Letter # 2

I've been meaning to write a poem mourning your loss, mourning the heady start that we'd got, mourning everything that would help to purge you off me. I wonder if catharsis is in the process or in the moment that would eventually negotiate my cure.

I've been meaning to ask you about your knives-- the ones you say were reared never to draw blood. Wonder-struck, I asked you, would you still call them knives? If they won't cut and tear what else could they possibly evince? You took offence. You tried to demonstrate. Each time they only surprised you more and more. Exhausted, you said, I was only thinking about their kinder sides.

I've also been meaning to tell you that I've lost my journal to computer viruses. Gone is your name; your idiosyncrasies-- that I'd so diligently noted; particular dates when you might have said something particular; little nuggets of personal history when we'd talked late into the night; little poems of odd lines that never really grew beyond a certain number of words, everything that could put you at risk is gone-- you must marvel at the beauty of fate.

Soon it would be close to an year of knowing you and un-knowing you. You've only asked me to move on and likewise denied me the opportunity to mourn the loss of love.

Now Playing:: Arziyan.......Delhi 6

Letter # 1

I thought the call would last for an hour. But it didn't. You sounded jittery; maybe the rains make everything sound jittery. The clouds had huddled up for another fresh spell. The air was too dank to reek of the earth without. Perhaps duped by memory the earth seemed to barge in, defying dankness, defying welcome.

I was too resigned to talk, the distance was too much to mask. I still long for you. I can still feel the constant rush of that longing replacing all things proximate in your helpless absentia.

But aren't the absent soon forgotten? I try not to believe in that, God knows I try. But I've no control on your beliefs, your pleasured preferences, the love you spill, the intimacies you provoke. All I know is that I'm no longer free, that my mind is fettered to the absent and for the lack of a better word, committed to thoughts outside of myself.

I was wondering about the difference in our time zones. I knew I was ahead; it was left to my imagination to distribute you according to the Sun's point of view. In that brief moment you ceased to be everything that you had ever meant to me. I saw you only as a curiosity in a museum that I dare not touch. Exaggeration is perhaps an abnormality with me but antique feelings are seldom privy to the spontaneity of mundane metaphors.

You made me return to this improper element of prose. I was defenceless against poetry. It loosened my sentences while strengthening my thoughts. I don't know how long can I continue telling a private story in the banal idiom of prose whose very essence had always been poetic.

I can only hope Life interrupts again, the way it always does, for better or for worse.

Now Playing:: Toofan mail.........Lata