april showers

my roommate stays up through the night to frame policies- this is institution building, revolution comes from headaches in the morning, having sat through 6 hours of deliberation.

april showers with my face to the wall and my back to a roommate, tremors so small under a blanket and blood on thighys drying so quickly that sometimes she asks if I ever cry.

The rivers are flooding, claiming back the banks we thought we could make our own. This nation falls and now its her turn to cry. I almost laugh, telling her its her fault for being so good, for caring and making something out of nothing, for being a leader, for being right. Its her fault for being so good that people want to take peices of her, while I sit here with chunks of myself measured to give to anyone who shows the slightest interest.

april cries while this world is ending, but this city is too dry. it used to have “cherry showers” this time of year when we first moved here, but the pink blossoms fall from the trees for only a week, and the people around me are new.

its like i was never here, youd never think i was

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a fresh start

as i write this two hours past the midnight deadline, a net is cast for tomorrow. in the lakes to the east they set out boats in the morning and wait for the daily catch.

these fish scales on my summer skin flake off as i scratch my arms in class, tying torn cords of fish nets around my neck in my head, dreaming of how i want to die.

i have fishnets drawn on my thighs in red and black, depending on what self love i settle for today.

i sit in this class in law school, with four goddesses for friends. im a mere mortal who bleeds when cut and gut with the fisherman’s knife, and then sold in 400g sqaures of fat and flesh. i was too cowardly to take up arms and so as i sit, i smell a slight rotten coming from my skin.
i rub hard against my scales with stone over a sink. they clatter softly into the metal basin and soon tears mix with water and thin blood.

slowly, as i find myself able to breathe in this orange air, the new day breaks and I wait.

ides

The chewy bread sticks to my teeth and I feel the unravelling sleeves of my jumper rub against my palms. The jam’s too sweet and this doesn’t feel right anymore – the tiny amount of certainty between us, that you come sit next to me and I sit next to you when there’s no one else, has made this worse. Almost desperate, I make an effort to disagree, in some odd hope that now you’ll drift away again. I tell you, “I’m not really feeling  Pearl Jam” but you chuckle, saying, “happened to me too, but you transcend that and really start to like it.”

I wake up thinking of last night’s cuts and wanting more. 

You text me saying that you won’t be here for long anymore, and that you’ll explain when we meet in person. I already know, I found out from another that you’re going off to DU to start yet another band. I felt for the first time in a long time. It wasn’t some extraordinary feeling, not the gut-wrenching burst of emotion that people talk about. Not the almost religious release of thin metal slicing skin. She told me about it in the metro and as I stared down at the grey speckled floor, I saw the dirt on my shoes rub away against the hard plastic. You won’t be there anymore, and like everyone who has ever known me, you’ll be gone too.  

The counsellor has a free slot and encourages us to take it. For the first time, I genuinely consider it.

That was until a senior was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his room yesterday, having killed himself two days before they found him. He left a smell of rotting flesh and no suicide note. You call me out of no where and say, “hey, can you come down to the lib ramp? Just wanted to say by to you and S before I leave.” I almost pretend to not know what you were getting at, and when I put the phone down, I let my hair loose and like I was meeting you for the first time.

I was meeting you for the last time. It was the three of us again, and like that night last December there was a silence in which we said a hundred things. I said nothing. S tried to talk you out of it but you had your heart set and soon enough, you were gone. S and I walk back with our hands entwined and it was like you’d never been there. I felt nothing. 

your song will always play on cold mornings.

You left and I feel nothing because you’re so easily replaced – there’s little to show for you but this blog post. We were trying to make something out of nothing in this place and you gave up. Everywhere around us these people are something, and despite that, they’re feeling all this pain. The counsellors go round the halls practically screaming for us to talk if we’re not okay, but when the most successful people suffer, no one’s going to care for someone like me.

 

I go to bed because I give up on the day, and sleep thinking of cutting.

you’re not allowed to talk

there will be no sympathy when my cut wrists show, people don’t have much time for that here.

you’re not allowed to talk about it if you’re not an addict or one of the most successful people on the college campus.

I try telling you, but it takes you half a day to reply to my ‘hey’ and then I realise you don’t have much time for that, either.

It’s not that you actively believe so, it’s just that I can always wait. 

So I keep waiting.

 

Last night some fifth-year screamed about how the people here have ruined his life. He slammed his fist into a car and then a tree, and today morning there’s word spreading across the law school grapevine that his blood on the pathway to the mens’ acco is the ‘new tea’.

Until some senior says, “erm, this is serious.”

 

I spend some time and come to the conclusion that there will always be things bigger than me, and that maybe going to the counsellor is useless in the first place because the world won’t change if i’m better or worse- 

my father calls and asks if I’m  alright, if I’m not lonely and sad, but not before having the 10 minute conversation he wanted on wills and succession rights. As I answer “I’m  too busy to be lonely” I  wonder what would happen if I didn’t say what I always have and instead told him the truth. Then again, being lonely here is failure (to optimise on your social capital) as well, and just like my entire life before this, I don’t want to show him a bad grade.

there were poets in the college quadrangle talking to a too-small audience about my familiar haunts- of blood and thoughts in your head when you can and cannot see yourself in the mirror, not sure of which is worse. Then, my inferiority complex walks on stage and tells me not to kill myself. I almost roll my eyes and barf, but I don’t- people here are wearing black dresses over stick thin legs and the woman I look up to as God is sat three seats to my left.


I don’t talk because I don’t know what to say.
I’m not one of those poets so comfortable on a stage, saying “yes, I wanted to kill myself”. I’m in the audience telling myself over and over again that I’m  not one of them, all the while pressing down on four day old scabs as though they mean anything different.

I’m  told that after a blow-job last night, last year’s winner of Man Lachs let slip on the early morning bathroom floor that he takes pills for depression and anxiety. I’m glad no one else in the college knows, because if they did then all scarred bodies would have to win.

I’m finding it hard to keep my eyes open most of the time, I’ll  be lucky if I can even play. So I keep my cuts on my thighs and my mouth shut tight, hoping you’ll never really ask.

 

 

              

have you tried telling anyone?

I come with all these words in my mouth but when I actually get here, none seem to come out. I try and bring it up, to gag and expell it because it has this bitter, green taste that hurts my insides. You see, I can’t keep it in any longer, even when it doesn’t want to come out.

No one wants to hear all that. No, not really.

For a month I try to look for myself amidst all the early Eminem lyrics I find myself whispering when I try to describe… all this.

Lucky number: 8, colour: pink.

For a month, the nothingness of bad thoughts and nothingness of good thoughts level. There was too much of nothing, and so after a month I find myself in a box of strips of sharpener blades, collecting bits of who I once was.

saying three incriminating words doesn’t really make a difference, cutting isn’t the problem anymore. Maybe it never was. The ”wrongness’ is still sitting there, brooding. I’ll never know what it really is, but I take comfort in the short stocky red lines that define me when after a day of saying nothing you ask if I really exist.

 

 

 

 

Quad party

there’s a static silence behind us, but it rings in our ears and in the distance between us.

“My friend used to say we’re nothing but our masks and who we want to be-”

“Used to say”

“What?”

“You said, ‘used to say’.”

You cut me off and to that, I say nothing.

“Did she die?” you ask.

“No.” The static silence around us fades. Before you dissipate I manage to say, “she just left.”

I don’t have best friends anymore, I think, as the second-year guys swoop into acad like a swarm of bees. They drop off their left over ‘alc’ from two nights ago, get some of the first-years to chug mixes of coke and vodka in second-hand Bisleri bottles, and then leave.

All the drinks taste like shit so I head to the box of subway sandwiches and fill myself with those instead.

 

A fourth-year is playing remixes through the speakers in the grass quadrangle, and no one but the participating teams seem to be enjoying themselves. Those from our college who actually are, are either drunk or are on their way there.

 

There’s a dog that’s whining in the quad, the loud noises and dim lights freak it into a whining frenzy. We tried to lure it outside the building with food but it wouldn’t leave, it just kept coming back. Now, its sitting in front of the third box full of booze and circles around itself absurdly, crying and looking for a way out.

 

When I realise I’m doing the same thing, I pick up another subway, stuff it in my pocket and head back to the hostel.

An afternoon, last year.

We had the thick curtains strung up that made the room red.
The afternoon blaze snuck in through under the door to the veranda and the last wisps of sandalwood incense coloured the room of wooden desks and bookshelves orange.

Through the haze I’d hear your guitar strum and hear your torn voice and I’d run my fingers over the raised pattern of the kalamkari bed sheet we spread.

Nothing else could fill me and this once, I let myself smile.

Fuck the notions of set-poetry. Under the banner of post-modernism I can do jack shit.