Neither She Nor I Could Ever Figure Out Whether Poetry Was An Excuse To Think More Of Her Or She Was

The duplicitous world has set enough examples of how self-love doesn't portray selfishness rather selfishness portrays self-love.

Shayan Das

Last night I saw a group of friends laughing at the café and ended up smiling myself. The other day, there was a couple kissing under the flicker of streetlight, and I thought to be gentler with me. For when you've been alone for more than half your life, you don't expect to be included or cast your own light; rather, choose to reflect like the moon that never formed a constellation. When you've been on your own, it seems that even the wind that brushes past your skin has a purpose— like a stray dog that thinks every kind hand that offers it food is home. You make two cups of chai every evening and pretend there's someone to converse with, or keep one earphone dangling, hoping someone would care to listen. You keep your cellphone silent not because you're agitated with the numberless messages, but because it hurts less not knowing there isn't one. You mistake your heartbeats for footsteps not because someone's arriving but because you think they must have.

Shayan Das, The Solivagant

I remember the day after writing the last exam of my grade 10th finals. I was convincing my father about my ardent interest in taking creative writing for further studies and heard him say, "The seas might look the best things to romanticise, so as long as you're hydrated, but in the fullness of time, you'll find 'tis the clouds, invariably not the seas, that can quench your thirst". And I realised beyond a shadow of a doubt how people are born romantics and made realists.

Shayan Das

And how easily we claim our love to be unconditional while knowing at the same instant that the greatest basis for loving someone more than our lives is to make ourselves exist.

Shayan Das

They misconstrued my softness as weakness, perhaps oblivious that even the softest of waters can burn, break, cut and freeze people to death.

Shayan Das

Sometimes even healing can go through breaking—as when the seamster stitches a tattered garment and end up making several smaller holes to repair a bigger one. Nonetheless, I've admired that breaking and oftentimes more than the healing expecting it to conceal my scars.

Shayan Das

"Like a young sapling, my child", beamed the mother and went on further with a sigh, "As if you are a freshly sprung plantlet of rose, I'd water you, assume every minute necessity of you as my own, and defend you from every ruthless squall until you bloom to your fullest albeit the only flower I receive in my lifetime is at my funeral".

Shayan Das

I stumbled upon you by accident and now, with a minute and half, I love you?

Your words are what I will look for in everyone from now on to stumble across love.

Thank you so much for writing this! This means a lot. Wish you a great day/night ahead <3 ⁠

What’s the worst color that was ever invented?

And why do we need to deem something as inferior to make another one look superior? Well, you may argue that's how this world works, right? We reap contentment costing someone else their own joys, see someone garnering milk and honey making someone else poor, and so on and so forth. Back to the track, I consider no colour to be the worst, assuming each one possesses its own intrinsic value and radiates its own distinctive nuance to the palettes of nature. I remember my mother once said to me that there are two kinds of people based on how they perceive beauty. A profusely large number who search for everything in beauty in hopes of finding a home and a far smaller number who search for beauty in everything and find the home naturally. And little did I know, the latter will bring out the poet in me.

Thank you so much for asking. Wish you a great day/evening/night ahead <3