ceilings

the final collapse

dear pritha,

i am discovering different ways to stay quiet. not just in speech, but in movement. it's like the melting of the alps: soundless, gradual, steps falling short despite being in a hurry. i have fallen silent in my heart and head; the banging has stopped. the falcon, who has been mourning in the woods, in what used to be a grassland, for an hour, has finally discovered the rain. it is just a whimper now, the prolonged kind, the kind that makes you wide-eyed in emotional depletion. boredom. maybe this was boredom. if so, then i have been so utterly bored.


the nights drift upon me in such heaviness that, the moment i slump on the floors, the tenderness returns. the back hurts from holding the gravitas of life, the spine melting with the tiles, and the ceiling slides onto me dust by dust. i can hold them in my palms tonight, and drift down into the comfort of knowing that one cannot fall any further. the stillness returns; the clock strikes three, but the silence twists and turns in my head: i have domesticated muteness.


you see, that is what it takes to fall wordless: an enormity of exhaustion. looking at the world through misty windows, and deciding to wipe them to seek clarity is futility dressed in effort. movement is futile, you understand, so i slouch down, leaning onto the cheers of the crowd, shoved into the waves of jollity, their waning success bleaching my skin, my odd solitude standing in sharp contrast. i lay still. maybe if the creeper coils round my hips once more, pulls me closer to its underground roots, and if only i could slide under the blaring gunmetal road, and descend, and drop further, and be one with tarr, away from the lowly mother, and the starved matron, and the rageful patriarch spitting on the sidewalk — stealthy enough to understand what remains gregarious in a society, and how tedious it is to carry one’s tribe’s complicity.


i broke it. 


the trance. the blaring camusian sun, bloating patches in the skin, astounds me no longer. we are meant to burn. i have recently come very close to love, stared at its pleading face, begging knees, inked palms, and remained unspent. i have recently learnt that no amount of hydrant can quench a body of need. i have fallen wordless at the words of love, the same words that anyone dreams of being confessed to — gone unspeaking, indifferent, nondescript. this repose, for the first time, flirts with the lump in my throat and agrees to stay quaint.

i am utterly spent at the hours of the night, that the moonbeam stares at the furrow in my hair, curl up her jealous nose, and holds the strings close to her chest — i am a marionette of nature’s ministry — i am nothing, if not lifeless. and, so the night strikes three, the catholic rings their bells, the jewish cries, the man howls. 





                                                                                                   we 
                                                                                                 are all 
                                                                                             t e r t i a r y 
                                                                                           to one another.







e
  m
     o ti on 
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                   .
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                           m-i- s- t- y

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                        wi  p  e
                                                                                            eff
                                                                                                ort










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                 s i l e n c e





 the clo
            ck


         s
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ikes
                                  






                                                                       3:00 AM

                                                       no one Ⓛoves you AnyMore










i cannot write any further, the ceiling has rained down on me. 

yours,
sushi

ignore the clock