My personal sun.

Heaven is a New Moon promotional poster and a pool of drool.

Another year, another day...

Your smile.The same wicked upturn of the pink, thin lips, the same knowing glare in your eyes like you caught me thinking, thinking all night about the prospect of seeing you again after all these years.You give me the same little restless flutters I felt, even as you stand across the room, a few hundred feet away, leaning against the table with a casual elegance, a phrase I'll always associate with you.Your scotch touches your lips with a careless precision as you keep looking at me walk towards you slowly.I spot several familiar faces, faces I dint care about then, faces I'll never care about again.It's only you that draws me here, that drew me here in the first place.Every step I take towards you brings me physically closer to you but my mind is farther away.Somehow I think of winter when I think of you and seeing you now makes me feel the chill air of October mornings, the smell of freshly burnt firecrackers, the feel of those days.I have no idea what I'll say to you, I wish I could stop walking towards you and just stare at you smiling and let my bittersweet nostalgia erode a little more.But I'm scared that you'll get tired of waiting and turn away.I walk a tad bit faster, caring not about offending the people who have been greeting me and expecting me to do the same. You are still there, like a half opened window, I go towards it planning to shut it for good but I hold myself back every time.I've seen what's on the other side, I don't intend to again. It is just there, attracting my attention only when the breeze is strong.I smile, anticipating your musical voice as I reach you.You smile back.I wait.

The fall

Why can't every heartbreak in our lives be like an unexpected fall off a chair? You lose gravity, time stands still, your body is momentarily suspended, hanging in the air, holding on to the ghosts of the threads that broke away seconds earlier. You know how you were, with exact precision, before the fall. You know what went wrong, what led to the fall. You can't anticipate how much the fall will hurt. You just have to wait, till you hit the ground and estimate the cause and effect. And all along, you think to yourself, how could you have been so stupid? How could you not have seen this before? Then you get up, brush the dirt off, probably brush off the tears if the fall was pretty bad, embarrassed at first that it happened to you of all people, you, who is so self assured and cautious and never slips up. And then several tense moments later, you laugh it off. It all seems so silly in retrospect. You reflect on it, think to yourself, what went wrong, how it happened and how can it be avoided on the next occasion. And in the following few days, you forget about it. Except for the little bruise on your palm when you supported your fall. A little conspicuous reminder of what happened. Just like the little dent in your ego after a heartbreak, a little splinter of grief you carry forward after you are left behind, the little precautionary note when something like this is bound to happen again, the generous pang when faced by the past. Yes, I wish heartbreaks were this easy.
P.S- I am updating my blog on my college computer. This is bad!
P.P.S- This post inspired by Poonam when she fell off her chair accidentally. She's all fine.

Boo

What are we scared of?
-The dark.
-The unknown.
-The heard.
The unheard of.
-The unsaid.
-The misunderstood.
-What we have become.
-What we could have become.
-What we might become.
-Means.
-Ends.
-Maybes and in betweens
-What you might discover in some one's mailbox.
-What you might find in the closet on a lonely afternoon.
-The fluttering curtains.
-The half opened door.
-Looking back to find no one.
-Looking back.
-The discovery.
-The discoverer.
-Scared, perennially, of looking at a black screen with grey lettering being the only witness to your life.

ACK

In 4th semester, between yawns and sighs for a better career option, I managed to learn ARQs in Data communications. For those lucky people who don't know(and probably won't care) what an ARQ is, it stands for Automatic Repeat Request/Query.It is an error-control method for data transmission which uses acknowledgements and timeouts to achieve reliable data transmission over an unreliable link. The basics are pretty simple. You send a frame of data to the receiver, set a timer, wait for an acknowledgement from the receiver. If you receive the acknowledgement from the receiver before time out, it means that your frame has been delivered and the receiver is expecting the next frame. If the acknowledgement is not received, then the sender re sends the frame. There are several things that can go wrong(and will go wrong in all probability) and these exceptions are handled accordingly. There are several types of ARQs but let us not get into specifics. My focus here is on the acknowledgement.
What is a person's first instinct when he/she receives genuine appreciation? Is it surprise? Is it gratitude? I feel both of these. Somehow, I'm very vocal in appreciating someone and also acknowledging the fact that someone appreciates me. There are times when I genuinely mean something and wish good for another being and express it in all earnest, yet it goes unacknowledged. It just makes me wonder, are people that self assured that they can't even be thankful for the fact that someone recognises their worth? I am always surprised when people pay me a compliment or tell me how much I mean to them. I'm not such a great person in real life and listening to phrases pertaining to appreciation with respect to yours truly always makes me think about how phony people are. But then I feel guilty for being sceptical and petty and I respond with genuine thanks for realising that I aren't all that bad sometimes. Maybe I suffer from low self esteem(which many people have pointed out) or I am too dependent on others' approval and any that comes my way seems like a cascade of affection. But yet, even if a person is self assured and confident of his/her own worth, it's nice to acknowledge. Just a simple 'Thank you' will suffice most times.
P.S- I never thought I'd come to a stage where I'd start comparing information science and engineering to ANY thing related to my life. I have come to a stage where I use programming terms in day to day life and care about things like ready queues and scheduling algorithms. God help me!
P.P.S- If anyone ever pays a compliment regarding my hair, it is promptly followed by 'I know!'. So much for genuine acknowledgement.

The comma between maybe and maybe not

Yours truly has sore eyes(not conjunctivitis; just red, puffy eyes that hurt and urge me to blink too many times) and no patience for formalities.
1) There should be licences issued for being a pedestrian. People should take a hearing test and an IQ test to be allowed to walk on the road.
2) When you're undergoing a certain emotional turmoil and discover a new song, more often than not, the song somehow summarises your situation and seems apt for the time being. Has it happened only to me or is Scott Adams really a genius? (The song in question is 'Careful' by Michelle Featherstone. Discovered it on season 4, episode 23, 'How I met your mother'. Don't even begin to ask me about the situation. Trust me, you are better off. And reference to Scott Adams, please read 'God's debris'. A must, must read.)
3) How good a movie can be if it moves you to tears and sends a chill down your spine simultaneously? The movie in question is 'The Lives of Others'. One of the most endearing lines accompanied with brilliant acting was: “Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?” Watch it sometime.
4) A good hug by a great friend is the best cure for any apparent status quo disturbance. Thanks vanilla bear. :)
5) Chocolate is god.
6) It has to be said twice. Chocolate is god. Not even god-like. Just god. The God.
7) People should not be allowed to use the words 'falling', 'in' and 'love' in the same sentence in the said order if they don't mean it.
8) Contradiction bites you in the ass sometimes.
9) I have forgotten how much I appreciate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Time is moving in a circle again.
10) I thought I couldn't hide my emotions well. After today, I realised I'm probably getting better at it.
11) A good cry and a good nap can solve the trickiest problems.
12) How can I forget to mention a good piece of chocolate in the last statement?
13) Didn't anyone realise I crossed ten points for the first time with almost nothing substantial to write about?
14) Pity is the last thing a friend needs. Save it for your enemies.
15) I'm OK.
P.S- What's with so many links if you wonder, I'm pretty jobless.
P.P.S- I wanted to include a point about how awesome my hair is but why state the obvious eh?

Unaddressed

I'm writing, yet again, to a person who won't care. And never for once did I think it would be you. Don't you remember those breathless days when we spoke so much we had no memory of doing anything else that day? Those moments of hushed whispers and 'OK, 5 more minutes and then I've gotta hang up!' extending to another half hour of smiles and memories, did they mean nothing? I remember your childhood, as I saw it through your voice, you as a scrawny little kid jumping from roof to roof. I remember your schoolboy eyes, scared of being bitten by a dog. I remember your moist eyes as you looked out your bedroom window and were in the moment, attuned to the happiness and stability around you. Your secrets, your hopes, your dreams...did you even realise how I never tried to make it about me?For all my talk about being selfish, for my clandestine need for attention, I hid myself. I closed up and gave you a chance to pry me open. You never tried, you never gave me a chance...I guess I am meant to go down that road again. Nights of longing and loneliness, a punishment for a little craving of a thing I liked to call 'intimacy'. You said you were lost. Now you've left me more misguided than I ever could be. I hoped this would be it, this would be the one I'd been waiting for,' impatiently' the way you'd put it I guess, and now it seems to lack the soul I fell for in the first place. It's better to be grounded than be taken up for a ride to the roof and then pushed away. You were real, as real as one could get and yet my dreams turning into nightmares seem better now. Your comforting voice soothed me, true, but you said a lot of things without meaning to hurt me. You never knew that words were the only thing that mattered. And words are probably, as the cliche goes, all I have left now to sort out another jigsaw puzzle where the centre was in the right place but somehow the edges got bungled up. And I loved the edges better...