Look, the heart of the matter lies in a little worm. The worm eats away at your core, day by day. Little by little, it crawls into your brain and nestles there, spinning away. It is a monster worm, this one. It spins a glowing black cocoon out of doubt, and misery, and old patterns. Again, and again you try to spray it into oblivion. Futilely, you throw drops of happiness, and security at it. "Shut up, getout, leavemealone!"
It merely grins its hideous grin, and oozes its way into dark corners. It will resurface; it always does. It knows this and you know this.
I will claw your heart out, and suck the marrow from your brains. I will lick my lips with great relish as I tongue back an artery dangling out of my mouth.
"Man, I love it when we tongue".
How many other tongues have you loved?
I will cut off your tongue, garnish it with salt and pepper, and feed it to my little giant worm. I have a gremlin little cat, who likes to listen to electrohouse. He climbs onto the drawer by the record player and cries in time to the drop. Little cat, little cat, little black cat, won't you please eat up my worm? 

On the surface of it

one day we will own a house with shabby comfortable couches, that you can sink into, and french windows. one of the rooms will have rust coloured walls and a fake fireplace on the mantel of which will live an empty frame that i have spray painted gold. we will own a cat whom we will name Murakami. Murakami will like you more but love me more, like children often do their mothers. i will have faint frown lines that finally show between my eyebrows and you will have the same old metallic frames housing your gaze. your hair will be more tamed, with a few blotches of white in it. mine will have resisted and have gotten messier than ever, clinging to girlhood. we will have a record player cohabitating with a stack of books we don’t read very often, but like to look at for their covers. perhaps they will have grand impressive titles like ‘Sarte on existentialism and bacon’. Actually, that is a book I would like to read, so scratch that. I should have been an art director in films. Perhaps I will be an art director for small films, and you will be writing something you like. one of the walls in one of the rooms will have lines from poems and books we love on it; parts will be yellowing, but we like it better that way. there will be a stack of dirty dishes in the sink that i am putting off doing, and there will be a line above your forehead, signaling your growing impatience,as you sit in an armchair and read The Times cover to cover, leaving out the obituaries and the tabloid. i will be traipsing around the house with a vague look in my eyes, in purple slippers and a long t-shirt that i have stolen from you. i cannot remember what it is that i’m looking for, but i keep throwing glances at the refrigerator each time i pass it, and finally, i settle down with a block of dill havarti (in a coloured jar with a paper label saying ‘I Can Haz Cheez’) on the other armchair on the opposite side of the room. i sit cross-legged, open Ulysses (which I have not managed to read in all these years), and catch you looking at me.

“what?”

you just sigh. “never mind.” a slight twitch of the head.

“what?! why must you always leave things hanging?”

“i suppose you’re going to want me to do the dishes again”.

i smile in what i think is an endearing manner, but you don’t catch it because you’re looking at the kitchen and besides, you stopped thinking it was endearing about forty two weeks ago.

“only if they bother you”

“whatever”, you snap, and bury your head in the paper again.

sunday crawls along. i’ve never liked sundays. bloody evil days providing you with time to mull over things you have no business thinking about.

one day we will own a house, and a cat, and comfortable couches, and grow old and tired of each other. or perhaps not.

*I was wilting on my deflated air-mattress with pet-byatha (acidity), and feeling grumpy because I really wanted to be productive but the Festal I had taken wasn't working. So I wrote this.*

Half Baked

I am a dust mote floating,
caught on a single ray of sunlight
that is your eyes,
and your laugh,
and your touch,
burning into my skin.

Look, goodbyes are all I know. They mean that there are more adventures to come. With me, it's always time to go. But, well...I knew right away that there was something different this time around. I didn't want to be anywhere else. Around you, my guilt seems to melt away, and time feels like an alien concept.
"Are you ever happy?"
Everyone has times when they know that they're happy for the most part, but moments of pure, crystallized happiness are another matter altogether.
"I can pinpoint certain moments in my life when I've had this pure burst of happiness. It's like- hang on, let me say this right... it's like... I was floating, suspended- a dust mote lit up by the sun. If i could explain the fierce blaze of happiness I felt with my entire being- that's what it was like. Like being tiny, tiny, tiny but so large that the happiness consumes you. In a good way. It wasn't like being overwhelmed by a flood- it's like floating, suspended, with a mind wiped clean- no, not like being high- like... I don't know. I was never much good with words. You know what I mean."
I was really, really happy that time in the fourth grade when Mrs. Gomes, my favourite teacher said that I was an asset to her class. I looked up the word 'asset' in the big green and black Oxford Dictionary we had at home, and I felt like I had something to be proud of.
When else? When we, my brother and I, were at the backseat of the family car, tired out playing Antakshari and finger chess. We'd fallen quiet and our parents were talking, laughing about grown-up things that did not include us. Not fighting. Never have I felt so happy to be excluded.
Watching cartoon after cartoon on Fox-kids, watching Spiderman with Ma and Bhai in the master bedroom made me really happy.
When else? Laughing till my skinny ten year old sides ached, my head on a kolbaalish as my Grandpa read 'Haw-jo-baw-ro-law' to me. The story about the crow(?) that I've now forgotten.
An evening on a deserted college campus, after the rain, with a cool breeze, and a few errant souls and old music playing on their phones. I wrap my arms around a lanky frame, and push my chin into the small of a back. Close is not close enough, I realize. All the time is not time enough. Kissing is not kissing enough. Too much all at once. I am startled, and taken aback by my discovery, but fiercely, fiercely happy.
Another sort of happiness- lying on a too-thin mattress with an eye peeping at me from behind skin, blurred, Neruda streaming into reality.
Almost every time I've danced un-selfconsciously, I've been very happy. Almost every time I've allowed myself to get caught in the rain, I've been happy.
Reading really, really good books, realizing that I was beginning to love them, I've been happy. Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind, curled up on a couch at a cafe, with crumbs from finished butter-tarts littering my clothes.
"Listen, you probably don't remember this. The first time I came over to your new place, when you lived by the cows-"
"I did not live by cows!', you interject.
"Uff, you did. Yes, you did! We passed them everyday on our way to your place. Before the auto and before Papon De, but after that advertisement in Bangla we couldn't read"
"Yes, but that was a good 3 minute walk away- that is not the same as living by cows".
"Okay, okay fine. That house, anyway."
"Yes, yes, carry on".
"We were supposed to go exploring. North Calcutta, and old houses touching elbows, and sweet-shops. But it started to rain buckets, so I came over instead. We had the place to ourselves because Lahiri- bless his soul-was in Sodepur. And we wanted to watch a movie about a talking lizard. Johnny Depp was a talking lizard, and I really liked Johnny Depp so we were going to watch that movie. But then you slid over to me and wrapped a long arm around my tiny waist. You bent down and put your face next to mine, and breathed into my ear. "Koto din tokey dekhini", you said with feeling. It had only been three days. "Far too long", you answered, and that was that.
Something deep inside me was singing then. Happy-happy-happy, it went, and I knew how happy I was. Who knows what strange twist of fate, or chance brings people into our lives, but how unutterably lucky, lucky, lucky when someone you could really love comes along and rubs their eyes, disbelieving, at the dumb luck of it, too.

Kissing you goodbye was not the hardest part because it did not feel real. Wanting so badly to reach out and feel your bony shoulders and bury my face in your neck- wanting to do that and not being able to- that was hard. It took me nine months to shed tears over the distance, but I did.
Dilli door nahi.

Disclaimer: Boy, if you happen to be reading this, wipe the smugness off your face, and remember 'inspired by', not about. You are not allowed to use this against me to win an argument. I put it down in writing, so there!

Inga Muscio writes in 'Cunt', that period pain is a myth made up by companies like Ibuprofen to exploit us. I wish Inga Muscio was close at hand right now so I could take out my totally imaginary yet still excruciating cramps on her. Looking at the moon like she suggests,  isn't quite doing it for me. Being locked up in an auditorium with about 500 other scientists isn't quite helping things either, even if they are some of the most reputed/ brilliant minds around. The complimentary cookies are terrible, and I'm on my second cup of coffee. Well, at least there's cocktail hour...during which I shall be presenting my poster.

Update: The food at cocktail hour included scallops wrapped in bacon. Wrap your mind around that for a second. They were delicious, but I only managed to get two; by the time I was done showing my poster, they were all gone. There was also brie with cranberries, wild mushroom tart, risotto cakes, and chicken tortillas with guacamole. Also alcohols- I had a Chardonnay, and now I'm sitting at a Starbucks slightly buzzed (I told my boss back at the lab that I 'swug' my wine). 

I have this feeling right now that if I were to slip away, suddenly, quietly- and just disappear, it would be a while before anyone would notice. (The parents would notice, of course).
I feel like I'm back in the sixth grade again, the new kid for the second time.
It is a strange, strange thing to feel this inconsequential, this replaceable, this nothing. I wish (and have been wishing for a while now) that I was someone else. Someone with a different life, a different brain, different thoughts. This is not a plea for attention, or sympathy, or even whining. I am not about to walk into traffic (ever). I am not falling apart at the seams or coming undone, or anything dramatic like that. Just detached observation. All I seem to want to do these days is sleep and possibly disappear into someone else.
I feel... nothing.

Let Us Say Goodbye

Let us say goodbye then,

You and I.
Let’s walk away, and begin to forget.
The kisses, of course,
And the remembering -of firsts and quirks, a handful of dates.
Let us put behind us our secret knowledge,
And all those times you dropped a kiss on the tip of my
nose.
The first time I ever wrote a love letter, I titled it ‘This is not a love letter’
And put it in caps, to emphasize how much it was not a love letter.
Let us obliterate the memory of that;
Leave it to electronics and circuitry,
And the people who will stumble upon it one slow afternoon at work.
Let us erase the last traces of
That feeling in my chest when you laugh,
And how you call me 'bitch' with great affection.
Let’s rub away at the kisses
Till their last vestiges are wiped off the corners of our lips.
Let us kiss strangers till their tongues take away the electric of
Your tongue on my lips
And my lips on your fingers,
And your fingers playing a riff
In the dark.
Let’s forget the time you kissed my damp eyelashes (surprising yourself),
And pulled out the sting.
The world will not cease to turn,
And nothing will have been lost.
Except- a few brief hours
Where my hand on your chest was yours.
Nothing except laughing hysterically as we plotted murder,
and talked over each other, trying to win.
Nothing but staring at pixelated smudges on screens
Till our heads ached.
Nothing except the wind on our backs as we ambled home,
A happy tangle of limbs.
So you see it would be easy.
Let’s not make a fuss now.
Let’s not ascribe this affair undue importance
So the stars did not align for us
(They don’t align for anyone, you fool.)
The gods did not send any angels our way
(We never prayed for them, you see.)
Everything fades after a while,
Even memories, even pain, even something that came very close to being
Love.

Disclaimer: Having gotten a few 'DON'T scare me like that you freak's, and incredibly sweet, incredibly worried emails, I feel like this is necessary. So, for the record, nobody has said goodbye to anyone. This is fictional.

Postcard evening

It’s like there’s a part of my brain that always has you on its mind. There’s a corner that’s always tuned to you. Once in a while I remember it, and I look at it, and there you are. Right now, typing this, I’m sitting curled up beneath a red rug that I have ‘borrowed’ from the roommate for the time being. The roommate is hardly ever home, and her cat is beginning to love me more. Already he follows me around instead of her (it’s because I actually feed him). Anyway, I’m curled up on the air-mattress, as comfy as you can get on an air-mattress. The giant tabby cat is curled up, pressed against my feet with his back facing me. He’s quiet, satisfied, and he flicks his tail from side to side, erratically, like he’s keeping time with the music. I only just realized that the tail is a muscle a few days ago. It’s one of those things you know, but don’t know. So the tail is a muscle, like certain other things are muscles.

Here is what I do sometimes: I go to Grooveshark, and I click on you, and I click on ‘play station’. It’s a comforting thought that I can play you like you’re a radio whenever i want. Right now ‘Crush on you’ by Springsteen is drawing to an end, the tinny sound through my speakers, turning my room into an old-time cafe with a jukebox. I like having this option to play your station. It makes me feel safe, and warm- the way a fire in the fireplace makes your soul feel warm, as the flames leap up and lap at the wood. 

I want to write you a letter. “Dearest”, it would start. I want to write it in curling handwriting at the back of a post-card. but i won’t because I’ll forget, and we talk too much on the phone anyway, and where’s that letter I was promised? 

I’m reading ‘American Gods’; it’s interesting. It’s nice, this feeling of being wrapped up in a story. I’d missed it. I’ve missed you. I’ve forgotten how to kiss you, but maybe I’ll rediscover it when we meet. Through the prickliness of your ‘stache, or perhaps not. 

‘Whiskey in the jar’ is playing now. I’m going to get back to my book.