Love Without a Story

by Arundhathi Subramaniam

‘Best to meet in poems’ – Eunice de Souza

It gets easier, friend, with age, to delete, plan breakfast, turn the page.

always a little more absent than present.

the body wants to be nowhere but here.

You believe they must add up to a story larger than the one you knew,

where the sombre white owl has seen it all –

every moment the memory of a previous one when the skies were crazier, love purer, life simpler, when the heart was Malabar, the spirit Arabian, desire Coromandel, laughter more Gene Kelly and words like baarish and mazhai were headier, truer.

The first rains are always this plagiarism of yearning, every moment an echo of another –

knows a way through, knows a way beyond, knows the two aren’t separate.

Nostalgia is reflex, a spasm of cortical muscle. But this remembering isn’t habit or even sentiment. This remembering is a slumbering, allowing main text to drift into marginalia, weekday into holiday, inhaling you as rumour, as legend,

Remembering isn’t an art, more an instinct, a knowing that there is nothing limited about body, nothing piecemeal about detail, nothing at all secondhand about remembering.

In Short All the time that you believed you were housed, you were actually outside, nose pressed flat against the panes of brightly lit windows and you forgot that people are also panes you press your nose against, leaving behind a steamblot, that you can never climb in for good, however hard you try. And one day you realise you’re a pane too, freckled by your own rigmaroles of vapour and all your life you’ve done nothing but make hectic designs on the glass. And you’re still outside.