Starlight and Moonshine

  Life is imperfect. Life is Scary. Life is electrifying. Life is everything you want it to be. You and your friends, drinking away the nights, smoking away the days, dreaming about the good old times are just a small part of a big chaotic universe. You have a burning rage, a heart torn apart like the pages of an old Victorian novel, roaring agony that you hold so dear. You wear facades of happy to veil the shades of gloom and despair. You tell her you talk less when you feel so timorous and sweat oceans of fear. You hold her so dear, so close, so near, you feel her love laden breath on your beating heart. But your friends warn you this is just the beginning. The quiet before the storm. The change before the norm. The rain before the hurricane. You listen, you fathom. Is this the beginning of the end? Over the bustling streets of Mumbai, the beating hearts of the Chaiwallahs, and the loud thunder of the rain, you hear your thoughts. The lights of the night fade away, the chai...

" Love runs through your blood, " they say. " But how do I force your ways of loving onto myself? " she questions.    Today was supposed to be the happiest day of her life. The smell of sugar-coated Rosh Gullas fills the house as the mashis spend their nights chattering away. The bride-to-be puts on facades of happiness to mask away from the horror and terror. She wipes away her frowns to erase days of torture, puts on the bright red saree and hides the broken pieces of herself, and strokes the raven black kajal as tears flow free like an overflowing sea. The groom has arrived. She is happy, or so everyone thinks.  Perhaps the trouble with her groom will always be that he is a man. Amma told her it was her ruin, Baba didn't care. They told her love was a phase and her truths were all childhood lies. Her love wasn't real. How violent is it to love someone with every inch of your body only to realize what you started was never meant to be whole. She questi...

'We are all broken pieces of a singular glass, worthless until we leave a piece of ourselves in others. '  I can feel my heart pounding my ribs, wanting to be set free but I dig my nails deep into my skin and hold her in. This is our last goodbye. This is the end of a beautiful chapter. We had our time together and now I have to let you go.  There is something so beautiful yet tragic about childhood friendships. How best friends become strangers. Lovers become indifferent. Friends become enemies. How we lose pieces of ourselves to the women we love, the cities we travel to, the pages of the books we soil. There is beauty in goodbyes, in last kisses, final hugs. Perhaps the worst kind of hurt you can feel are goodbyes at the airport. It's suffocating, exhausting and utterly crippling watching someone you thought would stay, dissolve into the horizon. There is a choking kind of hurt, a lump in our throat that refuses to let go, tides that refuse to settle, hands that beg for ...

Tonight as I scavenge for the lost pieces of you, I will find hidden rhythms of myself and for the first time I choose to heal my wounds Instead of bleeding myself trying to fix what's better left broken - Arshia :)

TW: Self Harm She is the fire, the goddess, the desire. She is the banshee haunting you at night, she is the Tyndall of the day.  She's the art and she's the artiste.  I traverse the arches of my skin like the travellers of the night, patiently waiting for a home to bury myself in, to breathe, to hold and to fathom. I find nothing. I want to taste the poison in my veins, the saline waters of the oceans, the nectar of the black cypress. I wish to repent for sins I have not committed, to cry for flaws that aren't mine, ache for a heart never broken before.  So I split my skin open thread by thread in search of a home. I break my colosseum until all that is left is ash and stone and feel the overflowing sea of nothingness drowning me in, taking me whole. I use thorns to carve roses in my skin, I write poetry with my blood, I paint the sky the darkest shade of gloom.  I sit still as I watch my wounds become scars and scars become haunting cries  Until I do it all ov...

Piece by piece I made my flesh whole again as the phoenix rising from her ashes  I caressed my scarred body  like souvenirs from the battlefield  And piece by piece I fell in love with myself  while you fell out of love with me. - Arshia :)

  JANE EYRE, Charlotte Bronte, 1847 pp DLXVII 568 Arshia  Mehta  Jane Eyre is an exemplary novel written by charlotte Bronte. Not only does this serve its purpose of bringing to the world Victorian feminism but also the hardships faced by the main protagonist Jane Eyre in her life. Bronte uses her immensely passionate writing skills and brings to us a fine classic with a combination of romance, tragedies and a vaguely happy ending. She has usually depicted her writing as being unconventional but with Jane Eyre, she chose to tread the conventional path.  The novel begins with Jane being an orphan and having to live with her aunt Mrs Reed and her children. She has to face various challenges in this particular phase of her life. Jane is a very passionate and unconventional child from the very beginning. She questions and reacts to everything with abundant passion. The next phase of her life begins when she is sent to Lowood School. There she meets a girl ...