Books and Pepper

[booksandpepper4]

Brutal Honesty

"Brutal honesty is a virtue" they say

After skinning me with words

Emphasis on the brutality

"Just being frank and honest" they say

After packaging their insults

And letting it rot for a week.

As I grow older, I realize

It takes love to lie

Takes concern to plaster wounds

In fragranced balms

[booksandpepper4]

What I need are beautiful distractions. Not some imagined happiness or the longing for the same. I want to be excited about my shy plant taking roots in stubborn soil.

[booksandpepper4]

Searching for shelter in people is akin to searching for stillness in waves.

[booksandpepper4]

Sugared words. We need those sometimes. Kind, fragrant, beautiful lies make sugared words. Life, like chocolate and sorrows must be seasoned and tempered to bearable limits. Poetic lines - sugared words - help.

[booksandpepper4]

Then again, has anyone ever been closer to us than the tear-stained pages of our diaries? And yet, we've been taught to find soulmates in people not pages.

[booksandpepper4]

I pray to a Goddess not a God. I need to know that the higher power out there has known menstrual cramps. And has felt her world shift ever since. I want my Almighty to have known what it's like to hold herself together, legs numb, a hot water bag against her tummy and a smile on her face as she went about her day.

[booksandpepper4]

"Life will take a turn that makes you happy". One has to whisper this to oneself till the brain becomes as stupid as the heart.

[booksandpepper4]

Pickled love. It's the one to chase. The old man holding his wife's hand through the veil of cataract. The old woman trusting his touch through her fading memories. The kind of love that has survived salty tides and did not die. That old-school brined pickled love. That's the one to chase.

[booksandpepper4]

That chaotic spot between 28 and 30. When you know you've given up too much to reach your goal and yet the goal is nowhere in sight. It is at this moment that the universe bestows upon you its only gift - conviction. Conviction that the only step to take is forward even though there is zero proof to attest to its practicality. After all, what is hope but un-evidenced conviction.

[booksandpepper4]

Did it hurt? When you knew it was all in your head? That half-second applause? The sneeze of validation? That 'boss woman' poster you stuck on the wall after bartering what you did best for what they called success? Did it hurt when it dawned that you pawned your years for an imagined audience?

[booksandpepper4]

They believed that hysteria in women hinted at a travelling womb. A curious falsehood - as though women would ration out their sanity in scales of menstrual blood.

[booksandpepper4]

If travel travelled, would it long for home and its familiar bed?

[booksandpepper4]

Hope is a soft being that sobs at dusk and forgets to be sad at dawn

[booksandpepper4]

I hear the world whining about things missed. The journey to an unknown destination. Food pronounced differently from how it's spelt. Imagined romance with imagined men. Is there something wrong with me, that I miss nothing? I see the world in my chair, in my books and coffee mugs. Poetry, it seems, numbs the need to weep over what was never yours.

[booksandpepper4]

What's it called? That 3-second elation you feel when you smell something forgotten yet familiar? The smell of lemon, dust, rinsed clothes, vinegar, petrichor. That olfactory portal that unlocks a 3-second advertisement of your childhood-self. And it vapourizes when you blink. You can never summon it again. And you forget what you saw.

[booksandpepper4]

Wouldn't it have been such a relief if we were given a Marauder's Map of our life? An old, coffee-stained, foldable map of how far we are - from pacing anxiously towards our bitter-sweet fate.