Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

  A tired smiley face. That’s what I want most right now. A tiny emoji looking at me with its eyes grooved  by the dark circles beneath and a hammock of a smile; slight, coming from a place of love. A miniscule  image of golden pixels can carry so much meaning, but all it comes down to is a person sitting behind a  screen, just trying to get the tired eyes right. It would have so much to say.   I’m tired but ok.  I’m good but I don’t feel like talking right now.   I understand, please know that I understand.   It’s ok, my darling. Its ok. Here, let me take that pain off of you.  I love you and I’ll be home in a while.   I’m trying to be brave right now but it’s showing through my eyes isn’t it? How close I am to letting the  hammock drop? Like the towel that rubs my hair dry after a hot shower in the winter and the locks won’t  dry. They won’t dry and you rub and you rub and you release your head from that d...

We grow up in a time where stories of survival and sacrifice are told in quiet living rooms, in opulent halls that were built up from nothing. Those were different times back then. The second biggest war had  just ended, and mud-faced men returned home to the land of the enslaved where revolution was spread  like the gunfire it was made for, showering the masses with the blood of their brothers.   Of course, they were brothers no more.   The loyalties that lay between saffron and deep emerald tore the land apart. Rivers were carriers of wet  cremations as bloated bodies filled the sights of villages far away from the freedom struggle. No one  knew for sure where their home lay; the crown forgot to inform all what lay on either side of the line  struck across paper.   We are the descendants of fathers who collapsed at fences of barbed wire with legs swollen from weeks  of up-righteousness; he hadn’t known which side he belonged ...