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.

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.

Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsv8RDYdQyc

Our conversations are

Background music: https://youtu.be/oTN7xO6emU0