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Excavation of Memory

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Eight days passed and no ideas or imaginations struck me. Purely by coincidence, I found Walter Benjamin’s unpublished single-page thesis on memory. He proposed that one must begin digging, and come to find that Earth was never the one to give life, but is only a tapestry, rich with vegetations of memory.  His words halt abruptly- it was clear he intended to write more- and in the inertia, I begin this piece.  The idea of excavating a memory, of unearthing something significant or lost, struck me, or I struck it, with a spade I can hold.  Benjamin’s experiment had echoed in my mind from time to time before I found his text. I envied those who were able to expand and watch themselves in the past, observing keen details, collecting what would become the gurgling soil in their veins. I envied Anzi the most; he would elaborately report his childhood, his college days, his love affairs and his crimes to me, insisting that I write it all. I of course, never did. However, I woul...
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From Dreamless Green to a Tapestry of Bone-White Dreams

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My body complies too much with sabotage. As blame is thrown, I watch it return with a force I capture in chemical absorption. He said that the body is all we have, he said that ignoring the body is why some philosophers can never write poetry like mine. He has said too much.  11 july 2024 In recent dreams I see  participants of the past constructed in yarn be  unlaced and sewn back— all my friends from times  that don't belong to me drifting in absurdity.  And when I come to, mornings  acquaint me with a child: splitting image of my mother.  Day becomes the hem of a dream collecting finer particle memories; exhaling not love or adoration—what I thought I’d miss,  but clarity of conversation; an evasive, perturbable ache in my chest.  While I narrate these visions  of sleep to him, record betrays that I long and yearn;  an off-putting nostalgia threatens me through dreams.  Metaphors of the body do  not seem so marvellous t...
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Desire

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My desires are impossible to decipher. It presents an image, an almost comical image, an expression, imprint of the ways in which love lives in things. A gush of faucet water throws up  the thrill you send through me  in your awaited absence.  It is ridiculous that I cannot produce  my desire for you as coalescence  that can proclaim  language, art, history, and every justice in the world. Yet I find myself gently rising, like eyes touching the summit, to the conclusion—  I need you as reminder. I don’t need to imagine sweet childhood loneliness to describe love anymore.  Instead, I must find ways to retain you on my skin, because love is lost in the seines that cover me.  Never can I shake the habits that leave indeterminate  all the ways I will embrace you.  I know your sharp eyes have already made note, the ways in which I fail,  in which I paint the tapestry of desire,  with nothing but euphemism.  I will not repe...
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a tale as old as time.

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love is premeditated first, by history for years lovers have sat  in the pristineness of the grief following a fight and imagined.  the heart drags to the feet with a painful force the mouths curl into cruel words but limbs and heart are locked in passionate disbelief; now does his mouth have a distaste for me?  it seems impossible yet he could be spewing arguments of hate for me too. trapped by contradictions, lovers quarrel eternally each convinced by their historically exceptional agony.  imprints of their dissent are now  feathers of fables falling at leisure.  i say pitiful phrases to myself when we fight, and then it befalls me love is premeditated by me too.  always slightly hopeful that a voice will respond, i expect whispers of dejection to be sliced.  but response comes in a weep  so heavy it fills my lungs with emptiness  i can only imagine is borrowed, from tired nights of the past. a cloud of tears around my ears dripping th...
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Eyes of Hyderabad

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  A year has passed since the events of the movie Premalu .  (soumya's night vision) Reenu and Sachin are trying to work it long-distance; Amal Davis has left Hyderabad, and Niharika moved out to pursue travel blogging, but everyone’s been in touch. That’s neither been conscious nor demanding; skin and screen share the same space in Reenu’s heart, and days are spent tapping in and out of happenings, sliding careless brush strokes across keyboards, smiling at static eyes.  But today, things were off; her thoughts held a momentum that was hard to control. Like slipping into a white room, Reenu kept disappearing into her mind trying to lock onto something unthinkable. There was no memory of reading a children’s book.  There was no memory of even holding one. This is perhaps why her grip on the copy of Black Beauty felt uneasy like she had little faith in her own hands. The cityscape outside was an unfocused blur; she confronted a phantom childhood of her imagination, ...
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