I fake too much. I mimic too much. I don’t know who I am.

I laugh too much. Like a dangerous bitch. *belly-cramp*

I cringe too much. I advise too much. I hate my fans.

“Only fools fall for me.” Only lovers lose and die young.

I have had a bitter taste. And I don’t make sense with my tongue.

Be it with being myself, or with philosophical discourses, as I prolong.

I am not a liar. I tell truths of events, but not of who I am.

The circumstances are real in my head, but not of where I belong.

This world, real, is not an idea, it’s what is mine, where I am.

I love the ghost-haunts, the self-taunts. Uh. Damn.

I don’t know what I truly love, what purpose I serve. Just sham.

I wish at stars, talk to them, and put Star Walk 2 to blame.

I wish I touched his face when I could, glad that he came.

I wish I loved like he does, so I’d hurt the same.

But I hurt behind time, I polish my ego, and I play games.

With the thoughts of his going, and that of the fuel, the whim.

I wish people wrote of love, wrote of science, and I wrote his name.

I wish people regretted less, I wish I lived, when I lived with him.

I swear so loud neighbours hear, I shouldn’t. How lame!

I wish I never did, I wish I lived much more and I know I do.

Because I’m twenty-two.

And a fake poet.

In stars.

Liar.

Not born any better.

Her eyes opened. It was dark. It was not a midnight, it was noon. But the curtains and the dust and the buildings blocking out the foggy sun all took a share of the cause. She had been sleeping and I believe you even assumed she heard a noise. Well, she did. It was the calling bell. Again. She cursed so bad the neighbours would hear if they cared. But the neighbour from upstairs died at the start of this book and no matter how waspy he had made her or how insensitive he had called her, she was neither. It was just the circumstances - this time, it was her not being able to see.

But, well, now she can - see, that is - because apparently, the glasses she’d thrown away didn’t break. But the spyhole did. The last time she didn’t open the door, and he hit it with his mother’s umbrella.

People, when ‘people’ were a ‘thing’, used to say she was a control freak. He used to say, “Get a grip.” And she died, convulsing. Now, she’s dead, mind you. Just not half physically. But she'd sincerely hoped, at least, with her utmost effort, that there’d be someone at the door. Since there was not, she hit her head with a bottle of water and moved on to the kitchen, for some hint of leftover aloo bhujia.

She got up. It was cold. The fever had been holding her back - literally - sticking her to the bed which she'd warmed over time, pasting her to the bed which she'd deemed 'succour' for the past couple of weeks and gluing her to a bed she'd been made love to on. My purpose hitherto has been to convince you of a lie. She was not, in fact, attracted to the bed more than anything. She was lonely and she wished she could be less confused of a fact - she was more attracted to her youth than to her bed. But, let's face it - she's gotten up. And she's moving, slowly, to a refrigerator she thinks she'll find food in. All there is, is frozen meat and a pair of scissors. And she can't cook. And she doesn't want to die of food poisoning, if not of love.

She's not in her wedding dress, no. She has socks on; a pair of capris too young to not emphasize her paunch suffocates her waist down and a brassiere beneath a printed tunic beneath a CampusSutra hoodie suffocates her chest up. 'She is not eighty and poor', you might be relieved to think. Well, I assure you, not half physically.

The calling bell rings to an old familiar tune, something she hasn't heard for a long couple of weeks. She is not really shocked. Not partly astonished, not for even a fraction of a second. She's not peed since morning and so she staggers to the washroom.

My mind is an art gallery of emotions. If you make me feel a particular way, and if it's something I've never felt before, I'll hang that emotion on display on my mind and I'll write your name underneath it.

And that's how I recognise people. Not by names or identities, but by my relation to that person. The relation tagged by an emotion.

Emotions are like snowflakes. Minute, but invincible. Each one its own sort of inexplicable. Each one different in a mind-bogglingly intricate way.

Emotions may take turns to make me feel overwhelmed. And when they do, it makes me borderline creative. And when I'm that, I start thinking of emotions, trying to describe them in the worst relatable way possible and ending up staring at the ceiling.

Humans are masochistic by nature. More the cynic, less the sanguine. Whenever an emotion hits me and overwhelms me, I try to judge it and place it under one of two broad categories. Happy. Sad. And since I'm human by birth, I characteristically spend more energy on Sad. Hence, the staring at the ceiling.

I can hear my mom rapping at the door. She'll open it soon enough, remove the chair and poise by my bed, hands caressing my forehead, fingers wiping away my tears. But, right now, she's behind that latchless door, respecting my privacy, calming me down just by making me aware of a gentle presence behind a door.

I can hear my mom saying, "Lanya dear, you always have me." I guess she heard me too, heard me screaming your name, heard me reacting to your putting a foot down to our relationship.

"I thought you loved me!" I howled.

"I thought you did too," you hung up.

***

My mom's gone now. She patted hope in me, delivered a quarter of her goodness to me and almost lullabied to sleep.

But that won't stop the ceiling from being my new best friend. That won't stop anyone from laughing at me for losing my old one.

That will stop me, though, from ever living a good life.

Being creative and misplacing emotions won't give me you back. But they'll help me recover, while my time, doing nothing, staring at my new best friend, searching for answers in glow-in-the-dark stars.

I realise my hopelessness as I call you sixty-two times in a row, you declining thirty-eight times and letting it ring for the rest.

I'm past shrieking, past kicking the air around the bed, past relief, past motion.

I take up my phone once again. Looking at it with a blurred-out sight, I open Call Log and swipe the screen across your number. This is the one last time, the one last chance that determines whether I win or lose, that decides whether I should live or die. You reject the ringing at a time slightly ahead of my insides revolting. I lose.

I lie calm, bribing sleep into my system as sleep clearly evades me. I lie calm, hoping it'll come, hoping it'll come in a more exaggerated fashion, hoping it'll kill me.

I don't exactly want to die, but I don't exactly want to continue on either.

"You can't do this to me!" I yelled.

"I don't care." Your voice was calm.

"I'll die, Dhruv. I'll kill myself."

"You won't. And I know that."

You don't know anything. You only know how to hurt and how to pain.

***

I don't feel any pain. Maybe that's ultimate pain? To be so overwhelmed by the pain emotion that you forget how to breathe but that doesn't hurt you because you know you'll breathe anyway?

The deafening silence rasps at my ears, polluting me with words I don't know meanings to, words I'll thus die to scout meanings behind, words that are ambiguous in the first place.

Is this how it feels like? To have won over someone else so much that you lose yourself? To love someone else so much that you forget how to love yourself?

I can see it clearer than I saw it an hour back. Three phone calls changed my life. This past week changed my life.

The fragility with which we were woven together got shattered to pieces in a tiny tunnel of hope. We both got tired of hope in the end and we both eventually made it out of the tunnel. But when you moved forward and out, I moved backward and out. I've relapsed, I've become who I was before and that is not good.

You first broke up with me a week back. Last Saturday. You downright insulted me, even disdaining the little dream I had of myself that didn't include you. You kicked me out of your life. I spent most of the next two days, lying on the bathroom floor, crying, panting, crying. I had started thinking of myself, I had began feeling pity on myself, I was growing truly suicidal. But thank god I didn't cut myself open like the past distressed times. I thought of my parents and I didn't engrave your name deeper on my left arm this time. I choked on my spit and rasp and tears instead. I kept calling you, texting you. You just couldn't be as adamant as I was. You finally picked. I insulted you back. You cried. A tit for a tat. We patched up.

That had been all until two hours back, before my calling you sixty-two, vain times. You didn't insult me this time. You knew the tactics by now. You had figured the perfect plan to get rid of me and it was going to work out. You shrugged responsibility instead. You said we were 'dragging on' a relationship that had lost its fruiting ability. Instead of trying to make it better - 'which would be futile anyway' - you gave up. You said, "I'm leaving this to you." You said, "You decide what we do with this. I'm giving up and walking away." You held your hands up in surrender. I didn't say anything. I knew what it meant. I knew you were trying to put a blame on me for something you were doing. Instead of accepting your faults, you were just going to leave me. Was an ego that hard on you to make you do good?

All that I'd ever tried to do was help you. To go out of my way, leave my past, my dreams behind and help you. And you put an end to it, in your words 'putting an end to something that lost its shine.' Was it all about the shine then? The bling, the romance and the mush? A little argument and the shine's gone, huh?

I was tired by then. Tired of trying to make you understand that this is not how it works. I am tired now. Tired of calling you. So, I fall asleep. To make my thoughts go away. To find you in dreams I'll hope I never relive.

There was a time when they asked me to die. I was poor, but I asked them the price to live. They told me to show what I'd got. And there I began.

I had no brawn. Women won't collectively outperform men with their brawn. In fact, it's not genetically viable. But that wasn't what I told them. I told them I was a woman but brawn just wasn't my genre.

I had no caste. I just didn't belong. And they were about to throw me out too. So, I told them the truth. They laughed at the irony.

I had no skill. They were advancing now, pulling out the thread of life that was stitched into my wound. They were ready to dismantle me, but I had to convince them of my worth. I had to live. I just couldn't die this way. So, I told them. I told them that I had been so lonely that there actually wasn't anyone to teach me.

I had no custom. I had no ritual. I had nothing for them to distinguish my civility from crude barbarism which they loathed. I had no definition that could fit into their tantrum of a society.

True, they lived for them and each lived for every other. True, nothing was going anywhere without the support, the cohesion, the plurality.

But wasn't this act of hypocrisy not restricting individual freedom?

They were powerful, now. So, they shut me up.

They did what was best for them. Because, after all, the majority's side was what the majority was going to take. And, who was I? What could a puny, lost soul do for herself? She could fight and I did. The fight lasted a second. The blood gushed but it stopped after a time. It had to, no, O Clot?

The fight lasted a second. Some watched, some snored through it.

The fight lasted a second. And, by the end of it, I was dead. And, no one cared.