Fading Beauty

Wrote this for a competition. Not my best.

It all comes to an end
The circle of life
The circle of love
The theory of being.

The colours on a canvas fade away
The letters yellow with age
The memories dim
Friendships end
Love is lost
Never to be found again.

The sun sets in a blaze of colours.
It ushers in the night.
The light gives way to darkness.
Happiness gives way to sorrow.
Hope fades into despair.

faces wrinkle.
Eyes no longer shine bright.
The smile doesn't come as easily as it used to.

Words lose their meaning.
Pieces don't fit.
The music is tuneless
The instruments break.

Everything comes full circle.
Life always ends
All of us disappear.
Slowly, surely, steadily.
We fade away into shadows.
Like we had never existed...

I fight

I stand in front of the mirror
And I can't meet my own eyes.
I can't face myself.
I've turned into someone I don't recognise anymore.
I've become my worst nightmare.
I've always believed in the power of my mind.
I've always trusted the thoughts I've had.
But now I'm not so sure.
Now...
I don't know anymore.

I'm scared of my own thoughts.
Trapped in my mind, I fight to break free.
Thoughts spin around like the winds of a hurricane.
They shift around like desert sand dunes.
A fire burns behind my eyes.
And it consumes me inside out.
Like a disease...
It eats me up.
And I can feel myself disappearing.

I struggle to hold on to myself.
I fight to save the person I used to be.
But I'm not sure of anything anymore.
I don't recognise my own voice.
I don't believe the words I say.
I feel lost, adrift, stranded.

I try to find hope.
I reach out for help.
But all I can hear is laughter.
All I see is rejection.
And all I feel is crushing despair.

I fight a losing battle.

Unexplained

I tire myself out
I hope that if I'm too tired
I can stop thinking
Stop feeling.
That if I'm tired enough
The thoughts will stop haunting me.
I walk till I can't feel my feet anymore
But I still feel the thoughts.
I work till I don't know what I'm doing
But the words still hurt.
I wander off to places far away
Turns out they aren't far enough.

My feet are numb,
And my body is exhausted,
But my thoughts still sound as clear as crystal.
They still remind me of what I'm trying to run away from.
They tell me that I'm waiting for something that'll never happen.

The physical exhaustion dulls nothing.
The pain doesn't drive away the voice.
I have no choice left.
I can't run away anymore.
And I can't escape.
I'm trapped...
In my own head.

The dark side

Every one of us has a dark side; a person inside us who whispers in the night. It hums lullabies so the nightmares can take over. Our dark side fills our head with false hopes. It makes us weep in the darkness. It fills the mind with doubt, fear; sheer, suffocating blackness. Our dark side chokes our dreams and drains away our happiness. It is slow; clawing stealthily forward like the mist. It is a claustrophobic, impenetrable fog. It attacks when we least expect it. It poisons, it maims. With its icy cold dagger it stabs through our strength, pulling us away from the light, the love.

Life is a daily struggle to keep the darkness at bay. It is a fight to keep the dark side hidden in a box, locked away, deep inside the chambers of our mind. Life is all about finding the strength to keep going; to push away the pain; to not shrivel up, hideaway and give up.

Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose.

What are friends for

I wrote this sometime around 2 in the morning. It could be a little more refined but I think I've put down most of what I wanted to.

You know why we need friends...
We need them to lie to us
When we can see the reality.
We need them to tell us it’ll all be ok
When we know it won’t.
We need them to blindfold us
When the truth becomes too much to take.
We need them to bandage and mend the cuts
That refuse to heal.
When the reality hurts too much
We need them to sing us a lullaby
And put us to sleep.
When the cuts bleed
And the tears flow,
We need them to stitch us up.
And when they see our hopes taking flight
And they know only more pain can follow,
We need them to chop off their wings.

Dreams

Dreams. They can be very dangerous. They are even scarier than nightmares. Only because you know nightmares will not haunt you in real life, but with dreams, you hope they come true. And that hope can be devastating. Dreams can play in your head, over and over again, like a tape on rewind, or one of those old record players which is stuck at the same spot on the record. You begin to wish. You begin to hope even more. And that's when the harmless dream can take on certain nightmarish qualities.

Dreams are most dangerous when you lose track of the line that separates them from reality, hope from truth. When that line blurs and the dream seems real, true, that's when you know you're in trouble. That's when you need to wake up and smell the coffee. You need to know that difference between the pictures and life. You need to be able to enjoy the film and then know that reality beckons.

That is what life is about. Knowing the difference. Recognising it. And most important, accepting it. Because the consequences otherwise can be shattering.

The perfect coffee 6

It's called Adiga's and it's in Bangalore. 8 rupees, a small steel glass and a bowl. It's amazingly south indian, if that is a term I can use to describe coffee :) I loved it. It was worth every penny spent on it and the experience of drinking something so lovely, was something by itself. Adiga's needs to come to Pune. And I think its South Indian food is better than Vaishali's, no offence meant to anyone. It'd do better business I think...

French Loaf also has some really good coffee. And the coffee at Gloria Jean's Coffee is also worth a mention. They have some really good ginger cookies which go very well with a steaming mug of coffee.

Till next time, the coffee spree continues.