shreya salaria

I ricochet between fantasies and insanity. //Instagram : @shreyawrites

[shreyawrites]

Departure

When she left, a crooked smile like my back weighed down with the weight of failed love lay spread across her face. She packed the essentials : the countless sighs heaved into my neck on dark mornings, the stains of her kisses on my fingertips where bluebells shiver before they finally dare to bloom, the nicotine on my lower lip, her collarbones for windowsills soaking never-ending rains.

Claire, I could sense it. The growing need in your bosom to feel regret. I could smell it off the raindrops that clung to your breast earlier that day, I could taste it on the rim of your coffe mug last week. You are dying. The eternal dying where the heart stops pumping blood and starts breathing because the lungs are tired. You are dying like the flowers in your hair, like the summer, but you stay in the shadows to revive like that blade of grass under heaps of snow.

You're not the cracks on the door anymore, you are the door. I am the cracks, across your face, sleeping in your palms, on the blue walls of your heart's chambers. It's time you filled them up with the mud from the garden of your mother's home, with the muck from your father's grave you wore like garlands and danced to the end of love with moonsongs on your lips. Goodbye, my moonlit one. I shall, till then, wait for my cracks to heal. 

- @shreyawrites

[wordsnquotes]

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays. (via wordsnquotes)

[enjoy-the-life-baby]

[relatablepoetryandquotes]

“I never wish to be easily defined.” - Franz Kafka

via @quotemadness

[shreyawrites]

Seasons and Her

Winter. The touch of her palm which refuses to feel the warmth of my lips. Summer. The color of her thighs in the shade of which my tattered soul sleeps, and becomes whole with the whiff of dawn. Spring. The sweet nectar of bluebells growing out of her pink fingertips, their petals like her lips after her 7th cigarette, parched yet silken. Autumn. The rugose leaves that are her eyes, like bronze warmth blanketed in cold. Monsoon. Her toes pirouetting under a streetlight a little after midnight, dancing to the cadence of her own giggles. Monsoon. The taste of her neck after heavens wept into its hollow. The feeling of her shoulder blades opening and out flowing raven black wings when she kisses me slowly. - @shreyawrites

[yard-sales]

[shreyawrites]

Flowers and Her

Crushed white primrose petals seem to have made home around the heels of her feet. Her mouth reminds me of pink cosmos petals very carefully adorned with dew in all the right places. She identifies herself with delphiniums : although blessed with eternal beauty, her heart remains a deep blue ocean of toxic love. I disagree. If there is any flower that best describes her, it has to be the moonflower, for she bursts with emotions under the mellow caresses of the moon, she unfurls like secrets that reveal themselves in the most unexpected ways. And when dawn knocks on her windowpane, her soul recoils somewhere into the depths of the lacuna in her bosom. One can easily mistake the tears that trickle down the peaks of her face for snowdrops that you happen to find tucked in the pages of old books, and when they collect in the crevices of her hands, they catch the immortal twinkle of her eyes and glisten like lilac hydrangeas floating in a bowl. The ends of her hair tenderly graze her shoulders and kiss her face like sweet alyssums. Her laugh - which rings in my dreams - after clumsily slipping off the pavement, face lit up like golden sunflowers beaming at the sun. I love studying her soft silhouette moments before the sun scowls at her candescent contour and questions its own, beholding her as the world watches its pride ebbing away and calls it the setting of the sun. She throws her arms around her frame and smiles her salving smile; I feel passionflowers blooming in the most hurt places of me. We sit in silence as dense clouds unveil the moon smiling down at her, the night around us urging the wind to graze through her hair and fill it with its jasmine breath. I rest my head in the hollow of her neck and the essence of damp earth consumes, questions, and accepts me. She whispers, “it’s okay, now”, as if a hand knocked the moon over, spilling my secrets. But as she holds me in an embrace, I feel silken flower petals blanketing my skin, and I sleep as if being rocked in a cradle of possibilities and tulips of longing. - @shreyawrites

[shreyawrites]

“I feel it in the roots of my being, when you laugh like that. For once, it feels like I can breathe this air thick with pretense and my lungs won’t collapse. The very sound of it writhes my soul and frees it of its malignity”. I finished with the kind of contentment you feel when you’re standing with closed eyes and flowing hair on the edge of all you’ve known and you’re ready to unlearn it all. She looked up, her curled eyelashes like the rays of the sun kissed the outline of her brows and it was like God pulled away the curtains to marvel at his creation that is the universe. Slowly, the cusps of her mouth rose and she, for the first time, smiled like a child does after a round of applause on narrating a rhyme : slowly, and breaking through, opening the chambers of your heart to winds you’ve only felt in your dreams, winds that gush in and yet never seem to fill you up wholly. The mad winds, born from the ringlets of rebellion and painted in an infinity the universe has yet to measure. We rested our bodies on my bed, tired of confronting sullen-eyed people who suck all the flavor out of life and then weep at its hollowness. The chaotic calm in her poise, spine glistening like a knight’s sword moments before it slays the dragon, the magnificence of it all brings destruction to my soul while her slender fingers try to sew the ripped edges of me. I laid back, her lower back my pillow, my raven hair tickling her bare skin, lights of the night dancing in our eyes. In simple words, she was the air, for the air is never fettered by anything, and I felt her slender fingers clutch my heart and breathe life into it when it cradled on a hammock of old letters the words of which evanesce like the kisses she plants on my skin. I liked to weep at her feet, and then collect my tears and decorate her hair with them; she wore them like her own and they always looked better on her. She came when the clouds threatened never to cry again and left when the sun sat on my shoulders and burnt me like her fire never could, and on those days I sleep with her name rolled up in my tongue. Claire. The shadows where my soul can breathe better than in broad daylight. - @shreyawrites

[shreyawrites]

It’s just that at one point Your hand doesn’t reach out To the phone at 2 am To call your beloved. Instead, Your fingertips graze the Palpitating clump in your chest And your saturnine eyeballs Half hidden under the curtains Of your eyelids Watch demons dance on your lap Run their tongues up your torso Drink from Your parched mouth. And it’s marvellous. You shove your insecurities Down their throats While crickets outside Sing of your failures. The moon guffaws And pities you. Marionettes surround you Throughout life, As you hang on a shoelace Dangling above Candescent death. - @shreyawrites //Poems about Life

[shreyawrites]

[mitten]

[shreyawrites]

Happy Girls

Some women make you believe that happy girls aren’t the prettiest, the ones with crooked smiles, with proses etched on their wrists in deserted apartments and beside running faucets are the grandeur of this rotting planet. Women who’ve endured cloudbursts in their ribs, women who are accustomed to ache, and it’s now like jumping on red coals, except now they’re walking on it because that is all that is. “Happy girls are the prettiest”. A phrase I am reminded of on texts and late night conversations, and it’s mostly from people who don’t have the time or the patience to bear with what I have to say. “Never mind, Claire, be happy”, or, “honey, you should…” When I was ten, my warden held me by the shoulders and told me, “Never let anyone start a sentence with ‘you should’”. She’s a little woman with a firm grip and soft eyes. I’ve never forgotten those words since, like a poem read in childhood that never leaves your head, or your first sip of alcohol that lingers on your tongue forever. “Happy girls are the prettiest”. That’s why they are girls, not women. Women who don’t know what it’s like behind the marijuana walls they’ve built for themselves, and they don’t mean to find out. Women who reach out for the moon to pull them out and away, to mistake them for sea waves. Women, whose sarees make them itch, and bangles manacle their curled toes and muffled screams to the closed room with whiskey stained walls. And when these women smile, it’s beautiful, not because they’re happy, but because they look forward to be. Because they still drape those sarees around their gnawed bodies, and they wear the bangles for the jingles to excite their children of her coming home from the supermarket. They paint the cigarette stubs on their knees and arms and wash themselves a little too many times everyday to feel less filthy. Happy girls aren’t the prettiest. They’re just, happy. - @shreyawrites

[thequotejournals]

I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…I want, I think, to be omniscient…

Sylvia Plath, Letters Home (via wordsnquotes)

[shreyawrites]

I know a woman whose eyes don’t hold the stars. They simply manage to capture the reflection of you in those short moments when you are most susceptible. She’s the water that holds my ankles to the ground when I stand in a small stream and throw ashes of my soul into it; she’s there when I take birth on the other side of the river. Her eyelashes are the hammock on which my heart sleeps and the sighs that escape her gelid lips are its lullaby, while she breathes the universe, all of it, at once, and lets it go spill by spill of her drink. Her elbows, etched, scraped, blotched, rest on the edge of the horizon and she becomes the light on days the sun is too tired to look pretty. She’s another kind of light, one that draws you to it and terrifies you at the same time, one you often feel tossing somewhere in your bosom; each ray of her was a telescope that gave an insight into her story. A story left incomplete on purpose, secrets you can’t focus on, for she alone holds the power and privilege to dig into the valleys of her chest and study the remnants, the stones, the bones, the ghosts. I know a woman, the streaks of whose brown hair are roads that were meant to lose yourself in, and live the life of a gypsy in her candescent halo. - @shreyawrites

[shreyawrites]

Altair

And she’ll paint your ribs a blinding blue, She, of rugose leaves and morning dew. She’ll make you cry, she’ll Stub her cigarette in your eye, And she’ll plant a kiss on your neck A kiss named Adieu. Her lily-scented love, you can’t construe.

Mark my words, if you may You, holding the clump of your heart Will rue the honey-flavored day The skies and the winds played a part In ripping apart, your marred heart.

And yet, in the place between Those moonlit lips, their snowflake sighs Their touch, the bliss - The upper one, a sharp M The lower sheeted in scintillating creme - She set free the chrysalis That was my soul.

The tender demise Of my fears with the bise Of her flaxen hair; She’ll be your Altair.

- @shreyawrites

[shreyawrites]

You and I, we talked between sighs and wept between whiffs of smoke that left our mouths and nostrils; silence simply spoke. We walked and walked when we couldn't say exactly what part of our damned souls hurt the most, and when our limbs gave up, we crawled. We crawled to the places where we lost parts of ourselves, and laughed at how those were the places our puerile hearts once thought to be the ones where we'd always feel whole. The debris of our dreams lies somewhere between lulled songs we scribbled on our wrists, songs they named sins. There was a place between the edge of insanity and the brink of oblivion and you met me there, where we made a home from our own guilt and filth. - @shreyawrites

[shreyawrites]

It’s funny how I drown in the shallow depths of your words every time. The words you spat at me are the ones that gyrate in my head while I pirouette at their rhythm, each time promising that this dance will be my swan song. - @shreyawrites