Hri's Reveries

Love is considerate. I set his message notifications to high priority on my phone and he texts me to ask if I want anything every time he goes to get himself food. I don’t write about him the way I have about past lovers— rash, unthinking, distorted. All the words I give him are gentle even on paper. I make them so, syllable by syllable. I lose myself in lectures, doodle in my notebook, and think back to biology classes in school. Mutualism is when two species interact and benefit. Two types. Obligate or facultative. The former cannot survive without the symbiosis, the latter can. I think about how a younger me would have dreamt of a lover who shares the same breath as her but now I think of the honeybee and its favourite flower as the ideal kind of love. Hydrogen is flammable and oxygen helps it catch fire and yet, the two can combine to form something incredibly stable and life-sustaining. Even in my boring science lessons, I tie my thoughts back to him. Love is considerate. (S...

Maybe in another world, I get to wake up in your arms and watch you sleep. In another world, you don’t feel like you have to lie to me and keep me at a distance just so I don’t end up falling for you. In another world, I can hold you when you cry. In another world, you don’t think a hundred times before showing me the tiniest part of your heart. In another world, we don’t limit the glimpses of our souls that we grant each other. In another world, I don’t write and then delete texts asking you to meet me. In another world, we don’t dance around the lies we tell each other. In another world, we don’t feel like we have to lie to each other at all. In another world, I don’t have needles growing up from my skin and you don’t block out every voice with the noise in your head. In another world, we don’t much care what people say and we meet each other at the right time. In another world, I let you read the poems I wrote for you and you care enough to listen to me when I sing. In another...

“The moment I see you, I’m going to hold you so tightly and never let go.” But what about all the moments we don’t see each other? Yesterday I got myself a rose and sent you a picture of it. I wanted to hand it to you and watch you smell it and grin at me. Today I scraped my leg on the edge of our glass table. I texted you about it but I wanted to be there in your arms and make a fuss about it all. I was mindlessly scrolling through the endless tabs I have open on my phone— song lyrics, movie titles, physics articles, psychology research… I would tell you all about it but for all my writing tendencies, I find it so difficult to text sometimes. I use the backspace button a little too often nowadays. I read about the red thread of fate. In old Chinese mythology, it is tied around the ankles of two people; in modern tales, it is tied around their little fingers. The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. This magi...

Time stumbles,  but I never do,  every time I step across                                       the threshold of your door. I gently dress up the wounds I gave you                                                                 a few weeks ago and let you do the same for me. The setting sun is peeking in through the gap under your window’s blind The rays turn you to gold and I— I don’t make a sound  as you draw your own blades out of my skin and let me bleed  dark red             all over your pastel blue bed sheets. We buy back the illusion, bit by bit. The room is a haze (is it passion or hallucination?) Your skin is on mine again. My skin is yours and yours is mine again. The sun’s r...

The twentieth summer of my life came with the threat of being the last.  I sat in the bare-walled room where my doctor saw “serious” patients and thought about how all the plans I'd made for the rest of my summer were melting away.  I thought about my roommate sitting in a dorm with my side of it empty, waiting for me to come and put my colourful posters up, even though I'd never.  I thought about my best friend giving his first lecture as a TA and how I'd be missing out on it.  I thought about that one course I was looking forward to the most about trauma and drugs and other things people dislike talking about. I thought about how much I've been looking forward to kissing you in the fall. About how I might never get to hold your face again. And how I didn't realise the last I was looking into your eyes that it was going to be the last time.  Soon enough, I'll be a name and nothing more in the student history section of our college’s website.  And someone e...

You held my face in your hands and kept asking me what was wrong and I couldn't speak because my words have always come with a bitter price. So I just look into your eyes and think about how they are the colour of my morning coffee and how I despise my own eyes for reminding me of my tar black soul. You're telling me to breathe and your forehead is against mine now and I want to tell you how you feel like water being splashed over my burning skin. But I couldn't speak because my words have always come with a bitter price. To speak is to hand someone a knife that I cannot protect my heart against. To speak is to love and I am not allowed to love you. So I don't speak, I don't hand you the knife, I don't let myself trust you with my words, I don't let myself love you. But I let your hands stitch together the gaping wounds on my skin and I let you quiet the voices screaming in my head and I let you memorise every curve of my body again.  This is a love that wi...

Pull me closer in / your arms tighten around me / too many things to do / but we ignore our lives / caught up in our own little bubble (how long before it bursts?) / your eyes are brown / mine are so much darker (I like yours so much better than mine) / brown eyes like the coffee I'm addicted to / how long do we ignore our lives? / “it's okay,” you say / “there's always tomorrow” / I like your hands better when they are on my skin / can I taste your lips one more time? / we have time we make time / and of course “there's always tomorrow” / touch my soul / you're the only one I'd let in / I see through you / I see myself / do you see yourself in me too? / your fingers trail up and down my thighs / how long do we ignore our lives today? / “it's okay” / until the bubble bursts / “there's always tomorrow” / until there wasn't .

October used to be my favourite month of the year. All I’m saying is, love can change so many things. The first time I exchanged words and thoughts with G was at the peak of my hometown’s rains in July. The air becomes damp and heavy around this time of the year; the imminence of me leaving home for the first time only seemed to add to it. I told him my favourite film was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He watched it and sent me paragraphs that seemed to put into words exactly why I loved the film. Unprecedented familiarity— almost as if we shared a mind. I found myself breathing the damp air much easier than I had in the previous years. All I’m saying is, love can change so many things. The first time I met G was in September, my birth month. He found me looking lost in the corridor of some academic block and introduced himself again, as if we had not already spent countless nights staying up to text each other about inconsequential things. Oh well, we started spending countles...

  …all my screams weren't wasted into the night If only I'd known then what I know now I wouldn't have pushed the blade through my skin and sacrificed my blood, begging for someone who would touch my skin and not feel burnt, someone who would touch my skin and want to touch it again Instead, all I had ever had were boys who didn't know the pain their hands could cause and the chaos their words could leave in the maze of my mind If only I'd known then what I know now I wouldn't have bruised my knees on the tiled floor and accepted the pain as my fate, praying someone would touch me despite the bloodstains and not flinch for once If only I knew then what I know now I would've told myself it would be worth it I would've known all that chaos would lead me to you.

This is not a love letter, but I learnt to use a lighter today because you left yours on my bedside table and I was fiddling with it absentmindedly while thinking of you. This is not a love letter, but I got pink lights instead of blue for my room because the blue ones would’ve reminded me of yours. This is not a love letter, but my best friend thinks we will find our way back into each other’s lives in the end, somehow. This is not a love letter but some nights I watch our memories play out on my ceiling. This is not a love letter, but I wanted to tell you that I think we look at each other with too much longing. Your fingers on my thigh and your lips on my neck feel so familiar that it’s terrifying and this is not a love letter, but I have started to know when you’re close by just by the smell of your perfume or the sound of your feet. This is not a love letter but I’m wondering if there’s a way to pull the remnants of you out of my skin without making myself bleed. Your lies are s...

“ You are a bitch. Wow.” She tears up the tiny piece of paper and dumps it into the trashcan. The door falls shut with a thud and I watch her walk to me as tears start rolling down her face. This is the fifth note that’s been slipped under her door this week. All I keep saying is, “I’m so sorry, Riya—” but she keeps cutting me off to remind me it’s not my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it. She decides she wants to take a walk, but then changes her mind in a second because she does not want to “be forced to face any more people.” She considers taking a walk outside campus, but it’s 10 P.M. and empty roads in the middle of Sonipat. “I wish we had an escape sometimes, you know? A bubble inside this bubble.” Her roommate comes back, so we rush to my room instead. A makeshift escape, I suppose, because my roommate had gone back home for the weekend. Ashoka feels endless sometimes and so, so tiny some other times. The irony is, it feels endless when all you want is to know p...

I hate the way time seems to stumble and slow down when you want it to pass by, and how it sprints when you want it to stop in its tracks. It’s morning and we are still stuck in each other’s arms. But I have a purpose for the day. What are the roots of grief? I try my best to be quiet but you told me before that my footsteps sound louder to you when I’m leaving. “Don’t go.” But I have questions that I need to ask— both mine and someone else’s. “I have to go,” I try to smile at you, “I have a project to work on today.” “Can I come with you and help? Please?” I look at you for a moment in silence. There is an origami flower on your desk that I gave you months ago. The desk is a bit dusty; the flower is not. “Of course, you can come with me.” I pack my bag as you use my mirror to fuss over your hair. I smile to myself, shaking my head at how easily we fit into each other’s mundane routines. I explain the project to you as I get dressed and push you out of the way to comb my ...