Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

Your smile is beautiful, he says. We've talked and exchanged bodies for the last year, and I've never seen more than his wolfish smile, his ecstasy coating skin and washing over me like the smell of mildewed leaves. He refuses to tell me his name, about his life. A perpetual stranger in mind, he notices the new blots and scars on my torso and thighs. He asks, care flooding his inflection even though I know he will never acknowledge it. Perhaps my words are the musings of a man who remains a lovesick boy. Reading too much into each tilt of the hands, seeing words and promises that have never left the birthing ground of my fiction but stay ready to jump from my tongue.   Irony is a strange thing; he has been the longest relationship I've never had and he hasn't held me a single time. Never seen me cry. Never seen my face as I would imagine what his thoughts would be when I would foolishly utter 'I love you’.   His spellbinding was never his own doing, rather r...

  What do you call home when the place you grew up in forfeits that distinction? Home is then a transient entity, finding its place in men who promise futures of growing old together while sitting at home with their wives and children, of loving and being loved in return as they make families of their own while you distance yourself from yours.  Is it too much to ask for: to be held and weep freely without reproach or judgement. Is it too much to ask for, for someone who does not make me fear the alternate universe where they will turn their backs on me, stab me in the sternum with pitying eyes, asking  “Why didn’t you see this coming? Your own blood turned on you, how could you expect any more from a stranger?”  I answer,  ‘because at least I expect it from you.’ I foresee the bloodshed and betrayal and walk towards it anyway, because at least I have a chance to change it. I can never change something that was meant to happen, something born of me being the way...