to Annie, without Love

Annie, 

Have you ever lost a Moth when you looked at another? Or have you lost them both not knowing which one to look at? 

How many candles do you have, burning, in your room? 

What if the best you could recollect of death is a shadow flickering on your brazen wall; where ‘Death’, at that time, couldn’t have meant death at all for you just didn’t witness it? 

Between two insignificances, which one would you pick, to caress into meaning? 

There is a spider on a cobweb in my bathroom as well, sitting pretty on top of a mix of flies, dragonflies, ants and, yes, of course, moths – unsung heroes of a lost cause. There is a spider in everyone’s bathroom, isn’t there? More than one, in some cases, as though they symbolize the extent of predatory tendencies kept in check, realized but in conflict with mortal fear as we take the place of both assailant and victim at the same time. 

Just like falling in love. 

Like when you claim your ‘love’ for a person when you don’t know for sure if you really mean it but then you want them to know what’s going on with the hope that they, if not help ease you out of your discomfort, would get down and suffer with you instead. In ‘love’; ‘love’ as sadism, ‘love’ as treachery, ‘love’ as the single most selfish emotion in the world. 

Like how you derive the pleasure of existence outside of yourself; where the pleasure is felt not by the Moth, but by you, the Monster – the heartless machine that would pump its engines with the juice of lives that pass you by in encounters, both chanced and planned. 

If only for a second you sat on the Moth and saw through its eyes, you’d swap your candle for fluorescence to let it live. And you’d let it leave, because there’s nothing you can do to make it stay and death isn’t an option – not its death, not yours. You’d let it leave like how you’d have let everyone else leave or have learnt to, the insects of your life who’d have fed on your glow, whom you’d have nurtured, whom you’d have melted in front of before having to pull yourself together and collect yourself back again to get a new candle up – fresh, but recycled. 

That, or you could’ve fooled yourself with fluorescence and the flower that said ‘she loves me not’ (she never did) when the last petal fell. 

I read your work. I hated it. It was beautiful, but I hated it still. You can’t make me sad unless I have faith in you to make me happy sometime. I can’t let you do that to me. I shouldn’t have – for which reason, I hate myself more for having shown to you my naked self, not a strand of hair on my chest; naked thought and emotion – further naked. It’s like I spoke to but a mere ghost of you and desired more, only to find that you weren’t even there to begin with. 

It’s vivid when I recollect the time that I spent, under your influence; when I saw you sit there as you told me your story, shifting in your seat and glancing at the door all the time and I pretended to the best of my ability that I couldn’t see that because I had turned my back on you to make you some coffee, looking over my shoulder to check. And then it was like I came outside, disheartened, as I made this excuse that there wasn’t any sugar when, in reality, it was that I felt you didn’t deserve the sweetness of one who really cared. You didn’t get your coffee, I didn’t get my kiss. That tasted like fairness. 

The classic example of a reader’s dissatisfaction with ‘mere words’, if I can call it that. Where, in a toss between your garden and mine, I would ask for yours any day. If only you would let me. 

I suffered with the bounty of your mind inside my head, not knowing what to do with all the gold that I held, not wanting to spend, not wanting to count; dreading the fact that it would all disappear as it’s bound to. Not wanting to melt and cast into an image of my own in the meantime, where I know I’d fancy you to be the Bear that I hugged to sleep on the planet that I was, a million moons back – innocence. 

And now, dear Annie, I want you to burn in the black of mine. And I hope you burn a sunset Orange in a Purple haze, for that’s a colour I would ascribe you to. 

hatred and helplessness, 

Karthik