Helpless

There is no escape,
No respite,
No consolation,
When your actions are seized,
When your thoughts freeze,
When reason fails,
When melancholy reigns,
When emotions tyrannise over you,
Over that forlorn you.
You saw it coming,
You were partially braced,
But it left you in tatters,
Intimacy was no armour,
It's just a two edged sword,
Which you never controlled,
And you never can.
You are just helpless

When familiarity intrudes.

Letters to Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky : 2

During the period I couldn't lay my hands on your books, you should have continued to live in the minds of thousands of other people, made new acquaintances. you should have been adored by thousands, cuddled by hundreds, studied by scholars and worshiped by fanatics

The world finds your work fascinating now, they might award you 'The author with maximum number of film credits' or something of the sort. You shouldn't totally believe in what I write sir, there's no objectivity in what I say. My statements don't have the backing of facts. I am a misfit in the world of fact maniacs, which is not acceptable. It wouldn't be something you approve of sir, I am aware of that. But sir, I humbly refuse to request your approval or sanction, because it's you who taught me to respect differences, differences on the spectrum which has good and evil at its extremes, which has knowledge and ignorance as its ends.

Despite the differences we might have among us, I'd like to remind you sir I love you as much as I love any living/virtual person. You should be wondering who the virtual person is, I was referring to artificial intelligence sir, the cleverbot who is a creation of my coevals. At least, I believe I love you. Can one quantify love? You might have spoken of quantifying love in one or more of your books. Though I am an ardent and devoted reader I am no careful reader. I don't memorise and parrot your words or quotes.

What I love, is getting lost in the depths of the character that you and only you seem to able to explore. I am hardly a favoured reader, one who can spread your fame because I believe it can't be. As much as I'd want acknowledgement, fame and awards for you, there is a part of me that doesn't want others to share the knowledge(so they call it) of you, a dark, evil but passionate part of me.

Your 'adolescent' is very dear to me sir, I am not sure if I see you in him or myself in him or the both of us. That's one of the enticing aspects of reading your books, getting to become you in the silliest of ways. Your adolescent occupies my thoughts few times a day. He hasn't become Raskoklinov or Prince Myshkin yet, who were my obsessions but I guess it's not going to take long.

What sort of people have put aside 'The Adolescent' saying it's not as brilliant as your other works? Maybe they looked for standards very different from mine.

You ought to be wondering what  happened in the intervening years that I didn't write to you. Precisely the same things happened to you sir, cuddled, derided, cared for, loved, degraded and the like, our lives haven't been very different you see.

Love,
Me.

You can go

I ought to water the plants

Oh, don't you? The plants should be missing you

They certainly do

More silence

I am wondering why my plants are so sensitive to human presence, I meant, my absence. Have you come across such plants elsewhere, love?

Did your mind just choose to say 'presence' instead of absence?

Apparently it did

I haven't come across such a mind, oops, I meant plants. What do they call it, freudian slip, eh? 

What sort of a mind?

One that rarely fumbles under the weight of complicated processes

But I did fumble

Which complicated mental processes was I referring to?

You tell me

We know what they are

Do we?

Yes. We do. Complicated processes like juggling, writing simultaneously with both hands and the like. It boils down to handling more than one thing/person at a time. 

Yeah, I do remember talking about it sometime

What did I just tell you?

Some more silence

But the plants!

Yeah! The plants can't stand your absence though they seem to be able to take your obsession with them.

My obsession with them? 

Yes

It's just that I love them!

Well, there isn't much of a difference. One can't differentiate between the neurotransmitter release pattern of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and love..  Honey, you can go 

Can I? 

Yeah. 

And he let her go. 

Chemical reality

'Chemicals govern our actions' - you tell me,
Disowning your actions, affection and anger,
Distancing yourself from me,
Assigning the task of handling me to your chemicals,
Evading my questions,
Indulging in those bromidic questions,
About the world and the human mind,
For which you never could and never will find the answers.

Our minds are drenched in chemicals,
That we seek - the hedonists we are,
No different from addicts,
Only it isn't  a material addiction.
You try and recede from the addiction,
Only to yield to it more frantically.

You quetch that I don't see through your eyes,
That I'm full of hope,
That I refuse to grow up.

I did see through your eye,
The sight isn't pretty,
But there's one scene I'd want to cherish,
Those spells when our chemical cycles synchronise,
When we forget why we live,
When we forget to live,
When nothing beyond 'us' seems real.

Niggling questions

When time becomes dearer,

When investing time demands strategies,

When investing time on people yields no returns,

In terms of peace, tenderness and warmth,

We invest time on memories,

Memories that can't and don't fail us,
Until reality can delight us.
Will we be able to subsist on memories alone?

Won't the repertoire of memories be depleted,

Without the people that create them?

Assault!

The assault was trivial,
It couldn't  hurt one's epidermis,
It could never disrupt a smooth day,
It couldn't engage one's senses,
For more than a few seconds.
But it made me numb,
It sent my head whirling,
It annihilated my thoughts,
It drew a curtain over my vision,
It accentuated my solitude,
It embossed the vacuity,
It squelched all signs of the make-believe joy,
It amplified the feminine disposition to embrace melodrama,
It caused the genesis of this drivel,
And squandering of some more internet space,
It was an accidental abrupt end to your phone call,
Should you be forgiven?

Nettled

Decisions were made only to be discarded,
Confusion was resolved only to be reinvented,
Passion was forsaken only to be embraced again,
Novelty wore off only to disarm you a little later,
What prevailed and reigned,
Was uncertainty,
With its exasperating pervasiveness,
With its unsettling expanse and growth by the second,
Coercing me to forsake my dreams,
Showing me the mirage of bliss,
And bracing me up for the misadventures.