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Brief Descriptions of Things That I've Been Trying to Insert Into Poetry
i) Morning birds that once reminded me of waking up to catch cheap 4 a.m. trains on school trips now sit in my memory as accompaniments to dim yellow lights and the guilt of staying up too late. This is one of memory's oldest, cruellest tricks- it gets rid of its own synonyms.
(In desperation to keep constant what I could control, I played the Arctic Monkey's 505 so much in the first few weeks of moving to Pune that I soon lost what it initially reminded me of. The smell of March 2016 was quickly replaced by images of unfamiliar classrooms. Pre-summer air by August floods. Home by the longing to be there. I didn't know anything about the girl I was going to become, except that she would listen to the same songs that I did. There was comfort in that fact, but there was also fear- How many things have I replaced in pursuit of familiarity? Was there a time when my grandfather's voice reminded me of something before his singing? Did 'gud' taste different at seven? If I eat too many jam sandwiches, will the smell one day stop reminding me of kindergarten?)
ii) The world is starting to sound like the pause between a question and its answer the tension-filled silence between "Will this ever get better?" and a shaky 'maybe'.
iii) The end of May arrives alongside cloudy mornings to announce the last breaths of summer. It's my least favourite time of the year- the rain makes me much, much less hopeful. Still, going about my day while the sun is gone makes me feel more alive than I did the whole of summer- there's something about the raw attempt to simply survive, even amidst gloom, that feels more human than the urgent need to live out life on a sunny day. Something that brings you back to your body. (It's not their pain anyone falls in love with, is it? It's the survival of this pain. It's how they ate breakfast and went to work empty. Sleeping, moving, eating, writing just for the sake of staying alive and for no greater pleasure than that - it makes you feel, for the lack of a better word-real.)
iv) An excerpt from something that I wrote drunken at 1 a.m. goes. "I want to show people the world the way I see it. I want to sprinkle a little bit of myself on everyone I meet. When I'm gone, even if they don't remember my name, I want them to look back, and call it magic." It was titled 'Overflowing Paintbucket' and it's from 2018. It was then the name I decided to give to everything that I created. It seems silly to me now, and it will seem even sillier in 5 years, but I think I'm going to keep it. (If you were to meet me outside of what I put down on paper, you wouldn't recognize me. I don't talk about city streets and memorize smiles. I talk about falling into dustbins and check to see if you're laughing. I exist for people there, I exist for myself in these sentences - between that there is very little space for who I actually am: A cheat? A dealer in fake portraits? )
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