Hold You

Source: Google Images 

I'm not the type of girl
who'll squeal and hug you hard
in trepidation
of thunderbolts clapping across the skies.
Instead,
I'll be staring at the clouds light up
  whilst holding out,
the piercing rain slash my breasts;
in comfort.
I'm the kind of girl
who'll smile and hold you though,
if these forces scare you;
  without judgement or question.
Who said boys can't be afraid of the
  rumblings far above our heads?

~Hemu

Still Little Moments

| Isn't it true that the smallest things, the most minuscule moments in life are what one reminiscences the most? There are some dishes that your grandmother makes/made that you can taste when you think about it, the carnivals you attended as a child whose colours are still fresh in your memory.

I generally don't post anything from my personal journals.This is the first time I am sharing anything from my personal diary. These are two little moments in my life from my past that I now look back with immense love and longing for, that I have recently written in my 2014 journal, Shon. 

Two little stories that I'd like to share with you from my past that I would trade my present with. The sportsperson in me that I long to meet again.

 I'd love to know what your memorable moments are. Please feel free to share it with everyone here.  |


#1
Synthetic tracks. My spikes dig momentarily into the rubber and shoots out just as quickly. My body leans in to the left, just a slight tilt; like the angle in the mirrored version of number 7. I'm out of breath and feel the pang of heavy wind and breathlessness burn my nose and throat. But the pain is beautiful. It pulls me and pushes me. My feet is never stagnant and there is no thought on my mind but the lines I'm bound within and the place I have to reach. That slight tilt in my body with my legs striding and the pulling within that's trying really hard to finish the race I started... that after that point my legs will be fine and the pain will subside. I can breathe without noticing my own breath and the necessity of air to my lungs. It is the time that I give nothing but my very best. That moment of tilt as I cover the curve of the race, that's when I'm the most steady.

#2
It's almost 5:00- 5:30 pm in the evening but my coach is relentless. I can't go home until I land on my feet from the Round Off Backflip Back Somersault. It doesn't matter how many times I fall down. I can't stop, I'm not allowed to stop. If I left for home now, I may never set foot in my gymnastics training every again. The hall on the left wing corridor on the first floor of my school was empty except for black mats, my coach, a picture of Gurudev with a walking stick and a smile and myself. Anger welled up as tears in my eyes. It's unfair that the other kids are allowed to go home and I am not. My coach didn't care. I just want to leave. I muster my strength and run with quick, agile steps and completed the element, landing on my feet.

I landed right!

I did the Round off Backflip Back Somersault for the first time in my fourth grade.

My anger reaped happiness. My coach merely smiled. I did it a couple of times more and landed right every single time until my coach asked me to stop practicing and go home. Oh, at that moment I never wanted to stop performing the element nor go home.


P.S : I still remember the first time I performed the floor exercises on proper floor. The height, the stillness in the moment when I was in the mid-way of my element, in mid-air and swiftness that existed at the same moment. The perfect landing. It still takes my breath away.

Image source: www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk

~Hemu

A Junction

There is this particular junction I cross everyday on the way back from college. One of the main roads in the city which is now a huge mix of one-ways,complicated yet simple routes that has been changed from its main course ever since the construction and all the digging began for the Metro Rail project.Envisaged by the traffic policemen in white and fluorescent overall-ed workers regulating the traffic with red flags, I am like the flock of sheep they push towards a certain direction every single day,to and fro the same route.

By now, after years of riding, I am more or less mechanical, with the music playing through my player and regular checks on the rear-view mirror, I am good to go at any point in time. But something struck me of late. I have been using this route for a long time before the construction process (with huge cranes) ever began and never noticed anything extraordinary. Just the same old schools and colleges in the locality, the buses and the ever impeding vehicular traffic. I guess that's the thing about two-ways. When you have the option to look and you don't? Or is it just that a whole lot of obstacles have been removed from the view for us to appreciate the possible beauty?

 

 I get a couple of seconds to admire the sky and the overall setting everyday while waiting for the traffic to move. Sometimes I wish it was more because everything looks so beautiful. The way the cranes' load stands in mid-air and the steel containers lie still- it's almost poetic, that I could keep staring at it for hours.  Sometimes, the sun is out in the open blinding me and at the other times, dark, rolling cottony-clouds set the perfect background for all the cranes and the tiny people in small helmets. A natural hierarchy exists there. Colourful hemets, little people, the containers, the cranes and the sky. What's more astonishing is the ability for the setting to change everyday yet appear similarly enthralling and beautiful. Some days, the crane is moving and some days its still, but for the sly wind to brush against it, different sky settings... but it's lovely, every single day. In the entire half hour ride back home, that's a scene I neither look forward to nor avoid, but enjoy just as it comes. In that singular couple of moments.

 I wonder if the junction is in new light or if I am perceiving it to be.Am I supplied with a new choice or have I trained myself to look around? Whatever it is, it is beautiful. Maybe, I could apply it to my life and move on as and when the signal turns green.

Do you have a similar story? Finding something utterly peaceful in the midst of chaos and loudness?
Please do share it with me here. I would love to know what I am missing out on. Cheers and much love! :)

~Hemu 

My little boy

 I looked at him lay beside me.All his face muscles relaxed and a chest so smooth. His ruffled hair and closed eyes made me run my hand through the silkiness of his face and hair. I could see him smile. It seems like he is in the middle of an intense dream where there was a chance just to smile and nothing else. It seemed like god was playing Lego blocks with him and he beat god with a more massive and intricate structure. It was a smile of triumph and acknowledgement of being let, to win. Like the smile of a three-year old boy who thinks he is the strongest in the world as he beats his father in a game. He didn't know the truth behind his victory: the  selfish satisfaction of the father wanting to see his son win. The smile of a kid. That's all that was wanted.Yet,beyond all this, you know the boy'll melt in his mother's arms and embrace her surrendering himself fully to her. Like he did, in my warmth. That's all I saw.. A little boy. 


      Perhaps that's exactly what made me love him. The little boy that I saw in a wannabe man.Mirth danced in his eyes, evidently.. he had a risqué manner of speech..Still like an event that never happened,  the first time we both met. I didn't know who he was.. We spoke in the full freedom of being strangers sharing a conversation. He was of a different class.. of a different world and different ideas. Outsiders saw two radically different people connected by one word: frivolity. Odd that I started liking him I've never had a crush on any guy who resorts to annoying habits I so detest. I never did. But he caught me somewhere. It was an incursion which stayed in fragments in the heart of mine so lonely. Like the little boy who kissed the stranger's cheek, I as the passing woman sat down on my knees to cuddle the bubbly kid. 


    I was still in the warmth of my bed, Unable to get up as he would be awoken from his encounter with the Angel of Smiles, I lay still, looking at his baby face. The smile wandered back and forth from his mouth and into the thin curves of his cheeks. He lay right there holding my hand tight, still sleeping... smiling...
       .... like a little tot that clings to its mother's clothes, my man, held me in his arms.
I went back a little on time and thought of all the eons that he made me smile. Starry-eyed he was, of hot chicks, a prankster,an imp.. The jolt in me that struck me every single time he spoke to her., the days of jealousy and envy. 
It was a feeling that I stuffed inside me. All that I needed to brighten my day was to see his sparkling face just once.. fooling around and teasing everyone. Kid-like antics, I tell you!


           The feral guy, so cherubic... with horns and a tail as well. Boyish charms. That's where he caught me. Yet over the few of our years together, I've seen a man growing. I see it when we go out alone, a protective force all around me.. I see it when another man looks at me. Yet, when it's just me and him, I fail to place the man anywhere, I can see just the little lad. Just the same little boy of enormous guts who walked up to me in the middle of a large gathering and asked me if I liked him in front of so many of my peers! I still remember the cheers that faded out as I walked out of there. What a day it was! 


I lay and thought of it all. Saw my life go in front of my eyes. I saw those tears, ego and love blinding me. I saw the past,present and future. As they were, as they are and as I wished it to be, with him. He amazed me. With the way he talked, the way his face carried a look of obliteration about me liking him or not, the wide shine of his ardency that left me with the blank feeling of emptiness that I didn't know what to do with... everything about him. It just left me stunned. He seemed like a magical being to me. Yet, like every other human, he did grow sad and angry. As a matter of fact, he possessed the emotional level of a kid. On extreme scales of happiness, sorrow, temper and tantrums... He jumped like a monkey from one to another. But, it is adorable to look at him through it all.. For whatever may a toddler do, he is always looked at  with a feeling of extreme love and adoration.  


     Thinking about it all, questions of what, why, when,who and how never were answered when put as a question to ask me about him... He just walked in and pushed everyone else out!
And when I agreed in the pool of tears I had shed that I loved him too, after months of denial and pretension, for I could take it no longer, He just smiled. The same mischievous, impish smile that made me look at him, twice in a huge crowd of people. The same smile of the little boy who steals another's chocolates.. His clean sweep, pride and elation, all behind that one smile as he embraced me to be his...


         I turned around to look at him staring at me, wide-eyed, into my eyes. Still in the covers of my thoughts, I smiled, looking at that boy... who still looked the same.. as I whispered," Good morning.. You seemed to be very amused in that dream of yours! what did you see?"
He mocked my look and asked if I really wanted to know.. As I gave a nod, he said...
   " I saw a little lass, my dear.. A tiny little one that grew possessive of me..A girl drowning in jealousy as I spoke to another.. I saw the girl I so love.. The small kid whose heart I nearly shattered before I could make her love me too, the little girl that i wooed,. and the girl who said a "yes" to me...She is a little girl, my dear who makes me smile.. 
                                                         
The beautiful little girl who I know is a woman, 
yet to me, who will always remain to be a child!"


I closed my eyes and slept on him as he stroked my hair, with a peaceful smile of knowing... 

~ Hemu 

Unrealized Smiles, tears and thoughts! The beauty of it!!!

Why do babies smile in their dreams? What do they see? I set this up as my status on Facebook and received a few interesting feedback. One being a belief that god plays with the babies in their dreams, and hence they smile.

          It sounded magical to me.. Probably even true, who knows! There something nice about little things, not very true.. but highly inspiring. It seems very obvious that God wouldn't come in our dreams to play with us, I just wonder why! Did God come in our dreams when we were young? I got no clue. Seems like a distant part of you, doest it? Childhood?!

   We flip through old photos and realize how cute we looked back then. We listen to our parents and relatives relate our antics in detail.. Making us feel like we were the most mischievous kid ever on earth, and hey! THAT is taken as a compliment...Now! you feel happy about it don't you? 

  Probably the only time when we think, yet don't realize the value of our thoughts. Why? We were not trained to think if our thoughts are right or wrong?! We just think, blurt it out loud, sleep, cry and smile. No worries, no tensions.. We didn't create any of it for ourselves.

   The purest stage of mankind when we posed for a photo, yet never knew we did, never worried about how  we looked when it was taken.,nor did we bother when we were showed the photo in a couple of weeks. It was innocence, taking us over, inside out. 

  That's the best part about being a kid.. Being able to say what you think about people without bothering about their reactions("Oh Aunty, I think you look as fat as an elephant!"), not having to lie("Hi uncle, Dad asks me to say he is not at home"), smiling or crying whenever you feel like-both being equally adored...

    I can only wish now that I could remember whatever it was, my line of thoughts... whether God really did play with me in my dream.. or if I just smiled for no reason at all... The most brilliant part of all this is the unstirred innocence, purity and the beauty of it. Living at that particular moment to the fullest, not even realizing what it was that made us happy or sad back then, and not having to worry about the future. Past, or future, it doesn't stay or get created in the memory..

  Coz If it did, we would have strangled its beauty! 

  

Hemu