spiced lentils and hydrangeas, just the way I had always liked them, pink and freshly plucked, not from the plant, but always from those fallen to the ground. I remember me running down the stairs, skipping two steps at a time, squealing like the wind - unstoppable. Baba would always wait at the mouth of the yard, eyes pretending to be nonchalant by my hurricane appearance, but his body always leaned forward toward his self-made garden while clutching my hydrangeas behind him, in a way that clearly conveyed: the man was more than just a little proud of his handiwork. The kitchen, as I recall, was a good 100 steps away from Baba's yard, which always meant that him and Maa were rarely on the same page, except when it came to me wearing Baba's hydrangeas in my hair and galloping to the land of spiced lentils owned by Maa, to show them off to her. That was the only time I remember them smiling together from across the house. I realize I never really grew up and out of this routine. But for some reason I can never understand, I can barely remember the other days of the week. It's like now, I only wake up on Tuesday mornings that smell like home-cooked spiced lentils and hydrangeas, just the way I had always liked them, and when I rush down the stairs to meet Baba in the yard, I find Maa standing there too, joining him in his nonchalance, and neither of them even notice my hurricane appearance. They just lean forward towards the ground, and mourn the dead hydrangeas.

I cannot seem to trace back all my love for flowers, but I have these constant dreams of finding you standing in the middle of a hibiscus field, and me running to you, but I can never see your face; I just see your hands desperately covering your body, red petals growing on your barely clothed skin. I run to you but just before I reach you, you turn around and start running away. I run after you but I can never catch up, and always, every time, I fall face down over all the flowers, and crush them under the weight of my hurry to find you, and soil rises into my breath and eyes and mouth. I manage to look up and all I can see is you, your body heaving like intimacy in a hibiscus field with no end, and all of a sudden, I stop breathing. I feel a single petal fall from my tongue, and that's the moment when I wake up, always breathless from a dream I can never complete.  I can never make out what you are doing there, or if you're someone I know, or someone I made up in my head to give my lonely love a face. I can never understand if you're someone I used to love, or someone I never could, but it feels like you're lost, and it feels like you can't wake up or breathe either: like you once thought this was where you wanted to be, but now you're stuck underneath a disguise neither of us can uncover; you're stuck becoming something you cannot stand; I'm stuck wishing I was you. Perhaps the hibiscus field stands for life and every flower that became immortal there was a runner, like you and me. Perhaps the falling and becoming a flower is a metaphor for pain and growing. Or perhaps it all means nothing, like the conception of the universe or why we exist.  Every morning when I wake up to the aftermath of you, I write inside my mind —  “if there's a passion in love,  there's a passion in grief,  and if you are that passion,  am I love, or am I grief?”  I cannot trace back my love for flowers, but if I could, would it matter?  Would you stop running in hibiscus fields?  Would you show your face?  Would you let me follow you till the end?  Would you wake up?  Would you let me sleep?  Would you take my place and let me take yours?  Music: Kazukii, Regressa https://youtu.be/Ukt-smeCK00

I threw all your letters out the window the night you told me that love was like a shooting star: it passes. They fell into your mouth like heavy sighs & you knew never to speak the truth to me again. I treat inexperienced advice like a lesson in how to offer truce to your own self. So I turn to the books that tell me how to take care of myself, & they teach me how grief, just like you, offers itself in stages. Never as a whole, always too much. 1. DENIAL My mother tries to wake me up for the seventh time in the day. I don't even flinch. Her voice is the sound of a thousand years of experience mumbling all at once. And the only string of syllables I catch is your name. This is how it is now. The symmetries you called so fondly even in your sleep have fallen into a metamorphic mess. Nothing occurs in unison with the tandem in my body.  Not pain, not memories. Definitely not the truth. My mother tries to wake me up for the tenth time. But if I close my eyes just long enough, I don't have to see you're not here. 2. ANGER I was walking down the street I secretly named after us when I heard a mumble of "there now, please don't cry", & something inside me split into two as I glared at the man who had spoken those words to his disgruntled lover. I never imagined that one day, the same words that I had leaned on to recover would break underneath my own feet. At least I listen to you now. 3. BARGAINING My poems are weeping red with the nights we spent in secret rendezvous. Wrapped under solitary sheets now, I beg for the words to go home. For you to come home. They tell me my poetry sounds more real now, more beautiful than ever before. Love takes away the rest of the poems along with the pain. But if this is what it means to be able to taste words, I would rather trade them for a momentary taste of you. 4. DEPRESSION Every evening at 5:30 pm, when the sun shines through the window exactly the way you liked it, I wait for the sunrays to hit my face. But they only turn me blind. Not with memories or pain. Just a blanket of empty space. I do not know if this is what not feeling feels like. 5. ACCEPTANCE If I was here, these words wouldn't be. Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsv8RDYdQyc

"Dard ho dil mein toh dawa kijiye, jab dil hi dard ho toh kya kijiye?" — Mirza Ghalib

Our conversations are monosyllabic now. I make a revelation, and instead of widening your eyes and opening your mouth slightly to kiss out the knowledge from under my tongue, you type "Ahhh", as though four letters could ever convey the multitudes that are supposed to be born in the space between our words. All the I love you's you were supposed to tap into the curve of my waist with your tongue lie frozen on a phone call, no semicolons, only fullstops, I see they were right when they said love ends when you cannot see it. Yours ended, mine still hasn't. I daydream about you teaching me to dance slowly on Mia and Sebastian's theme under saxophonic streetlights, even though I keep repeating that I never understood what that movie meant, because my heart refuses the art of unhappy endings, but yours seeks them out and then so do I; because what belongs to you couldn't possibly be painful, could it? Background music: https://youtu.be/oTN7xO6emU0

Do you wonder if this is okay?

Ashka (Sanskrit) - blessings taken with the palms by touching god's feet or taking the flowers offered to god and pressing them against the eyes.

What do you call this unshakeable feeling that every stranger could've been something more?

Searching for love is just another form of searching for home.

The only way to nurse heartbreak is to come full circle, let it breathe, talk about the way it began, and let it heal.

An open letter to the broken self.

If you've ever been told goodbye, you might know this.

A tale of living between stories.

How many of your favourite things exist when you are sober?

A prose piece about getting caught in expectations and running away from the disappointments that follow.

A prose piece talking about more than just stopping and smelling the roses.