shreya salaria

“I feel it in the roots of my being, when you laugh like that. For once, it feels like I can breathe this air thick with pretense and my lungs won’t collapse. The very sound of it writhes my soul and frees it of its malignity”. I finished with the kind of contentment you feel when you’re standing with closed eyes and flowing hair on the edge of all you’ve known and you’re ready to unlearn it all. She looked up, her curled eyelashes like the rays of the sun kissed the outline of her brows and it was like God pulled away the curtains to marvel at his creation that is the universe. Slowly, the cusps of her mouth rose and she, for the first time, smiled like a child does after a round of applause on narrating a rhyme : slowly, and breaking through, opening the chambers of your heart to winds you’ve only felt in your dreams, winds that gush in and yet never seem to fill you up wholly. The mad winds, born from the ringlets of rebellion and painted in an infinity the universe has yet to measure. We rested our bodies on my bed, tired of confronting sullen-eyed people who suck all the flavor out of life and then weep at its hollowness. The chaotic calm in her poise, spine glistening like a knight’s sword moments before it slays the dragon, the magnificence of it all brings destruction to my soul while her slender fingers try to sew the ripped edges of me. I laid back, her lower back my pillow, my raven hair tickling her bare skin, lights of the night dancing in our eyes. In simple words, she was the air, for the air is never fettered by anything, and I felt her slender fingers clutch my heart and breathe life into it when it cradled on a hammock of old letters the words of which evanesce like the kisses she plants on my skin. I liked to weep at her feet, and then collect my tears and decorate her hair with them; she wore them like her own and they always looked better on her. She came when the clouds threatened never to cry again and left when the sun sat on my shoulders and burnt me like her fire never could, and on those days I sleep with her name rolled up in my tongue. Claire. The shadows where my soul can breathe better than in broad daylight. - @shreyawrites

It’s just that at one point Your hand doesn’t reach out To the phone at 2 am To call your beloved. Instead, Your fingertips graze the Palpitating clump in your chest And your saturnine eyeballs Half hidden under the curtains Of your eyelids Watch demons dance on your lap Run their tongues up your torso Drink from Your parched mouth. And it’s marvellous. You shove your insecurities Down their throats While crickets outside Sing of your failures. The moon guffaws And pities you. Marionettes surround you Throughout life, As you hang on a shoelace Dangling above Candescent death. - @shreyawrites //Poems about Life

I know a woman whose eyes don’t hold the stars. They simply manage to capture the reflection of you in those short moments when you are most susceptible. She’s the water that holds my ankles to the ground when I stand in a small stream and throw ashes of my soul into it; she’s there when I take birth on the other side of the river. Her eyelashes are the hammock on which my heart sleeps and the sighs that escape her gelid lips are its lullaby, while she breathes the universe, all of it, at once, and lets it go spill by spill of her drink. Her elbows, etched, scraped, blotched, rest on the edge of the horizon and she becomes the light on days the sun is too tired to look pretty. She’s another kind of light, one that draws you to it and terrifies you at the same time, one you often feel tossing somewhere in your bosom; each ray of her was a telescope that gave an insight into her story. A story left incomplete on purpose, secrets you can’t focus on, for she alone holds the power and privilege to dig into the valleys of her chest and study the remnants, the stones, the bones, the ghosts. I know a woman, the streaks of whose brown hair are roads that were meant to lose yourself in, and live the life of a gypsy in her candescent halo. - @shreyawrites

You and I, we talked between sighs and wept between whiffs of smoke that left our mouths and nostrils; silence simply spoke. We walked and walked when we couldn't say exactly what part of our damned souls hurt the most, and when our limbs gave up, we crawled. We crawled to the places where we lost parts of ourselves, and laughed at how those were the places our puerile hearts once thought to be the ones where we'd always feel whole. The debris of our dreams lies somewhere between lulled songs we scribbled on our wrists, songs they named sins. There was a place between the edge of insanity and the brink of oblivion and you met me there, where we made a home from our own guilt and filth. - @shreyawrites

It’s funny how I drown in the shallow depths of your words every time. The words you spat at me are the ones that gyrate in my head while I pirouette at their rhythm, each time promising that this dance will be my swan song. - @shreyawrites