I was 23 and I had never suffered an absolute crisis for words.

“Fuck! “  And “Shit!” came to my rescue.

You say these two phrases in varying tones of voice and you put everything you feel into them and believe me, they can be almost as good as shouting or bawling out loud. The pain alleviates and you transcend from one word to two words.

“Fuck you!”, “Oh fuck!”, “Oh shit!” and yours sincerely “Fucking shit!!!” lend you a hand.

I keep talking because I know that at this moment staying quiet can very realistically make me stroke or or send me into a comma or can give me a cardiac arrest. I tell A, “I think I’m going to die.” A smiles, staring into the dark road ahead of us .He asks me what would I like to drink. I say I need pain killers.I was in something like pain and my mind was logically offering solutions.

”We are not doping sweetheart, so tell me what you will drink???”I tell him I don’t think I’m going to be able to drink, eat or sleep for the rest of my life. He gets out of the car and is back with three cans of beer.

I can feel the air entering my lungs struggling to make me feel better, I realize my head is pounding, it is so loud, I wonder how the city can sleep when my head is making sounds of these bloody proportions. The pounding is becoming louder and threatens to explode my brains to tiny pieces. I start talking again. This time it is a merciless hail of questions.

“How the hell??”, “Why is this happening to me???”, “How did I get here?”, ”What the hell just happened??”,”What is this I’m feeling??” “Is this ever going to go away???”, ”how could I have not seen this”, “how could I have not known???”,”what the hell was I thinking???”

Questions, my brain reflexly answers by connecting the dots so fast. The split second muted answers leave me exhausted and turn down the volume of the pounding.

I can feel the confusion of my tear glands in the form of a stretching pain in the corners of my dry eyes. I want to cry but my mind tells me not to. The conditioning of years does not fail me, even though for once, right then, right there I could have really used a good cry. Then come the lucid conclusions.

“Dude, this is so wrong.”,  “I am so screwed”, ”This is the worst ”

The ,”I should have never done this and I should have done this” rant. Realizations. “This is why I did this and this is why I could never do that” rant. Suddenly you have one of the clearest moments of your life. It is like a whole new dimensional upgrade. Like someone giving you the 3D glasses in a movie theater and now everything that was hazy for reasons you could never understand suddenly becomes magically beautiful and real beyond your imagination.

You stand on a line between who you were till that moment and who are going to be beyond this moment. You look into the eyes of each other and you understand each other perfectly. You exchange that look of the eye that sworn enemies who have finally found their peace exchange with each other. You promise that you’ll keep these secrets between you and you and no one shall ever know the war you’ve seen, and the things you’ve been through.

“I’m going to be okay.”

A smiles.

I laugh. A tear finally escapes the corner of my right eye.

“One tear, I guess that’s all this deserves.” I say.

A smiles.

We don't get to a live an edited version of life, we get to live the full version.

Yes, for a while, you were my painkiller. The addictive sweet sedative that gave me dreamless restful sleep.
I got up one day and the pain was back.In spite of you.In spite of everything.
So i stopped taking you.
And I haven't slept since.

Life seems to be putting  a small * with everything good I find.And when you go the end of the text and read what the conditions are in the fine print of *Conditions Apply, you realize that theres nothing really good about it.

phone calls,chocolate cake, chilled coke, stomach cramps at 4am, pill popping at 4am,more phone calls at 6am,wind,non subsiding pain,another pill,rain,dancing in the rain,getting really wet, sleeping for a couple of hours,forgetting to dry the hair,getting up with the curliest hair ever,18 missed calls,3 new messages,fever,the mother of all headaches,talking happily,pretending to be "okay",body aches, damning the dancing in the rain,pill for fever,pill for headache, dragging to the washroom to clean up, cotton shirt, red walls, chilled water,nerdy glasses,glucose biscuits

She calls me an emo writer.She asks me to write love notes for her lover.

I plead with her that I am no writer,I write only when I am sad or overwhelmed. I cannot write on cue, I can only write when I absolutely need to.Its not a very comfortable thing for me.

The thing is that ever since I was a child, I have believed that there is an invisible force that reads every word that is written with heart. It reads every deleted word, every broken message that you type in your phone, every thing that you scribble and throw away in crumpled papers.It reads the words yo u trace out with your finger on a foggy glass or on your torn jeans on a bus ride.The things you trace out when you play with your food.Words you inscribe in sands and snow.The doodles in places that no one knows.

Its doesn't have to be a word,or a perfect shape.It doesn't have to mean something.This force understands what you meant and how you felt.You float messages in a bottle out to the sea of life, and this force is what is there at the other end, intercepting every kind of language every kind of code.I have no idea what it does with all these messages.Whether it judges us or not, whether it acts on our pleas of help, our desperate wishes.All I know is that it is my oldest most loyal friend, it helps me hold on the illusion that I am not alone.

There is a threshold for how much we can feel and keep within us.Most of the times it remains within us,but at times it oozes out of our fingers,dripping off us in spaces we occupy.It doesn't matter how it is written,all that matters is how purely it is you.

She has been listening with her eyebrows raised. I have realized that my rant is not working. She responds to it saying that it is bullshit.I tell her what she wants to hear.

"How do I write for your lover, when my heart has recently been blasted and lies plastered across the walls of my existence."

She says," Tell me when your feeling better, lets give Valentines day a pass. Its his birthday in March."

"You are cruel you know"

She smiles and says,"I know."

(A vegetable hawker yelling gajar lo mooli lo kheera lo tamatar lo)

I have been wake. He is fast asleep.

There is a spot above his right brow on his forehead, if I kiss it, his face lets out the most beautiful involuntary smile. He sleeps, unaware of the hundreds of kisses it has taken me to find this spot. Unaware that he is wearing a blanket of my kisses on his back.Unaware that I have kissed no one as much and as the way I kiss him. I sleep, laughing at myself, thinking, “and you thought you couldn't do this, you thought this was stupid, why can’t you stop kissing him???”

(palak lo methi lo saag lo)

I am awake. He is half asleep.

I softly untangle his legs from mine.As I gently pull away my head from his chest, his arm pulls on me, tugging me back to where I was, close.It’s like a kid and his rag doll, I move away, he pulls me back. I tell myself to sleep, wishing we could freeze in time here right now, sleep for a hundred years, this close, this way.

(gobi lo gajar lo mattar lo mooli lo)

I am awake. He is awake, talking on the phone to his girlfriend.

I whisper to myself,"Kisses don’t mark a man and rag dolls get replaced" and go back to sleep.