Miracle

You're loved 

That's an absolute

You're loved

In any circumstance

In any condition

You're loved

This love doesn't go away

It'll stay

It'll wait

For you to see it 

For you to heal

Do you have to become worthy of it? No. 

You're already worthy

Everything you do

Every time you get up again

Every time you decide you won't give up

You don't need proof of this love

You just have to know it's always there

Helping you when you think you can't go any further

Picking you up when you fall absolutely

It won't do everything, of course

This love believes in you

The miracle is you

You'll get up, 

Again, and again, and again

You'll do the crawl forward

You'll do the walk forward

You'll do the run 

The miracle is you. 

You'll find your strength within you 

And you'll realise how worthy you always were of this love 

You're held, you simply have to allow yourself to feel it. 

You are the miracle, you simply have to allow yourself to be it. 

Blink

How can you ever have been real,

If you’re not anymore?

I’m looking at your face now. 

How could it ever have existed 

If it doesn’t anymore?

Are your memories just something 

My mind made up,

Or were you ever someone I could talk to 

But can’t anymore?

How strange to think you were once 

Flesh and blood,

How - how can that dissipate?

How can a soul - how can someone you could 

Touch and hug and hold and smile with 

And smell and feel and hear and know - die?

How can the jokes 

And the advice 

And the eye-rolling 

(for bad advice) 

vanish?

Leaving nothing but sepia feelings…

How can you have lived and breathed 

If all I know of you comes from treacherous memory

And what when I’m gone too, 

Taking my memories with me?

Here lies a man who once was… real? 

Errant emotion

What errant emotion do you capture?

Where did it run away from me, who was trying so hard to keep it down?

You grabbed my emotions by the forelock

Is the fault mine? I was hurting and unaware when you came for me first

I was emotional and trying not to be

And you laughed and took all the emotions i was trying to hide from the world

You took them, and you took me as well

And now when I'm trying to take hold of my emotions

Try to steer them in a way that i can manage

You, who took them and made them bigger and stronger, and made me weaker

You don't reach out to take me back

But now i come willingly

Called by the high, chilling notes of the pied Piper

I won't tell you to stop

You're here as well

You've hurt as well

The call came for you as well

Louder. Higher. Bone-chillingly promising

And you answered

And now you're caught

Worse than me

I won't tell you to stop

You can't

I'll continue to try.

Unreal Reality

What do i do with the grief that's piling up?

where do i look where i won't see blood?

what do i do with the despair, the helplessness?

how do i stop this within my own body?

how can i distance myself from something that cries blood?

how can i look away from this that

... it's not the first time humanity has failed

but we thought we were past it

it's not the first time humanity has failed

but this time it's a collective failure

it's the failure of the strong to protect the weak

the failure of those with voices to voice the voiceless

the failure to find our own better selves

this is it

this is the result of a gaslighting on a level we didn't think we would see

and all this is all right

but what do i do with the hollow in my stomach?

what do i do with the blood rising to my throat

as i watch one side of the world burning

and the other carrying on as usual

this doesn't exist

this isn't real

they aren't dying 

in this strange unreal reality

if i can turn it into tears and let it flow

maybe i can save my own self

even though i still can't save you

even though i still can't save you

I'm sorry

the fault is mine

In Prospect

One day I'll tell you

How much it hurt when you looked away

One day I'll tell you

Why I kept coming back for more

One day I'll tell you

How it felt to sit right next to you

And yearn, unseen.

One day, when this all passes over

Maybe we'll sit and talk.

It'll be just the two of us,

In a place that feels safe

And I'll tell you what I went through

When I was trying to be strong for you.

I can't yet; you're not ready

But through all this pain,

And this heartbreak,

And this silence

I hope

That one day you will be

What I know you are

I saw an angel in you

One day I hope to see it again.

One day,

When the world isn't 

Attacking you anymore

Turning you feral in defense,

One day, 

When you find that angel within yourself

I know that day will come

I can see it in you sometimes

And you might not love me now,

But you will one day

And me? I will always love you

And one day you'll see it too

One day, when you're less lonely,

You'll see me here, who never left.

Intrinsic Value

What is true value then?

I guess true value would be the worth of your life itself. What does your presence mean for the people around you? Are people bettered by you or worsened? What about the space that you inhabit right now? Is it better for you or worse? 

Take that shameless bloody trillionaire for example. So he's worth a lot of money, but what value does his life have, intrinsically? Nearly nothing. Apparently he tried to party with the dirty island folk but even they didn't want him. Simply as a human, he fails miserably.

And speaking of the dirty island folk - what the hell? It was always known that most of our celebs and rich people are Pompeii people, and we knew some of our thinkers aren't thinking right, but this is something else. If so many of them are actually dirty perverts, no wonder this has been under wraps for so long. Our leaders are not just incompetent, but they might actually be evil, and that's just hard to digest. I mean I have seen the normal evil that they're capable of, but this is just… textbook evil. Movie evil. The kind of evil that if it wasn't literally coming from the FBI, we'd be calling it conspiracy theories. Anybody who spoke up about these things would be immediately labeled delusional. Stupid, stupid people we are, to think evil just went away, and now the real problem is your mother's BPD.

As a culture our values have changed so much. Rich friends are assets, poor friends are hopefully avoidable because they just aren't cultured enough. Parents matter for as long as we’re dependent on them, but the minute they’re dependent on us, the relationship dynamic sours terribly. Success is measured by money, not difference made. 

I mean, we can't just stop everything and take sanyas, but maybe we should start measuring our lives differently.

There's so much noise, it's difficult not to get pulled away. Best brands, cheap brands, partying, neon stuff. We think like buyers. We think in terms of consumption. Money is so important - spending it, saving it, being clever about it, not having to be clever about it.

That's the reason home industries are dying out. Because the cheap stuff in the market is so tantalisingly cheap, and the expensive things are so covetable, and really who has the time or patience to really build their own stuff instead of chasing reel capability, especially when both partners are now required to work?

I won't even get into the toll this takes on women because what the hell? Why is it that every time we think we've found the solution for one of our problems just as a society it turns into another trap? 

Maybe there are solutions to this. It'll usually be on the lines of spending more time with family, eating an apple a day (or something that doesn't break the bank), but that's the thing. Everything is complicated. Understanding the need for this is different, making the right decisions is so much harder to do these days. 

But yeah, it would help to think of yourself as a person having intrinsic value instead of chasing fiscal value. Then you can know what it is you really want, and chase a life of peace and build relationships, and maybe build stuff. Maybe then we can go back to real joy, instead of chasing empty pleasure. Maybe instead of numbing to drown out the noise, we can embrace ourselves wholly and allow for some compassion. All of these are words, and in an active life, it's hard to come to terms with this as possibility. 

But maybe understanding the need for it, and finding a way to step back is our first step forward. 

Echo

History had a way of keeping us quiet. History had a way of keeping us in awe. We learnt about British conquests, and the fight for freedom, we learnt about the Spaniards and the things they did, and we learned about the suffragettes, and we said, “no more”. This age is different from the last one. Things that happened before won’t happen now. History is history.

We thought we were beyond that. We scoffed at the people of history, even as we learned about those that rose above. We thought we were better than them. This is the age of civilisation, we’re beyond the Dark Ages now. In this age, we won’t see concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, and World War type of destruction. 

This is the age of enlightenment, we have science and technology. We can see right to the beginning of the universe now, we’re coming close to cars that self-repair, we have kpop, we’re here in the bright, bright future of the Jetsons. We’re here in the age that all the people in the past dreamt of. This is the age of enlightenment; we won’t see people get dark behind the eyes. 

But now, slowly, as our eyes hollow, we’ve been seeing, we’ve been shown, and all of our happy ignorance is gone. Hiroshima holds no horror for us anymore. The Bengal famine, terrible as it was, has lost its ability to move us. The Native American genocide, the - I don’t know - Vlad the Impaler? Hitler. 

None of it has the same effect it once had. We’ve seen worse. Somehow, the words of history are getting erased by fresh blood. Nothing has the ability to shock us anymore.

I used to wonder what role I would play in our freedom struggle. I think at some point we’ve all wondered the same thing. Well, here’s the answer. We watch TV. We get back massages and foot reflexology. We meet our friends for lunch, and make plans to see movies. Now that we’re living in times that require heroes, we’re slowly starting to realise what being a hero costs, we’re slowly starting to realise that in the history books, we’re the crowd.  

But that’s the thing. We don’t all have to be Mahatma Gandhi. We don’t have to give speeches like Martin Luther King. As history starts to repeat itself, we also start to realise - history wasn’t entirely built by the heroes - history was built by the crowd. By the people who walked with Mahatma Gandhi, by the unknown faces at the Jallainwala Bagh, by the audience who sat and listened to Sojourner speak her Truth. 

It was us the crowd that won the war. 

So yeah, maybe we’re not the ones who get a page of the textbook, but those of us who stick with the truth, even in the quiet of our own hearts, we’re the ones that cause the subtle shift that ends up turning the world right again. 

We might not be the ones who talk loud, but the ones whose voices, in the end, have the loudest echo.