To love is to remember the leftovers

• "People carry roses
• And make promises by the hour
• My love she laughs like the flowers
• Valentines can't buy her" 
• — Love Minus Zero

Call me a fantasist, a madwoman. Or call me a storyteller.

But this story that I shall tell on Valentine's Day is about a girl who I would call Persephone. It is about a girl gathering raindrops under a tree. She goes by the name Persephone. A borrowed name, but it is just a name. Or maybe more. She knows not whether she lives in heaven or hell.

She doesn't own a comb. They call her Medusa sometimes. They say the hair reminds of the hissing snakes. She says it was just bad shampoo. She sometimes stands under a tree during the rains, looking upwards trying to rescue the raindrops from falling on the earth.

She says it is like hearts shattering. She says she knows the sound of oblivion, of drowning, of fading, et al. There is never a thud or a crash.

Silence is bad omen. Nobody knows what she writes or deletes. They say when you can't make love, you write. She says when you can't write, you make love. That's how it goes. The lack of this or that. Not everyone can write. Not all can make love, talk love, etc.

She reads through the day. She writes in the night. She sleeps with her mouth half-shut. The window streams in the stars. She sleeps like a river and a sea. She sleeps with the notebooks by her side. She wants to mix gold and silver. She wants to tell the story again.

Persephone was a wanderer from the underworld. She probably had an unquiet grave. We don't know the whole story. We don't know these details. We make them up as we go along.

She is a myth. And she isn't a myth. Depends on how you see the world.

"Signs, shadows, wonders."

That's the point of this story. To make up love, lovers and stories. To remember love. To love love.

On January 1, I walked out into the cold dark night. The measure of love is always loss. These are borrowed lines. But I couldn't have said it better than Jeanette Winterson.

I felt free. I put my hands in my pocket and felt better.

All these years, I have chased this idea of love asking what is love and found no answers.

Over the years, I have read literature on sexual politics, the idea of female desire, the maleness of all views, the resistance of all things I and, yet, I have fallen in the trap and crawled back out of it.

Over the years, I have realised that certain answers don't exist. And don't we all set out to find that which cannot be found.

Why do we presume the missing as dead?

I hope you don't mind indulgences. I hope it is okay to write about all things considered love. And all things not love.

***

"I spat out all my inner fears a long time ago. One night I talked for nine hours straight until I puked and fell asleep. I woke up to a new reborn me.

The gym is average. The cigarettes too. I see the woodcutter, stonecutter, metal founder, fur traders, gangsters... Techno in the ears. Solutions. Encounters. Love."

- Michele Lamy

Would you remember the phantom lover, the woman who brought you French hearts and drank black coffee assessing the black cat as it moved around, imagining you to be Mr Ankara who spoke to cats in a Murakami book?

Your cat had a Japanese name. I speak in past tense. But I am not assuming the missing as dead.

I mean, if we ever crossed the same street, would you wave at me? Or hurry to a corner, which is what I would do, to smoke a cigarette — resting against a wall trying to remember the small details of our brief love. That is, if it could be called that.

What keeps us from loving each other? I don't know. Love is such an emergency. Like loneliness.

What ails me as I lay awake concocting situations of encounters with past lovers is the myth of love and lovers holding hands, kissing like the fish in a bell jar. I was accused to killing two. A lover had sent me two goldfish in a glass jar long ago. I named them Hector and Athena. Those days I was hopeful.

Words would have deepened the distance between us. My side of the bed was solely mine. We tried to shoo away the silence but that was just making the cut to be termed as "charitable".

I talked about the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. I spoke about Kafka and the Little Prince and horror movies where little girls called Emily are often possessed and end up vomiting pea soup.

I talked a lot of nonsense.

We broke the monotony of time with cigarette breaks. We didn't venture too far into each other. Maybe I asked questions about your favourite colour or whether you were a feminist. You ran short of words. I pretended to be disappointed with your disenchantment with words.

But having done this and that, we ended up being strangers.

Do you remember me?

Don't you remember me?

I am a futurist. But did I breach your silence? But then I know the past. That's how you go into the future. The one word that rang through the journey was "abandonment".

It is a harsh, brief observation.

And I am the one to put out the lights. And I am the one who lies awake in the darkness, listening to the slightest sound hoping it would rain. I like the rains. They kind of smell like home.

We are always looking for love in the wrong places, I said.

Boost Vitamin C intake, fortify yourself, she said.

It is like going to a war, isn't it?

A haze hangs over the city. I make my way across the street and hail a cab to go to my favourite cafe.

I have decided I will write again about love.

I will write again about loss and seas and rivers and mountains and snowflakes and flowers.

And why am I writing all of this? Because love is all about remembering the past. And because we make such a big show of love, why not remember sights, smells, the missing, the leftovers?

***

Here and there I have written my name in the mist on a window of a car or a home on foggy nights, trying to leave my name behind. Like last night, when I just drew a line. Who knows if there are stories in such lines drawn on misty windows and whether the person would notice it before it dissolved or evaporated.

In the cupboard, there is still the stuffed toy my mother bought me. A dark dog.

My brother had a red bunny. I kept the dog by my side. I cropped the golden locks of my fair-complexioned dolls.

Nobody told me the hair on my dolls' heads wouldn't grow back.

I waited for weeks until one day I decided to lock the dolls away.

They haven't grown older either.

Their plastic skin is the same while mine is withered and dried.

Dolls don't die. They don't cry either.

Me, who was my mother's doll, has cried many times in this lifetime.

At first, because someone stole my doll.

And later, because they kept my heart hostage to this idea of love until one night I walked out into the cold, dark night with my heart and my notebook.

When you walk out into the cold, dark night, it is almost like stepping into the Dostoevskian golden period.

After we walked on streets empty, as if nobody in this city ventures out anymore, we thought we could defeat light.

I transcribe relentlessly, a strategy that wasn't until it became one. They say only the one who loves can remember so well. I loved well. I remembered well.

***

Last things I saw at lovers' places include wilted flowers by the window.

I was told they were duly replaced, although I have not returned to check.

I had warned him dead flowers bring bad luck. I don't remember if they were lilies or roses. But I am certain they weren't carnations.

By now, I have forgotten the shape of his nose. Is there a recall value to noses, fingers, et al?

In another instance, there was an ashtray and a black cat and a terrace — and winter and a faded moon. As I ran down the staircase past midnight, the cat had escaped with me. I heard him call out to me. And then everything was silent

As promised I sent him a poem from the taxi.

I last noticed his phone on the table. I never received an acknowledgment for the receipt of that poem.

But among these last sights, there was also this - a woman sipping coffee...

Wondering if they were lovers even or just encounters that lead to memory deformation.

Do you forget faces so easily and so quietly?

Flowers, ashtrays, etc.

Moon, stars, cold and mosquitoes and a million other details.

I am only trying to document these with the dispassionate approach of a surgeon, who tried dissecting anatomy to arrive at cures for heart, lungs, et al.

By the time I boarded off the plane in Amsterdam last November, I was already forgetting the contours of your face.

Bewildered with this kind of forgetfulness, I looked out at the sky and then at the ugly plastic tulips wondering if that imagined love was not just in fact that - imagined.

How disappointing it was to be at that airport in a distant country en route to another and not even mourning the death of an affair. But that's the point of this story. What is love then? And can you distil it from the million encounters? Love is imagination. Love is memory. 

I had waved at you from the taxi.

I didn't think I'd see you again. I was done with my grand farewells and as I waited for my connecting flight, I was despairing at the demise of this imagined love. Later that month, I went to the sea, ate crabs, walked in empty streets and stayed in San Francisco all by myself with a cat. That's when I remembered you again. Of course, it had to be the cat memories.

The distant you and the remote me and the black cat.

I was polite and even sent you a picture postcard from this other town by the sea in Kerala.

I had returned to my endless hours of wandering, sipping coffee and listening to the waves' lullaby in a perfect beach town.

I was going to witness art and write about it.

And here I was, walking in the Sea of Pain returning to poetry once again.

I didn't think of you that often.

I couldn't decide who I missed.

Love's only desire is to be fulfilled.

Writers are unfaithful, but we aren't ungrateful. We are generous with love and coffee and poetry.

I remembered that long, long time ago we had been lovers. Not that we were. Memory is part fictional. In the aftermath of things, memory is beaten into abstraction of form and shape. Part of all of this is to tell ourselves how we keep making things up. We also make up people in our heads. We are all storytellers.

I don't know if I miss anyone except myself.

"Signs, Shadows, Wonders"

That's what the world is. And there is a stranger, a cafe and a smile in this city, a place that I have always returned to.

That's enough for a lifetime of poetry.

And so in 2017 I will write my book of love.

Sometimes we crave anonymity from ourselves.

I like shooting stars.

I like coffee with rum.

I like walnut cake.

And I like white lilies.

I like to buy them for myself.

We make excuses forever.

And forever we defend our unworthy lovers.

And what did I want from you?

And what did you desire?

I can't tell you things I don't know.

Can we start over?

But where did we start?

I am the blurry eyed wanderer rescuing time from where it is trapped in dusted corners.

It is my ambition to become a kaleidoscope.

We are in this impossible world. We are dazed with the impossibility of our situations and from where we could see the cityscape limited in its scope, we dreamed of the sea.

That's how we lived out our lives hoping for so many things. On most nights, I wrote notes. Perhaps, these never made much sense in the mornings but in the night when dreams are closer, these were my reminders to myself of what I saw or what I thought I saw.

Is home a physical place where your parents lived or live?

Or is it where you live, which is an impossibility, considering I am elsewhere mostly either physically or mentally. They say I have learned to teleport myself through situations and even agony. I don't counter such claims. They don't know about the battles to keep myself together.

I am sitting in a flight writing random notes again on a day when lovers make promises of love. I am too old for that now. I return to a city I first came to as a young woman following a lover. We never made it through. I remember looking at the train tracks and the sky scrapers and feeling a little intimidated. Bombay still makes me nervous.

I am nearing 40. For many years I have longed for home as I set up temporary refuges in rented spaces, even bringing my great grandfather's bed to fill up the space in my empty rooms.

A coat hanger that I made into a lamp, lace curtains my father brought home long ago that were packed in boxes for future for years until one day I brought them to this rented place.

The blue curtains fluttered in the breeze, but I was still not home.

My mother's letters are in my drawers.

And every day I remember my home because forgetting is a sin. Storytelling was my mother's gift.

She told me of Sita's abandonment and of Ram's betrayal. She made me understand through stories how women still had a raw deal in this world. Even gods endorsed the maleness of things.

In a way, she was initiating me into a tough world. She didn't ever tell me fairytales. I know now why.

How can I forget that gift?

Beyond the walls and the windows and the doors, there is a living space, a living museum of who I was and who I am.

A non-believer in fairytales. A believer of betrayals. I learned to question gods.

If there was a map to childhood, to my mother with her contained woes, the one who muttered half sentences full of sorrows, lies, deceits, helplessness, I would try and write them again to understand more. We used to have a small balcony from which I saw the moon and the street.

Oh, we had windows too. The moon scared me. I thought I saw a deer trapped in it. The moon became sinister at such times and I'd be scared of looking out of the window on such nights. And then in that home I learned about eclipses.

I liked the absence of stars and moon.

I began to find my way through the dark.

That's what home is. It prepares you for the world. Somehow the house knows the future.

***

Voids are intense. Ever heard about Eros? The personification of in-between. The absence of presence or the presence of absence. Unfortunately, you know neither.

The lilies in the beer bottle on your table I saw one morning and duly noted the sighting in my notebook is witness to the emptiness of scattered loves.

These are silent stories written in ink, sweat and hope and despair on blank screens under a lone yellow bulb.

Barriers to locked selves are to be crossed like rivers in flood. Archiving is not only the librarian's task. They say in my house there is a mausoleum of books.

***

Outside a car honks, a woman cries, a child screams, a man curses.

Lights go off and on. The moon hides.

Behind the layers of smoke-filled air coffee gets colder.

Wine waits on the bookshelf for a better occasion.

I mix rum in the coffee, look for a pill to help me sleep better.

Outpourings of grief on paper exhaust me.

I write half-finished sentences. I dangle them in search of hope or a better ending.

I believe only in ellipsis.

I don't hold the welcome sign anymore.

I make my way through the traffic.

The haze hangs. I breathe slowly.

We drive in silence. We stop at the red lights. We duly observe the people.

A hand encircled with bangles.

I am driving through the city and many other cities thinking of the dead lilies and promises in a place of mountains and snow, and black coffee and a black cat on a terrace where faces stared at me from the walls.

I am also thinking of George Michael. Long ago, when I was a young girl I stuck a poster of George Michael wearing the cross in his ears on the ceiling so I could see him when I woke up in the morning. Those days we used to record songs on cassettes.

There were many dedicated to Georgie as I called him. I danced to Freedom then and many years later, I would understand why he sang "all we have to see now is that you don't belong to me and I don't belong to you" and think of the lessons learned.

A friend said one night, "Being an old school romantic in a Tinder age of instant hookups is special kind of hell."

There is the familiar road to grief.

I know it.

How does one even deal with betrayals?

But then, I am just a girl unable to keep my promises to myself, still trying to figure if people forget others so easily.

Perhaps, it is a bonfire of vanities. If you didn't love my verses, you would never love me. I can't lip sync.

It is not my song.

***

I am taking a flight out of the city on the day the prices of roses will skyrocket because they are tokens of love dyed in red. I told someone I am allergic to flowers. The truth is they make me sick and they make me sad when they wither away, their petals falling off like they have been afflicted with that unbearable slowness of death.

I am not running away. But I know that when I feel hounded by the idea of love, I want to see the sea. And I want to see the sea because to witness it is justifies the singleness of my being.

Over the years I have watched many great love stories coming to an end. I have seen them crumble, dissolve under the great betrayals. My own, and of others.

But my personal tragedies are no gateways to the mysteries of the world.

Over the years, I have read and reread dusty books from the shelves. I have had conversations through the nights about loss and reconciliation. I have started to believe in invention and reinvention.

The years of stories began early when I was still a young girl trying to make sense of everything, reading about perfect despair and coming to terms with melancholy in my grandfather's house in Arrah where he quoted from Walt Whitman.

I remember one, "And your very flesh shall be a great poem" and all the scribbling on my being became verses that I quietly wrote and never shared, except in parts.

Unbreak, uncry. I kept repeating this to my friends who dreamed of lovers who would rescue them from the great loneliness of this life.

But loneliness was like the sea. I thought of it as freedom. If you shed your fears, you could float.

Maybe in all of this, we could contribute a verse.

And what did I want? What did I crave for? I could not answer.