I hate GoodByes...

Like the title suggest, I simply dislike goodbyes. They make me feel awkward, and it fills me with some sense of dread, the question, "Will I see them again?" rolls around for that instant, making me a little hesitant in turning around and walking away.

It is when the goodbye is more permanent that I become what I never am usually. A little lost. How do we tell someone Goodbye for the last time? It is a little more complicated than, "Well, till next time, seeya then.. Take care..."

Death is so Final, that there is little you can do when it comes knocking. No arguments, when it is time. Walk away. No teary goodbyes, no last minute declarations of love, nothing. Just Go.

Having faced so many such finalities, each time I make my heart a little more strong, the tears a little lesser, and the resolve a little tougher. Prepare: that's the only thing I can do. My eyes sting lesser and the understanding sinks in. We cry when we are not ready to let go, and when the understanding sinks in, we stop. I treat each goodbye as if I would never see them again. Sometimes I am right. Leaves me guileless the next time I think of the Dear Departed.

Yet, there are somethings that cannot be avoided. Manage your emotions however well, but one look at another broken heart's voice and it takes every ounce and more of all the available courage not to crumble and let it all go, strength be damned. I daresay I have become an expert at reigning over my own choked sobs, but it takes a very bruised pair of palms and cut lips to hold someone and watch such wrenching raw emotion wash over them, and you, and be the only dry-eyed one. Whispering words of comfort and promising them that everything will be alright, even if means lying through your teeth. It leaves me feeling wretched, it leaves me feeling drained. But someone has to seem heartless enough not to cry for their own Father's passing.

Such things leave people in a state where they cannot decide whether this new information is to be dealt with, how? Denial is easy, but never the right option. Always the hard way, it has to be.

There are so many little things that death of a dear one makes you think about. How quickly the "is" becomes a "was", how you will never see them smile again, how you will never get those few and far between hugs, how your family will never be whole again.

It leaves your thought in such a flurry, that momentarily you are disoriented. And when the thought get into order, you'll wish for the blissful oblivion of disorientation, knowing fully well that when you calm down, you have to fill in the shoes at the Family Head. It is far easier to forget and pretend it never happened.

The worst is when you don't know what your reaction should be. I was never one for open emotion, and I don't intend to make personal grief into a bawling marathon, blaming "release" for undignified behavior. As the British say, "Keep a stiff upper lip, at all times."

What happens when you don't have any personal grief left? Imagine someone who takes the news as "It had to happen sometime..." People misunderstand the facade to be real.

A bit of advice though. Never go to bed angry with someone, unless you can handle it. Tell someone you love them, no matter how much of your pride you have to swallow, to speak that simple emotion. Always leave someone with a kind word or a smile. There may not be another chance to do that. And not everyone can be so hard that it will not cause guilt.

So the next time you are saying Goodbye, leave no room for regrets.

Fallen Rain

I'm walking through fallen leaves,
Watching them float peacefully on miniature oceans
A drop that falls, playfully drowns one
Like children in a pool,
While the leaf retorts, and splashes
The heavens it can reach.
I realize that my image is rippled now
But I smile to think that something so small
Can have such a strong impact
Something sends a shiver down my spine
It's not the cold wind, but the warm skin to blame
And my attention is no longer on playful pairs
As we walk through the fallen leaves.

Sreedevi.

Dark? Scared?

This is the festival of light. The time when the dark was effectively vanquished by the Light. For a time. But as everyone knows, it was only time before Evil reared it's head, in the path of the Light again.

But in the modern day, I wonder what has the privilege to be called Evil or Dark? Privilege? You ask me.. Surely, you must be joking?

No, I assure you, I am very sane and very serious.

Tell me, what is the general idea of Evil? How do you define it? Is there an Oxford or Webster, universally acknowledged definition to it? We can deftly term evil as something dark, something that has unpleasant consequences, something that hurts innocent people. Innocent to the context, I should correct. I have always wondered. That makes falling in Love very evil indeed. People die for love, kill for love, do senseless things in the name of love. Does the means justify the end? If a person innocently fell in love and then was rejected, that person gets hurt, and the consequences for that person is unpleasant. Therefore, by the generic definition of Evil love is Dark.

Oh and for those railing about Moral issues, some parts of the world consider falling in love as a sin, so there. All in black and white.

NO. this is not another fluff piece. I assure you. Fluff is the last thing on my very black thoughts right now.

One more thing, why is it that we consider the absence of light as evil or scary? We make up tales of creatures of the night being horrific and being violently bad stuff. Come on. Give a vampire a break, will you? Did he personally demonstrate the sharpness of his/her incisors on your neck?

I have a dozen people whose thoughts screamed “Evil” at me when I mentioned I have a soft spot for the night and the moon and darkness around me. I can swear they walk around me with garlic pearls ever since I told them I enjoy solitude and that I sleep at dawn. A couple even “surreptitiously” grazed their necks to see if I had somehow managed to sneak a bite out of them. I think any non-vampire would smell the garlic, though..

I made a statement, and I think I'm officially to say it first. Pain, sorrow and darkness are a person's best friends. Horrified? Let me explain the reasoning I employed to reach this somewhat disturbing conclusion. Happiness and Joy and all that jazz cannot come unbidden to you. Not all the time at least. They last some, but I think they are the main use is to cushion a fall sometimes. Which may be good or bad.

These three and Fear, are those that can come to you at the first bidding. Even without you calling to them. They come and they keep the thoughts in your head straight. Like joy, they don' t tell you that the world is made of marshmallows, and that if you are feeling joyous, a truck can't run you down.

What and How you react to these best friends of yours, when they make an appearance, is up to you, and it will define how strong you are. It is way to easy to laugh and smile and make people believe when you are happy. Much less so when your smiles have to hide the pain you feel and call attention away from the fear in your eyes or the sorrow that is weighing down on your heart.

Make no mistake, they are not meant to drag you down. It frustrates me when people believe that they are bad things. I say, wake up and smell the coffee. These are the things that teach you to understand the value of a smile or of “Love” (ugh that word again!!). Be grateful, infidels.

I am an advocate for the dark side. Dark != Bad, for Salazar's sake. The darkness of the night is gracious enough to allow a measly candle to fight it. It is the unknown. That's why people fear it. What darkness is used for is not an excuse to condemn darkness itself.

This does not mean I'm going to go around waving sticks and claiming apocalypse is here. Rather apocalypse is in my coffee cup because I have unwittingly ruined the perfect taste with sugar. Impulse is sometimes so bloody unhealthy.

MY point is: don't be so quick on judgment. Before fearing something, and insulting it with fear rather than respect, think about it. Dark and Light cannot exist without each other, as you so well have already noticed. It is the classification that annoys me.

Pain, if you understand it, will no longer be feared. That is what I'm aiming at. Understand before you Judge. I sympathize with the anti-heroes simply because things are so unfair for them. With them being so unceremoniously being shunned because they react differently to the same stimuli. If someone yells at you for being stupid, they are bad. If they pat your head, go “there there” like everything will automatically undo itself, they are the best. How Pathetic!!

I wish half the children understood why they were being chastised. Oh yes, I understood why I was being chastised when I was a child. I reacted , how to say, differently... but I understood nonetheless.

My friend once burst into tears when I faced my mother's tirade, got slapped and calmly apologized before slamming the door in my mother's face. She apparently was never chastised at home. Explains why she was and still is a very spoiled twit. My revenge was sweet, but I understood why that scene occurred and never repeated those mistakes again.

The point of that little anecdote was just that. Understand and then deal with it, but learn from it. I cannot say that I always follow my own advice, but I, in all the goodness in my heart, am trying to help whoever needs this kind of brash truth, being slapped in the face. I utterly dislike being told “it's going to be fine” when I know that is a lie. Being lied to is not good and it will do good for you to keep in mind who is right, the next time you run someone crying.

If you want someone who will blind you with sweet caresses and soothing words, even though you need to be shaken to the truth, good for you. When it finally hits you that you have been living a lie, and those so-called friends of yours made your life better then but that led to a blatant crashing of your world in the long run, just remember the words of the “unsympathetic” ones as you labeled them.

Digression, you call this? Read again and think about it. They are all interconnected. Beyond that, I can say no more.

I see you moving to get those garlic pieces and mentally making a note to not get me on a temper. Go on, call me whatever. I recently have been termed as the “Ice Princess.” MY response is fitting: Sneer.

I'm not even going to dignify that with a retort.

Becoming Me.

Ok, I know, the title is not my own. I filched it from "Becoming Jane." But the reason I did that was because, I felt it only apt. After seeing the movie, I had that reassuring feeling that there are others in the world, or were there, who were also not understood. They also had no one to connect with. There were others and will be others who I can relate to. And there will be people who can relate to me.

Perhaps you'll roll your eyes after reading the previous paragraph, perhaps you shall be intrigued to read ahead. Perhaps your reaction will be neither. I will not justify this writing of mine, other than to myself.

There are so many many times I am bursting to share my views on something, but I find no channel for release. The need to bounce the ideas or views or whatever it may be, simply finds it's way obstructed, and either slowly dies, or proceeds to contemplate the virtues of schizophrenia. Surely, talking to self sometimes seems so much more useful than talking to people who will halfway not understand, and halfway make assumptions, and bothways make idiots of self and of me.

Not that I regret my quaint tastes or my cynical attitudes, or my aloofness that is so easily and readily construed as arrogance. I am very, very happy to break the mould, even if the creation is uncommon and uneven. Unfortunately, the vices of the soul deem the desideratum of intellectual company very becoming indeed. Unfortunately, such company is rarely, if at all, so attained.

I wonder, by how the notion of headstrong women and arrogant men is passionately pursued, whether it means to be of more use at all, than make up the essence of classic, evergreen fiction. To be read, enjoyed by the season, bound in volumes of rich leather, initialed and labeled in shiny gold letters, and then forgotten till some one finds comfort in those tomes again. Rarely by the same reader as before, I assure you.

Such stories are, I believe, never forgotten, once introduced to memory. The ingenuity and the powerful natures of the leads are so delicious, it is inclined to be etched, may not be in the fore, but in the least, some back-shelf of the vast expanses of the human mind, to be remembered in civil conversations and brief re-collections. Never Forgotten.

Are the realities of such delectable characters ever accepted? In all my life I have never once come across a self styled person resembling a Mr. Darcy, or Colonel Brandon, or here it comes, even Severus Snape. Not even in the same ballpark, not by the measure of a very long stick. Sometimes it makes me wonder if such characters are somehow the taboo, only to be read about, but never experienced. It is such a shame really. Chivalry is all but dead, romance reduced to physical entanglement of limbs and mouths, and men neither proud, nor prejudiced. Pride, dear reader, is somehow becoming the equivalent of arrogance. Looking down an aristocratic nose is mis-conceived as pride. Little wonder why people have confused hearts with souls and brief concurrence of ideas as being depth in understanding another individual.

Loneliness is the mistress of torture, and the lady of strong men's dreams. It's amusing, to the point of raised eyebrows, how young couples mistake an idea of concern toward the other, as love. I wager that most of these couples will not realise what they are really in, and when sufficient time passes, like the rock is reduced to sand in a desert, so will the boundaries defining concern, affection and true love be so indistinct, believing in either for the other is hardly an effort, given the slightest hint. Attraction, Nature's simple antidote to thought, works well indeed.

Singularly, I bring these up, for the reason that Finding ideal company is more than just a climb up the Himalayas, and so everyone settles for the next best thing, finding whatever company. I have had so many corrections to my train of thought recently, it had left me lost. I figured a good day or lifetime of introspection would be helpful to making such corrections. I found that a dozen years of talking made little effect on the listening powers of my closest friends. Other than gleaning correctly the information anyone could pull off in a hour's conversation at a local party, my "closest" friends had no idea who I was, or what my thoughts on common topic were, in the least. Even my next of kin, couldn't understand my responses, after 20 years of growing up together. I am truly, alone.

For a long time I walked around with questions threatening to drive me mad. Was I that much of an sociopath? Why do I enjoy the silence as a better company, to the sweet frivolities of friendships known. For one, people have become so adept at judging a book by the cover, that many think Playboy deserves a Pulitzer. It's maddening, infuriating, and blasphemous. How intellect is now restricted to proficiency, is simply annoying.

I do not, however, claim that I have knowledge of the pages within the bindings of great books, throughout the world. I do not. I barely have scratched the surface. But what I can claim with pride is that I have learned from all that I read. And I do not need the tag of fame to be attached to the author's name to compel reading their works. I have read several obscure books, short stories, and plain doodles on the back of a paper napkin, and I am sure that I can attest to a good writing style when I see one. It's unfortunate that I am in want of reasonable company, when there are so many millions of individuals around. I say nothing, however, of their individuality.

A wave of this, uncompromising need for a like minded , similarly inclined person, if at least one, is enough to make me run to the hills and live in solitude, with a handy multiple personality disorder, to satisfy the need to feel understood and equaled, in mind, heart and soul.

A handful of sparks

Each time I have that feeling, that familiar tingle, I cannot help but hold out my hand, palm up, and and curl my fingers heavenward. The glint of the gold on the finger of the heart is somewhat dimmed by the shadows cast upon it by the light playing on my fingertips. Familiar creases deepen and threaten to forever mould into my palm, canyons upon fair lands, tinged in red as the setting sun.
I stare at the sight, never shaking, deadly still hand. And I feel it. The ever so slight tingle of blood teasing my finger-tips, tickling my nerve endings, and I wonder what it is.
What is that strange sensation? Why do I feel it so? No reason is there, or is there reason where there is none?
What do I do with this, this energy ready to burst forth? For I know not how to expel it. I know not how to treat this condition, to see it through it's end.
Tell me, What will it be, with these tips to bend?

Autumn in New York...

Is there something that can completely captivate you? "Ensnare the senses?" Something that can make you stop mid-stride on a busy street? Something that makes you pause in mid-sentence and make you forget? Forget where you are, Forget what is happening, and take you to another place?

Think.

I am sure that there is at-least one such thing for every person.

What made me ask such a question? Take a guess. Something did captivate me, ensnaring my senses and took me to another place and time.

What was it, you ask me? I'll tell you.

"I wandered, lonely as a cloud,
That floats on high, o'er vales and hills..."

There was a distinctly beautiful song playing on my i-pod, which I think was "Be here to love me" by Norah Jones, and I was enjoying my self-declared coffee break, on a cool autumn afternoon, with a particularly beautiful blend of cinnamon-flavored coffee in the wake, trying to be at peace with the world and remembering to savor my last scraps of solitude.

Shaking the mental images of impending doom at the workplace from my mind, I tried to concentrate on the coffee, trying to get my mind to relax, which I was finding increasingly hard to do. There are some days that you would want to lie down and never wake, hoping they'd instate a memorial for you, who died bravely fighting workplace pressures. This was one of those days. My stamina was steadily deteriorating, owing to the hectic work schedule, and lack of sleep, thanks to imbecilic "above the floor" neighbors and a nagging sense of responsibility for my own demise. I wanted to just close my eyes and pretend it was a bad dream. Didn't work.

I sighed and decided that peace was a little hard to get right now, and leaned back on the cold metal seats that adorn the sides of the little stone pathway leading back to my personal hell. I needed a break. I felt like laughing out loud. A break? Damn it! You just had a summer break. What in the name of Merlin and Salazar are you talking about? It is just the first week of work and you're ready to drop dead? I chided myself for being such a coward. After all, I was not the only one in this boat. I felt a little better, knowing that I would not be alone in this. A deep breath and I felt practically normal.

Sipping the remnants of the coffee and letting the warm liquid gently soothe my aching throat, I settled back into my seat and glanced around, amusing myself with the behavior of overly-greedy pigeons, when I actually paid attention to the surroundings that I passed through every day, without so much as a cursory glance.
I was surprised at how ignorant we could be, not noticing the little beautiful things around us. The little things that would make things seem so much better for the moment.

I could not take my eyes off the sight. The afternoon sun lazily tickling the fall-tinged leaves on sleepy trees. The wind, blowing fallen leaves around gently, as if trying to help them remember how it was to be above the ground, fluttering in the playful breeze, how it was to be alive. The rays of golden that seemed to be drawn tight as rope, binding the earth and the sky, upheld by the strong branches of tall, proud trees. It made me smile and a content sigh escaped my lips, which were parted ever so slightly at the wonder that lay before me.

How long I sat there, I don't remember, but why I sat there, not caring about the time that passed, not caring if anyone watched my fixed gaze, not caring if I had to leave.

Not caring if I was in this world or the next.

When I finally forced myself out of my reverie, the rays of bright gold had dimmed and my coffee had long since gone cold.

A minute to a day

There are several things we fail to notice. And when we do, we wonder why do we ever worry about "greater things in life," but then we always worry.
The wonderful feel of the fresh air on our faces, the gently fierce wind. The feel of soft grass beneath naked feet, the warm glow of light to draw shadows on the walls. The warm fuzziness of the thick comforter on a cold night. The wonderful flow of silky hair through our fingers.
The grace of a slow-dancing flickering candle flame, the feel of warm coffee flowing down the throat on a cool evening. The wonderful chill of cold water in our mouths on a warm day.
The crispness of fresh snow under boots.
Warm glowing feeling when you do something nice for someone, or someone does for you.
Laying down to sleep after a tiring day, and waking up with that lazy feeling on a weekend.
Having nothing to do for a few hours.
Reading novels when you should be reading textbooks, just for a few stolen hours.
The tickle of the carpet when you walk around without shoes.
Smelling a wonderful meal from the door when you come home after a day of hard work.
Getting so much as an appreciative nod for something you put your heart into.
Smiling when someone lies to you, just because the lie makes you smile.

I will go on when I can, but for now my greatest pleasure is sitting back in a chair, feet bare on soft carpet, in a comfortably warm room.
There are my favorite songs playing in my ear and the cinnamon dolce latte has left a wonderful warmth in my chest and the faint smell of magnolia blossoms tenderly floats around.

I only sink lower in my chair and give way to a relaxation I can enjoy for sometime without worrying too much.