It’s a November night. Someone confesses their love to you. You sit back and consider all the possibilities with this person. You text your friends, telling them how sweet that person is, bragging about their kindness and the energy wealth they bring into your life.

You keep the phone down and wait by it for that person to call. You think it feels good because it is good. You think about the next haircut you’re gonna get. All the restaurants you can visit together. And then in a split of a second, in a spur of a moment your mind races back towards the similar feelings you felt before.

That happy rush, that iconic courage to risk the world for this love. And that scares the daylights out of you. You admit everything you had been feeling, the text to friends, the future plans, an urge to pushback negative and see the light—all was a way to keep your brain busy.

Because you are still scared. Terrified—of being pushed down to the ceaseless storm of heartbreak and pain. You thought you got over it but that fear never vanished, it always had been there—hiding, crawling on the floor to grab you the moment it could.

You want to feel the love again, you wish to embrace the openness of those little talks under the tree, of those shared cups of coffee, of those uncomplicated, unwrinkled emotions, of no stretch-marks timidness but you forgot.

You forgot when did the wall around the chambers of your heart skyrocketed and became impenetrable that nothing reaches you anymore. It’s sad. Really sad. When happiness is knocking at your door and you can’t scream out I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BREAK DOWN A WALL.

But try. Trying makes things possible.

©️kanikachugh

The realisation, when it hits you that you don’t really like someone when you thought you sincerely liked someone. It was just because you were either bored or filling in some time you made by not following your passion. All because you have nothing grand to obsess over at the moment. It’s unacceptable to you. Unless something consumes you in entirety. Because everything is supposed to be grand for you. Love, sunsets, golgappe, train journeys, friends trip, local festivities or movies. You never learned how to survive on minimal/mediocre love. Coz if you learned that you’d lose that grand part of you that defines you. So, you start spiralling, delusions after delusions, madness after madness, tea after tea, beer after beer, October after October until you hit, not a rock bottom but a side button that sings an alarm of your desires in your brain without permission and makes you face how much ‘intensity of substance’ is there in you. Of everything. That’s why you put your heart into anything you do coz you don’t know the other way round. Never learned. Never wanna learn. And you live with that realisation coz you can’t do anything else. World cancels extremities but accepts the mediocre/manipulators yet you rebel to be the one extreme in carrying love.

©️kanikachugh

I have closed one door permanently or at least I think it’s permanent.
Too terrified to knock, let alone have courage to open it.
A crimson, bloody door with strong hinges and hissing sound slipping beneath the space as life quickens itself by me or simply comes to a halt at times.
A ghost, it appears, had been living there. Old as a memory. I wish I could forget its existence but it’s my ghost; tailored to ignite my fears.
Don’t you just wanna smash it down and flee far away?

Memories, doubts, guilt, drowning sirens, insecurities, screams that never found a voice. All residing in one place. Probably, it’s not a single ghost. A cluster of dormant/dominant inhibitions posing as clowns and scaring the shit out of me. I need to learn how to swim out but I fail. So, I just stay there. Pretending that I’m swimming to the safest shore when in actuality I’m drowning. But then I’ve always been good at drowning. My soul being rarely lost, also being so thin to be felt in me.

I had been inhaling the fresh, sun-lit breezes. It’s lighter, breathable. Doesn’t accumulate its heaviness on my cheek. But the moment I’ll crack open that door its toxic smugness will going to invade my lungs, nauseate my yearly-added/practiced affirmations out, suffocate my manifestations, stifle the dreams, all because that ghost could thrive.

I cannot let that happen. I also cannot hold the door longer. It strains my neck, numbs my brain, prevents me from writing, prevents me from living.
Perhaps someone could help me. Perhaps not. You see about help- one has to be okay in asking it. You see, about help- rejection hurts more than punch in your guts. We, the topmost animal of the food-chain, the innocence-eaters, the egotistical beings only thrive when we stay afloat on the surface.
The drowning part is, however, subjective. Sometimes we prefer to die instead of holding their hands.
I feel mankind was doomed to begin with. They say the only time your age progresses is when you are a foetus and afterwards it only reduces. That implies we have had our graves readied since our births. And all this life we keep collecting different red doors, some miracles, some laughters, some mournings, some sunshine before nothingness decides to sit with us at the table and devours us.

©kanikachugh

“I figured out what you meant by saying —I don’t use feelings until that’s the only thing left to use.
Would you call me a spendthrift if that’s all I spent to be with people. Sometimes, even money. So they stay with me, as an obligation. I think no one would hit an emotional lowest than when admitting the bribe we give people so they could find reasons to stay. How cruelly manipulative of us to make them do this. How manipulative I could be? But not using feelings and emotions is an abuse too. Someone who wanted to be around you without any given reason waits and waits for your emotional opening but never gets it. What is worse -making someone stay with a promised candy every now & then Or being oblivious of the feelings of a person who wants to stay with you without rationality or logic?”

©️kanikachugh