Map Of The Heart

Blue Bird

Hide it. Hide it. Hide it.

Can’t tell anybody, can’t let the world see it.

She wears a white dress and has no face. She caresses my hair, humming Lavender’s Blue and reminds me of all the battles I’ve lost.

Hide it. Hide it. Hide it.

There’s a little boy hiding behind each pillar,

His eyes sunken deep, his skin pale grey.

All he ever does is scream and cry—the pain in his wails could shatter my glass castle.

Hide it. Hide it. Hide it.

There’s a girl I carry on my back, she wears a red frock and has a red ribbon tied around her head.

She wants me to help her—to free her from the grasp of the old man that’s touching her hands and kissing her skin.

Hide it. Hide it. Hide it.

There’s an old shadow that never leaves. He laughs at the sight of pain, my troubled soul gives him joy.

He tells me to jump—to throw myself off this building. He’s in love with death, and makes me flirt with it.

Hide it. Hide it. Hide it.

The old woman screamed. “You aren’t supposed to let the world know” “you will never fit in”.

She tells me of all the fears that humans have—

That there’s no place for odd balls with twisted minds and scarred bones.

Hide it. Hide it. Hide it.

Can’t let them go out. Can’t let them run free.

Can’t go far, but can’t get any close.

“Embrace the solitude that’s been given to you”.

But there are words ringing at the back of my head.

Stories begging to be told.

My heart’s racing fast, my palms getting cold.

I need to bleed; bare my heart, my mind and soul.

This madness is overwhelming. This madness is deafening.

I’ve let them down again, haven’t I? But I haven’t mentioned their names.

Maybe they don’t trust me with their names—they know too well of all the sleepless nights I’ve spent bleeding within the pages of these old diaries.

I hide them from the world. But I can’t hide myself from them.

There’s a bluebird resting on my shoulder. “Let’s run away” he keeps telling me.

I smile through the sadness, “we will, someday” I try to reassure him.

He sighs and leaves.

He doesn’t believe me anymore, does he?

***

Dreamers and Lovers

Five years later she’d hear the sound of the train engine and tell me she misses me; she would remind me of how I was fifteen and in love. Seven years would pass and we’d grow apart; the people I once called my own were now strangers whose old stories I knew by heart. Two years after Joe’s death, I finally booked that ticket back home, reliving old memories of us as the familiar roads greeted me with the sweet smell of cherry blossoms and pine trees. There’s nostalgia in every corner of the street that we grew up on.

Summers in India seem to be getting unbearable. I make our favourite lemonade and sit by the window, sipping it all alone trying to read a book that talks about a pilgrimage, and I wonder if you ever got to write that book you told me about; of old people and abandoned homes, of barbed wires and broken families, of love and loss and a poet trying to sober up for the lady he loves who hides herself behind thick walls of books in an old library somewhere in Vienna.

A lot of things remind me of you more than I realise. The way someone sits in a corner lighting up a cigarette, the bitter taste of coffee that I’m still trying to get used to because it was the first thing you’d look for in the morning. Coffee stains on the pages of your books that still lie on my shelf. Your addiction, my pills. Your old aunt waiting for your homecoming, my dad who never made it back from the ICU. The train. The lovers. An open field that gets packed with young dreamers with broken hearts at midnight, inhaling adhesives as though trying to fix something that’s damaged from the insides of their chest. Your arms that never healed, my prescriptions that never stopped coming.

Ten years and I’m still fighting the urge to make that call. Maybe I’m too afraid to find out that one of these days you would’ve succumbed to your demons[n]. Was it love after all? How does one love and not tremble at the thought of losing the other person? It’s calm but it’s also madness, I suppose; to love another human being knowing that the loneliness will come in waves when they leave; that you can drown yourself in the very thing that once saved you from yourself.

***

Chances are, you will write that book, and maybe you’ll end up hating it. Maybe you’ll give up on writing altogether and pick a nine-to-five. Maybe the idea of being immortalised by art will finally cease to haunt you, and you’ll be free from the burden.

We can go watch a movie then. Share two cones of butterscotch ice-creams at 1 am on the streets of a city we both don’t belong to—a land that’ll soon forget about our existence along with the world.

Someday the street-lamps will cast its luminescent yellow lights on our wrinkled skin, only to reveal the fine lines of a life well-lived. We will share a good laugh at our old jokes that no one gets, and promise to remember each other even at the end of time. And perhaps that will be the only thing that matters; to be loved well, to be remembered fondly by the ones you shared your life with; to know that in a colossal world that moves on too fast, within your numbered days, in a finite existence, your light touched another soul, and their light illuminated yours; that even for a brief moment in time, you loved, and you were loved.

Kemya Yanlem is a writer from Mon, Nagaland