// 2:11 a.m.

I can’t sleep.
Am I tired? Sometimes it feels like I’ve been tired for an eternity, and sometimes there’s such an intense fire building up inside me that it engulfs all of my exhaustion.

What am I doing? I wish I had a more poetic answer to that; I wish I could say I was reading, stargazing, or talking to someone about the world. The truth is that I’ve been working. It’s all I ever do lately, so much so that I run out of time to even breathe.

Lastly, am I doing okay? Is anyone? Is anyone out there sleeping everyday with a smile and satisfaction etched across their face? I’d like to meet you. I envy you.
All I know is; I’m holding on and getting by, one day at a time.

Priority

A girl like her

Would spend hours getting ready

To meet you

With perfectly curled hair,

Daintily applied make-up

And shoes that cost more

Than my one-bedroom apartment rent.

 

But me?

I’d either show up in sweatpants

A bun, and disheveled, hastily applied eyeliner

(The only thing I can do, honestly.)

And the first pair of clean shoes I can find.

I’ve been too busy to do laundry, you see.

Or forget to show up at all

I’ll be working till the wee hours of the morning

To reach a deadline, finish a report.

 

So you’d leave

Saying how I have ‘messed up priorities’

And I’d smile and breathe a sigh of relief

Call me shallow, and I don’t know about her

But I can never make a person my priority.

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// Goodbyes and Resolutions, Welcome 2017!

From today onward, we start afresh.

Goodbyes.

I say goodbye to all the people I left this year, to all the people who left me. Here’s to moving on from all the friends I lost contact with because of college, or the people in college I realized I’d rather not be around.

I say goodbye to memories of the bad days I’ve had this year. All the nights spent crying into my pillow, days spent locked in my room, too scared to face the world. I bid adieu to the flashbacks of the blood-curdling yelling, fighting and screaming. Here’s to finally making it through.

I say goodbye to the person I was in high-school; the narcissistic, cold-hearted and shielded girl I’d become as 12^th grade was nearing it’s end. Yes, it helped me get on with my life and made transitioning into college a lot easier, but I was left with little to no friends who’d bothered to stay.

And finally I say goodbye to being sad, to believing I wasn’t good enough. Farewell to all the people I hurt this year, because I was afraid to be hurt. I apologize.

Oh, and hello.

Hello to all the wonderful, glorious opportunities that lie ahead, just waiting for me to grab them. I promise myself to reach out and give everything a shot, and remind myself that I’ve nothing to lose.

Hello to all the beautiful people I’d be meeting this year. Here’s to making new friends and sharing ideas, aspirations and dreams.

And a warm hug to the person I aspire to be this year. To the person who’s loving, caring and yet, strong. The person who makes it through whatever life throws at her, and perseveres.

I’m not the person who makes resolutions; but I have just one teeny-tiny thing I want to start doing in 2017.

I aim to get more organized, give adequate time and energy to all the things I want to get done this year. Yes, I’ve taken on more than I can handle, but I’m not giving up.

Here’s to being even more resilient than I already am.

Welcome, 2017!

 Brand New Day – Kodaline 

My Thoughts on Love // Volume II

If you’ve been following my blog for a while now, you’ll remember a post I wrote back in December 2014 titled ‘My Thoughts on Love’ (To read that post first, click here.)

In December 2016, I’m going to write a volume two.

Love.

In volume one I wrote about how I’m a hopeless romantic, and I don’t ‘need’ anyone to complete my life and follow my dreams. A part of me seems scared and terrified of falling in love, because it’s immensely painful to fall out of it. I’m a couple of years older, and maybe a little less fearful now.

People think love is this feeling we’re all supposed to be feeling. They take love and project it as something so vast, that it leaves us wondering if something that grand will ever happen to us. The truth is, the world has romanticized love. They’ve made it seem unattainable, life-controlling and all-consuming, when it’s not.

Love is simple.

I believe you can’t chase love or go looking for it. Love, will come. And when it does, you’ll know. The duration of your encounter with that stranger won’t matter. Where the stranger is from, what they’re doing won’t matter. What your friends and family think won’t matter. Nothing will matter. Only they will matter.

I will admit that I went around searching for love on many occasions and for many years and always returned empty handed and broken hearted. Sometimes, it would leave me unscathed and the other, torn apart. But none of that ever made me believe in love less, none of that made me give up on the hope that maybe one day I will find that missing puzzle piece.

Love will come, give it time. It won’t fall from the sky (or maybe it will?) or show up with flowers at your doorstep. Love will come if you let your heart be open, if you let yourself be accepting. Let yourself believe in what the universe is trying to say, and trust your guts when it whispers in your ear to ‘forget everything and go after what makes you happy.’

And when love does come, everything will fall into place. You’ll never be able to imagine a life without love, and won’t understand how you survived all these years alone. When this happens, and I’m serious, you will be afraid. You’ll be afraid of taking this leap and falling into a hole in which you can’t see the bottom. You’ll be afraid that when love ends, you’ll never be able to climb out. But there’s also this beautiful possibility that maybe this time, you’ll have gotten lucky, and love will stay. After all those torturous years, it’s finally here to stay. If it wants to stay, let it. Jump.

And if love stays, it will get hard, because making love last is never easy. Sometimes you will argue, yell out words you shouldn’t, and curse. You’ll scream and cry and shout, but don’t you ever let yourself leave. Give it time, and remind yourself just why you fell in love in the first place. It’s always easier to leave, but it’s not always the right answer.

And finally, I still support my claim: “You don’t need someone to guide you along the way and to hold your hand through the journey. You don’t need someone else to make you feel good about yourself. Fight for what you want, and do it alone if you goddamn have to.”

For when love comes, it won’t stop you from fighting for what you want, and will never come in the way of your dreams. Love will never stop you from chasing after your goals, and love won’t ever let you believe that you’re not worth it. In fact, love will stand by you for whatever choice you make, and never try and influence you. Love will wipe your tears off when you fall, and will convince you that you can fly again. Love will be cheering the loudest when you reach the top. Love will do all this, because you will do the same.

My statement still stands.

I am a hopeless romantic.

I love love.

 Love Is Easy – McFly  

Bullets

That summer day, when we met

I saw

You had bullets

Lodged in your heart

And for years that were to come

All I did was pry them out

One by one

And having no one, or no place to keep them

Slid them onto my own

And as soon as your last wound closed up,

You were whole again

And you,

You ran away.

Can’t you see me now?

For all I do

Is look for someone to pull out

The bullets I took from you

So that maybe I can run away too.

Run away, to you.

Ghost

Your ghost haunts me

From the corner of my bedroom

Where we lived our forever

From the end of my desk

Where you’d smile at me while I worked

From the end of my dining table

Eating the meals I prepared for you, my love

Now, even though ‘us’ is gone,

‘You’ have stayed.

 The Quiet – Troye 

Counting Down

I’m counting down

The days

Till I’m right beside you

To watch crappy movies with you

But watch you, instead

Eat macaroons and ice-cream, with you by my side

Wishing that I could eat up

All the words that you speak

To go on lovely adventures,

Without our maps

Only to willingly get lost, in you.

And to always hear you talk about your dreams

But dream of you

Instead

 The One – Kodaline 

Continents

If only I’d met you

At the right time

We could have changed the world together

But here we are

Living life in different continents

(cursing our luck)

For showing us exactly what we were meant to be

Just not when we were meant to be.

 Autopilot – Kodaline 

// On Being Undermined

As an artist, I believe the worst thing that you can do to an artist is undermine what they create. In a lot of ways, everything a painter or a poet creates, and puts out for the world to see, is personal. To the shade of blue used to paint the curtains to the color of the sunset in the quatrain has some messed-up explanation. Every detail screams truths which are far from what the piece is even about.

Personally, the constant feeling of my writing never being ‘good enough’ engulfs me. There’s not a day which goes by in which I don’t feel the inexplicable urge to delete my blog, and pretend that it never existed in the first place. Every poem I write is so brutally truthful, that posting it feels like exposing my deepest, darkest secrets for the world to see. Yes, most of the time the pain is so deeply cloaked under the shadow of tiny details, that you probably can’t make sense of it, but that doesn’t make the fear go away.

Every morning, I’d look at the things I wrote the night before, and (for lack of a better word) feel stupid. There are honestly very few things I’ve written that I can say I’m actually proud of, and believe them to be something of value. The rest? The rest just seem like useless inklings, something anyone and everyone can write, and pretty much worthless.

You can ask my roommates the amount of times I’d pace around the room, fingers hovering over the ‘publish post’ button and the sheer number of times I’d close the tab, then reopen a minute later. So whenever someone says anything even remotely undermining about it, trust me, I’ve already said the same things to myself a million times. Probably even worse. Most of the published posts on here have been in my drafts for weeks before I gathered the courage to finally put them up.

Yes, art is subjective. Which is what makes it even more difficult to believe in yourself, because there’ll always be someone who’ll think of your art as junk. There’s no avoiding that. I’m not uptight, I’m always up for some constructive criticism. But there’s a very, very thin line between criticism and mockery. Criticism can very easily turn into insult, and nothing can feel worse.

So my point here is simple: you’re not going to like every single piece of writing I put out, but that doesn’t make it bad. It doesn’t give you the right to be cruel about it. I’m always up for helpful tips, but think twice before sending a message, as every poem is like my baby, and you have to regard it as such, too.

Here’s to spreading a bit more positivity, eh?