Eleanor

A place where love cannot thrive.

But then,

When I hold him

And I press my cold face against the warmth of his

And for a second there is a calm in my milieu.

An absence of chaos.

And I think to myself:

This is a perfect thing;

A perfect and innocent thing.

And that maybe I too am capable of loving and that my heart isn't cold. 

And that I might

No.

I write letters in hope that someday you'll come back and you'll know how sorry I am and how much I've missed you

I still love you; of course I do.

Underneath the old chestnut tree,

There’s no place I’d rather be.

The wet grass beneath our bare feet,

The sun is setting, and you feed me strawberries.

Fresh from mama’s garden

You grin, taking a seat.

An odd feeling of nostalgia washes over me;

The irrational fear of everything being too good for it to be genuinely real.

But you hold your hand out

and sit me down next to you.

Brush the hair out of my face;

Laugh about what our parents would say if they found out we were out together this late.

The sun has set now, but I am not afraid.

When it’s time to go, we’ll walk back,

Together,

Mama says chaman gheela hai, abhi bahir naa jao.

Lekin it’s february and the winter sun prickling my skin coupled with the feeling of wet grass in between my bare toes is something I have longed for since we moved to this neighbourhood over an year ago. 

My friend says she’s worried about how she feels like she’ll never move forward in life. 

Another says she’s sure she’ll get where she wants to be but might never find happiness. 

One fakes a laugh and jokes about how uncertain her life has become;

And one doesn’t say anything but we all know she feels heavy under the burden of what everyone expects her to be and achieve. 

I worry too. About all of that.

And paradoxically the more we try to outrun our fears and worries 

the greater and more frightening they seem to get. 

So we cry. And we laugh. And we joke about how Faiz said that, 

 dil naa-umeed to nahīñ naakām hi to hai  lambi hai ġham ki shaam magar shaam hi to hai

But the man never bothered mentioning that 

it’d be one of those shaam’s that feel like a lifetime. 

Someone once told me that to love is to be weak; 

And I believed him so I shut everyone out because I thought all I needed was myself. 

But then I realized that,

Kabhi kabhi mujhe shaam mein dhar lag jaata hai;

And that I need my friends. 

And sometimes they need me too. 

So while we all sit on a twenty-years-old wet chithaayi in my front yard, 

playing cards while sipping rooh-af-za made with the freshly squeezed lemons we picked from the tree at the park,

And laugh about how none really know how solitaire works;

We feel okay. 

And we learn that sometimes feeling just okay is more than okay. 

Ironically along the way,