Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

You love.... You care for him. This is not love, this is the beginning of a friendship. Given time, given memories, it could turn to love. This could be the start of something good, but good things don't last, and you need to be prepared. Be with him while you can, go with the flow.  You do not love him. This is just friendship. Partnership. Companionship. So many ships leave the harbour whose names we do  not know, to crash into icebergs. It's passengers flee like rats, to live, to survive, to escape unscathed.  That is why PTSD exists. Without survivors, there would be no Post Trauma.    It is a funny thing, post-trauma. Everything that is and has been because of Post -trauma. Species evolve to escape predators. Species evolve to kill prey. Species evolve and become predator.  Everything that is and has been because of the PTSD woven into our DNA our foreign strands of histories and memories we would call evolution and the human genome. The mind forgets b...

Glittering, gleaming, shining cityscape. Cinema at its finest as a pair take the wilderness as their stage, their feet shuffling and flying. All we hear is the swish of her dress as it hits his trousers and the sound of dust being kicked up against the peak of humanity. There is no music here.  The full moon somehow has enough light to give and we see each sequins, each weave of their expensively poor clothes, and we are invoked as ghosts of everlasting futures. Suspended animation / willful suspension of disbelief - it's all the same to us. Different names, same surround sound system. Moonlight is darker with the smudges of the histories and poems that clamour its name, and we add silver lamplight to make up for the humanity that afflicts it.  There is no perfect shadow here. Let's change this picture a bit shall we?  Add the dust of a landscape that bears the weight of the artists it failed to provide for. The ugly neon of lamplights that would replace the moonlight and...

  I should lessen the amount of times I cry listening to music, even if it's just for a few seconds. Sadness is a comfort now.  I told someone about a hidden daydream. Wearing a wine-dark plain lehenga underneath a deep lilac kurta. Twirl the swirling fabric to show off my painted Vans; I hope they last until I get a chance. Aquamarine nail-polish and tattoos of flowers as thick bands on my wrists. I always loved the idea of covering my wrist, but never enjoyed the weight of watches and chafing rakhis. A tattooed choker around my neck, I think I like the idea of being bound too much. Not having to make decisions, letting go… I remember reading once “Those who delight in being alone are either beasts or gods” and I don’t want to know who said it. Cause it would mean a man said it, and I can’t have any more memories sullied with mortality. Its fallibility. Everything would fall apart if we gave to it its history and context and author, not because of the disbelief that something...

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...