Double Decker Bus

deludedwanderlust replied to your post: They always say pines ‘whisper’. When you drive through the mountains, you will cross beautiful wooden buildings named ‘Whispering Pines’, schools named ‘Pinegrove School’.

Oh my, this is gorgeous.

Thank you, Snigdha :)

You might feel queasy as the road winds uphill, but you will sit back biting into an elaichi, looking at the jagged blasted through rock by road, or the rubble at the edge and the sloping pines with their golden needles shed on the earth beneath them.

You blew the mountain apart, pushed upwards laying concrete and confetti of used chips packets, the earth and rock of each slope aching for the warm interlocking of all that is below, and further. You ripped me naked, my old roots shaming under the obvious gaze of the roadside, curling inwards, the rain and the mist crawling over me, holding on hopelessly to any soil which cakes them. I see you pass by, hundreds of you, windows down.

I see young girls, letting the ‘smell of pine’ sigh filled breeze run through their hair, leaning back, thinking grand things about the men they think they love, or how the song they play to our dynamite breakup with parts which made us. You will shake fearfully, when our longing for the roots and branches we made shadows with grows passionate, and the heart of the mountain moves, cracks, with our missing, and tumbles down pieces of herself, of the rocks and soil we have made our own, crushing you, reclaiming her crooked slopes in rage. 

Slowly, but long after your deeply meaningful breeze loving hearts are broken and pieced together again, I will wither away too, remembering quietly all the stories I saw on the stiff hardness of the road you made. The red vine has promised to twirl around me, promised me that its glorious leaves will soften and kiss my soulless wood. 

My soul will go to the skies too, just like yours will, and I will whisper no more; the needles and cones on my branches look clearest when you see them against the million garbs of the sky, but I am a rooted spirit, as disparate from the blue and all its illusion shades as could be. We are different and we’ve never touched, the sky and I, but there is poetry in how we look together.

That’s what I whisper to all of you, and your broken, mending hearts.

Because I’m on a vacation in the mountains, and I write this sitting quite literally ‘in’ a cloud, with firs outside the window.

The Muse is having a good time.

Crisp capsicum tossed in, hot and sizzling.

If I could have a plate of that by my laptop right now, I promise the Muse I’d write  a thousand words.

Anonymous asked: What are your favorite books?

To Kill A Mockingbird, I love that book, so timeless.

I try reading as much as I can, usually gobbling up all the prize-winning novels and writers of the year. I love really emotional, character-driven books. The last few I’ve really adored are House of Spirits (Isabel Allende), Lover’s Dictionary (Levithan), Book Thief (Zusak), Mara and Dann (Doris Lessing), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Fowles), anything by Sarah Waters, Penelope Lively, Julian Barnes, Kamila Shamsie, Jhumpa Lahiri. 

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran is a lovely, powerful book which means a lot to me, the sorts I’d keep going back to and relishing over and over again. 

‘Marshes and mist, I feel like a wicked vampire,’ you laughed. I could see you quietly rubbing your palms together, your jaw set suspiciously too rigidly. 

‘When I was a kid, there was a huge marshland where cattle grazed right below the slope of the mountain where we lived. I didn’t know that wasn’t ‘real’ ground, because there was so much grass, and cabbage, and cudding cows, but once when I tried going there to get to the terrace farming hills on the other side, my feet sank in and I held onto a polka dots cow until someone came and got me.’

‘I’ve heard that story before,’ you said, walking a little way ahead, your birthday gift boots squelching, ‘You told me how your slippers slipped off your feet into the marshes.’

I smiled, ‘A vampire’s memory.’

The smell of the grey pines on the other side is lost, I can only sense vapour and the eerie stench of dead roots in cold water in the secrets of the breeze. I watch as you look around, and the way you wince at the darkness of the woods. 

‘Do you think it’d be warmer to wait in there?’ you ask, skeptically. The mist thickens over the water, until I can’t see the sad trees looming. Beckoning you over to the rock I’m sitting against, I check my watch and pull your coat, and you, closer.

‘It’s warmer to wait,’ I say, as you sit next to me, ‘to wait, right here.’

“Our feet are in step,” I noticed, “That looks funny.” And I tried letting you walk a step ahead to change that, but a minute later, our four feet were impishly coordinating again. “I don’t mind it, really,” you grinned, “Funny isn’t bad. Think up some symbolism of yours.” I give up, a last chiding glance at my footsteps.

(Such fun to see).

She quietly walked through the garden, a formal postal envelope in her hand, looking at leaves and flowers closely. It was a hot summer afternoon, and she was a pretty little girl.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked her, over the fancy bamboo fencing around her front garden.

She looked at me suspiciously, the envelope slowly slid behind her back, into the cotton folds of her summer cherry print frock. ‘I don’t want to tell,’ she said, and she shuffled away, the bright sunlight falling on the delicate poppies in the garden and the glittering studded butterfly clips in her black hair.

‘All right, I’ll show you.’

She held the envelope gingerly, carefully, in her hand, and came forward. I leaned towards her, over the fence. 

Ladybirds. Through the transparent bit of the envelope, I could see it was full of tiny ladybirds - red and golden and beautiful. 

They will die, I told her, don’t they look prettier on the leaves?

She didn’t take too much time - she slowly shook the envelope on the grass, letting the insects crawl out. She watched their pretty polkas take over and blend in the colours of her sultry foliage. 

I smiled at her before she quietly went back into the house, stopping only for a minute to gently unclip a sequinned butterfly from her hair, and to give it to me.

This will live, she said.