Fading circles.

I cannot remember a time when I did not carry you with me like my life depended on it. In the beginning you were only what you are: a couple of wristbands. But objects kept so close for so long often become symbols—things with life, colour, and sounds. It’s six been years now, and reaching back into memory is seeing the past through your mute presence. People asked me if you were my good-luck charm and I had to say no without meaning it, so that they would stop asking. People like being right. But you were something undefinable; we grew together and to say you were this, or that, was like stunting myself. You were the rains, and I gave you a name that was both the seas and the skies that swallowed it. I would run out to you in the evenings, and my lips would whisper your name to the first drop that fell upon them.

You were there when I first picked up a pen to write. The story was for Pooja, because it was important to me that she thought I was good at something; it was her little smile, which spread from her mouth to her eyes, and the way she said ‘Not baad, Rahul’, that made me want to write more. But the writing itself was for us, and for that I wanted you with me. I made you a part of the narrative and called you Azura. And so we talked, through soft sounds of tongue and pen and paper. I wanted you to know me, so that I could too, when I told you the things I did.

I lost you so many times under the beds and the pillows and in pockets, but only once was I scared. Pa and I were going to the mill to get the wheat ground, and I knew when I bent my knees on the bike that you’d slip out. I must have paced about, trying to remember where you’d fallen. I must have fidgeted the way I do when I’m uncomfortable. I must have felt my pockets a hundred times to make sure you weren’t hidden in some impossible corner. On the way back, I scanned the road as well as I could, and there I found you, lying in the middle waiting for me. Pa stopped when I told him to and you found your place in my pocket again.

It was terrifying to leave home without you, because I was sure that it was sign of something bad to come. I remember the days when I’d want nothing more than to come back home and find you in the washing machine before it did. Still I gave you to Pooja when her grandmother passed away. She didn’t ask, but I knew she needed you more. That night when she kept you in her pencil-box instead of her hand, I hoped both of you were okay.

I would never wear you on my wrist, because in my story that would mean invoking your power. I couldn’t do that, because people are given only a few chances in their lives, and I didn’t want to waste mine. Someday, when the world or she or anyone else needed me, I would put my hands through you and rise as the lord that I was.

She was fooling around when she tried snatching you out of my hand. I clutched at you instinctively, but she’d got a hold too. I would’ve let go, but in the struggle our fingers and arms and bodies touched and I liked it. Neither of us stopped till something snap and I looked down to the broken circle of green rubber. She apologised but I could see that she didn’t realise what she’d done. I mumbled, ‘It’s okay’, and let my eyes wander over the red of her skin instead.

I tried to weld you together in the fire of the lamp lit in the little temple we have at home. I stopped when I saw the material bubbling. Then I tried to make a clasp so that the broken ends would hold together, but the pin I used cut through you. I couldn’t let the yellow band hold the green in its curve, because the green one was older and had to be on the outside. `You’d broken and I couldn’t put you back together.

I still do a few things as I used to. You’re still in my pocket all the time. I still hold you in my left hand through every exam, because I’ll fail otherwise. But she’s gone and my story lives only on the sheets of paper she’s taken. I no longer write with my hand. Sometimes, when I’m home and it’s raining, I hold you in my palm and watch the drops lick the dirt off you, but we don’t talk anymore. I tell myself that it’s because we’ve grown too close for spoken words. My excuse is that you’re in my head so completely that I don’t have words that could say things any better. But that’s only so that I don’t feel guilty about betraying our years together. You’re gone, Azura, to the seas and the skies that swallowed them, and to the raindrops that won’t touch my lips anymore.

Afraid

It feels like I’m returning to writing, now. I haven’t let myself write the last two days, simply because writing had become something else. It had become too much about seeing my notification button turn orange—about getting a new follower, or finding a new comment. I’m not saying that I don’t want that to happen once I post this, but at least I’m not writing for the sake of that alone.

These days I’m afraid of a lot of things. Of not knowing what it’s going to be like two years from now. Of not knowing what I want to do, or half-knowing and then worrying if I’ll be able to do it. Most of all, I’m afraid that I’ll want nothing from life. There is such a thing as being overly content.

Today, I want to write about something else, though. Something else that scares me. Something beautiful. Poetry. I’m afraid of poetry and what it doesn’t do for me. I’m unsure while reading it. I’m reluctant about writing it. There’s a space somewhere and it isn’t distance. It’s strangeness. An unfamiliarity that cannot breached. My words refuse to fall into that space, and the words in that space refuse to come to me. We look at each other from either side of a glass window, unfeeling.

It’s funny looking back, because writing began with poetry for me. We were doing something by Tagore, and to keep myself from falling asleep, I screwed around with his words and made something of a parody. My friends found it funny and that was encouragement enough for me to do more. Soon, I tried making my own rhymes. It was easy, then, in the way that everything is when you begin for the first time. Even reading poetry was easy. Because it was school and metaphors where nothing more than literary devices. They never escaped the page.
Poetry is different now. It has been ever since I’ve joined college. It has changed even as I’ve understood what it is with other people. Slowly, I’ve come to realise that I never knew poetry, that I never had the words. I think it is this disillusion that has left us feeling like this. I feel ill-equipped to read it. I could let my eyes take them, or my voice, but these words refuse to say anything. It is the same when I’m writing. My words are quiet. I can get them to rhyme, but not to speak. There’s a certain lethargy. There’s a silence on both ends, and it’s disheartening.

But I cannot let go just yet. I love poetry even more, now that it scares me. There are moments when I’m just taken over by something. I run for a pen and sit before the blank paper. Sometimes that’s all that happens, but that’s okay. At least the feeling’s alive. We’ll get to know each other again, Words. Someday soon. And then we’ll weave the same magic that we believe in wholly, even if it’s only us who can see it.