You Wait For Me,

You wait for me,

was the plan.

I saw you standing,

so I ran.

I could not believe,

people stay.

Warm promises still spur,

come what may.

-Vanshika Singh

I met a wrinkly old woman today, on my way back home, asking me to make some space in the seat. The creases near her eyes, and the veins clearly visible in her almost translucent skin, stirred something in me. The skeletal body, trying hard to sustain in the wrapped cotton saree, and a small bag, that probably held her world. She was most certainly in her eighties, travelling alone in a metro, needing protection from all possible sides, symbolically and literally. But as she sat beside me, and a creepy man walked past, she held the steel bar beside me, hiding me from a probable attack, pretending like she knew me and I knew her, and we were travelling together. I couldn't help but feel overwhelmed to feel the protection from a lady, who could barely protect herself. She did what you would have. She was so much like you.

The creepy man, most probably was no grave danger. May be he just looked creepy. And I believe I knew ways to protect myself if it was the situation worth worrying. But that thin hand, with protruding blue veins, and shrunken skin, did manage to make me feel safe.

How hard it is for people to leave absolutely? So they leave no trace behind. I saw you, in her today. "Thankyou Dadi!", I uttered before leaving, the words I never said to you. We were close but unexpressive. And I wish I said so much to you.

That toothless smile, and those sunken cheeks, did make me smile goofily. The smile of the older ones are the most beautiful ones in the whole wide world.

Keep visiting me this way. I have to tell you alot.

An excerpt from an autobiography I will never write, Vanshika

Oscar Wilde- an emotion ❤️

“What of Art?” she asked.

“It is a malady.”

“Love?”

“An Illusion.”

“Religion?”

“The fashionable substitute for Belief.”

“You are a sceptic.”

“Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.”

“What are you?”

“To define is to limit.”

-Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray.

My bones were right.

"What of heart?"

"An overrated organ."

"Emotions?"

"Hormones."

"Grief?"

"Hormonal imbalance."

"Art?"

"Personification of heart."

"But heart, you say, is an overrated organ!"

A nod. "Art is the personification of an overrated organ."

-V.S.

My mother once said to me, "The most basic womanly thing expected out of every woman out there, by the virtue of her birth, is not assuming her caretaker role. It is, rather, being able to read the sadness of a human, and assuring them, at the least, of the presence they can offer. Because of all things she can lend-mind, body, heart and soul, her presence is the most precious of all."

-Excerpts from an autobiography I will never write, Vanshika