You need to love yourself in order to be loved

You’ve been searching for it all your life
A place to call home
A place to call your own
Your concept of it was built around books
It involved movies set in the 50’s
Maps that connected true lovers
For you home had a heart beat
A direction to turn your face to at 3 am
It had sympathy for your depression in its bones
And snuggles for when insomnia hit you hard

Let me tell you this
Your concept of home is wrong
You don’t need a life to comfort you
You are the life!
I won’t say, “you are a life”
Because, you are in yourself the world
Just as important as any soul here
You hold within your bones the love that you deserve

If 3 am darkness scares you?
Hug yourself sweetie
Let your heart know that it will go away
You deserve love
And nobody will give you the love you want
If you don’t start loving yourself the way you need to

You are the home
The temple
The kingdom
The forest
The heaven
And heck
Even your own hell

If you realize that at the end of the day
You’re going to go to bed with yourself
And admit nobody is going to save you
You might save yourself
I bet, if you take my words seriously
Love yourself, the way you always wanted to be loved
Nothing else would matter in this world

A tale everyone should know.

Hear, hear! The tale everyone should know

It is 3 am and I know things that little girls shouldn’t know

God is sniffing coke on the terrace

Satan is drinking the night away in the corridor

Angels are dancing in the living room

Religion is dead and your beliefs don’t count

Hear, hear! The tale everyone should know

Adonis and Aphrodite are getting it on in the bathroom

Humans keep chasing love

Love keeps chasing heartbreak

Every step humans take towards love

A grave dug out for a dead heart and soul, instead

Hear, hear! The tale everyone should know

Sanity does not exist and insanity is just another word

Your mind is a little bitch

It plays tricks on you when you least expect

Nothing is pure or sweet

Even your existence is impure and bitter

Hear, hear! The tale everyone should know

You get intoxicated to say the things you cannot say

Sober you is programmed to fit in

You lock yourself up in your house

With God, Satan and Angels

Talking about life and death

Oblivion and the past

Hear, hear! The tale everyone should know

Would you love or hate the people you claim to die for?

Knowing that in the end they’re nothing but bones and dust

Would you smile in the face of death next time

Knowing you lived a life that was a gradual demise

Odd human beings

It is odd
How we claim to love the dark
But seek light in our lives

It is odd
How we admit karma exists
But still do wrong

It is odd
How we say that we love one another
But end up killing our own brothers

It is odd
How we end up wanting the truth
But turn a blinds eye towards it

It is odd
How we claim to be a lost soul
But never try finding ourselves

It is odd
How we are a contradiction
Of right thoughts and wrong actions

When in doubt…

I don’t know if I make sense, but I try hard to make sure that you of all people understand. I want you to know that, I am like a wooden cabinet and not the glamor you see or I fool people with. In me reside fear and insecurities. In the corner you will find doubt spreading like termites. I am unsure of how life will be-but I try to make the best of it because I don’t know whatelse to do when things go down like a house of cards.
I am scared and more than scared I am terrified of losing things and people who mean the most to me. I have lost people but it doesn’t fit in how one second can put a dent of permanent absence. I have been left stranded on the shore by people who claimed to stay by my side a lifetime.
I am unsure of most of the things I want in life, big cities, money, lights and glamor they don’t seem not enough. I shift from one thing to the other like changing gears during a race on the highway.
I am lethal but warm at the same time and that doesn’t fit in the density of my cerebrum. I seep into veins like poison in a struggle to make home.
I do things to fuck me up and then repeat because one lesson isn’t enough for me. How many times have I puked in cracks and found God in narrow corridors-I don’t know.
I don’t know if I make sense to you but I try hard to make sure that you of all people understand that even with my doubts, fear, insecurities and nightmares of being lost there is one thing I am sure of that nobody will love you as I do. Nobody would be by your side like I am.

Pretty&Broken-7

Lately, I’ve been seeing that my extremist tendencies take the best of me. I have no midpoint and my emotions are all over the place, but nobody sees them because I camouflage the tsunami as mild winter rain.
Ever second my heart is bombarded with a surge of emotional rush and I can’t help but control the tears that fill my eyes as my nose turns red.
I’m like a pendulum which keeps swinging and crashing between two poles minute by minute, not halting at mid.

I need a midpoint. Its hard? I feel it becoming unbearable to control my extremist tendencies. It’s either north or west, left or right. Why can’t I ever have a ground where I stand firmly in between? watch the world from there. Everything laid on the ground and open for the world to see. I dig up whatever I lost. My people, myself, my home, my friends and mostly my place. I need to carve a home in this midpoint. I cannot and race between the two extremes. A fugitive.
I have taken up people as a hobby to distract myself from the things that keep me awake at night. I have taken up work to keep my mind busy. I’m afraid to look inside and find no soul or a damaged one.

Lately, I’ve been seeing that I’m meeting other souls and I see kindness in them and a lot of love, but as I camouflage my extremism they camouflage the love they have to give to the world- appearing, “normal”- as I do. We all blend in quiet well.

*and as she sipped on her last glass of whiskey, the typewriter halted and the only thing that lingered in the air was-a feeling of being lost yet knowing where to find herself.*

Irony

Somewhere out there a person under the grey sky is making rope from jute
Laboring away his life
Struggling to feed himself and be alive
Dodging death and poisons

Somewhere out there a person in his dingy little room is tying a noose
Preparing to embrace death
Deaf to life around him
Walking towards death and poisons

It’s ironic, you see?
Some struggle to live
While,
Others struggle to die.

Pretty&Broken-3

I never thought I would be sitting here on the cold floor with my heart anticipating with the same joy it did years ago. Life is a circle and time is what makes it go round. I never thought that I would be meeting God again, that through a needle and some chivas.

The urgency to be happy. Happiness through a needle? Tap, tap! Pop your vein, bent spoons, burnt cardboard, metallic smell in the air, old syringes, new needles, rubber band and blood.

You see yourself blooming again in the mirror. A rose. A happy rose. Happiness? Contentment? Is it too late to go back?

The circle of life landed me on the same spot as I was two years ago. Tap, tap!

Landing on the same spot twice is okay. Landing on the same spot thrice is your fate. Landing on the same spot again and again in the circle? Well, you’re just fucked.

She fell in love with her

“Good things in life unravel themselves, slowly”, her father used to say.

Years later she found it to be true. The love she had for her unraveled itself, gradually.
Age 10-meeting in the playground and playing in the sandbox
Age 13-together a journey towards womanhood. She cried the day she first bled and the other waited. Two days later they were on the same page.
Age 15- the boy down the street caught her heart in the palm of his hand. For the first time, there was no joy for her friend but jealousy.
Age16- One happy in her surrounding. The other confused. One cornered by lust and the other by drugs.
Age 17- One lost her virginity and the other found her sexuality.
Age 19- He broke her heart. She was there to mend it hoping to be the glue that would stick her pieces together. She helped her depressed soul and the other gave her a home.
Age 21- She declared her love for her. It poured out like rain in a desert.
Age 22- The barren land bloomed with roses and jasmines. Search of soul mate came to a halt, at last.
Age 23- Both wait outside the court for the same-sex marriage law to pass.

“Good things in life unravel themselves, slowly”, her father used to say and they surely did.

Born into a society

I am born into a society
Where death is a blessing and life a curse
Where humans are statistics and numbers
60 killed and 25 injured

I am born into a society
Where the rich get richer
The poor die hungry
Where food is enough and plenty
But thrown out into the streets

I am born into a society
Where empty smiles hide unhappiness
Money and sex are answer to all
Where people chug in alcohol to forget
Depression is common and pills are frequent

I am born into a society
That consumes more than it can take
Greedy eyes and full stomachs
Where massive consumption is okay
Power is the only outlet and defeat not an option

I am born into a society
Where the law of money prevails
Thrown into never ending wars
Not of our making
We fight for any glorious name

I am born into a society
Where hospitals treat the privilege
The lesser ones die on the pavements
Where old men control young lives
Grin and laugh while the labor class dies

I am born into a society
Where being a girl is a shame
You need a man to walk with you
To protect you and feed you
Or else get chewed up by the wolves and later thrown away

I am born into a society
Where nobody knows what happiness is
The jails are full and the asylums plenty
Everyone pretends to be the best
And yet crumble in powerful hands

I am born into a society
Where freedom is a state of mind
It remains not an expression but a word
You get shot in the head
Or locked up
If you say what is on your mind

I am born into a society
That glorifies wrong
That is divided into classes
The lower ones get nothing at all

I am born into a society
Where boundaries are plenty
Harmony nowhere to be found
Where color, creed and race define you
Not the deeds that you have done

I am born into a society
Where we are a part of somebody else’s story
Too afraid to write our own

I am a product of this society
Too tangled in chains and ropes
Of religion, nation and imposed ideals.

I am a product of this society
Who claims to be happier, healthy and perfect
Unaware what lies deep in my soul

Pretty Faces

All beauty rots in due time

Your face will too

Your art might as well

Every smile will lose its shine

Your eyes will hold tragedy

Bestowed by time

You may experience pain

Of how slowly it is all slipping away

A gradual diminish into abyss

Now tell me, love

What is it that we are supposed to do?

When this pretty little face would be of no use?

Illustration by Maria Nguyen