hummingbird

I remember light fluttering kisses on my eyes, my cheeks, my forehead- never before had I ever felt so loved. I didn’t even know you then.

The hummingbirds always get tricked by glass, no matter how many times they crash against it.

They still never learn.

You knocked on my door- a sheepish smile, a flimsy excuse and an empty bottle of water in your hand. You wanted to check out your new neighbours.

“This is what it means to be in your twenties- naked on a worn-out, torn mattress, sheets that reek of sex, in a shabby room he shares with another- smoking a cigarette with your lover.”  I had run away from interviews and impending adulthood then, a day or two was all I needed, just to be with you again.

That time when I left, you cried into my shoulder as you hugged me goodbye. You kissed every part of me for all the times you won’t be able to. I fell again then, and I fell even more into that bottomless well of loving you.

The giant hummingbird weighs almost twenty one grams. Experiments conducted by scientists, frightened of death concluded that the soul weighed twenty one grams. They waited and weighed beside dying beds.

“At the moment of death, there has been a marked difference in weight, a difference we calculate to be twenty one grams”

“I can’t think of the rain without thinking of him. A bulldozer crashing and rolling thunder woke us up. The monsoon is here, he whispered in hot, desperate kisses. We celebrated in the only way we knew.”

Once, we ran through steady rain into an empty auto, piping hot jalebis in our hands, as the sugar burned my lips we kissed with the rain pouring down outside.

Now I can’t think of the rain without thinking of him. He consumed me so much, at times I felt the world at one with him. It became him.”

You would ask me out awkwardly forward, earnest eyes imploring me to say yes every single time.

I didn’t want to admit it but you bothered me. I didn’t want to admit it but I liked it. I liked you.

The shaman call them messengers from a higher world. Our ancestors who have crossed the great sea, send them to us to help us with this world. They carry all that is good and pure- your very essence to replenish you, fill up all the holes the world carves into you.

The tribe considered the hummingbird most sacred. They believed in the land’s future, if it was visited by the bird.

“I love you,” you said for the first time. Our first date was two days back and you were already convinced. That night had been your birthday and the night I knew what love meant, for the first time. That night, fairy lights burnt till the morning.

The first rays of the sun peeked into my room as you kissed my eyes my cheeks my forehead, me and you kept saying the words again and again. Feverishly. As if I were a it were a prayer of a blessing come true.

I didn’t want to fall or maybe I did. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help myself from you.

No matter what I said, you would still come back. My friends made fun of you while they smoked your weed. I would complain to every other guy about you and how you never let me be. I couldn’t shake you off. It bugged me. It flattered me.

What did you see so special in me, I would wonder. You a stranger who I didn’t even call a friend.

You asked me the same thing, a year later. We were in different cities living different lives trying so hard to meet midway. “Why do you love me so much?” you asked me.

I was tongue-tied. I had no words to translate my heart.

Those days I saw so many hummingbirds, their long swordbill beaks flashing in and out of the flowers. Their stout wings beating backwards. We were so in love. Head over heels.

Then I had to leave and then you left me.

I don’t see hummingbirds any more. You don’t stare back at me from the mirror anymore. You don’t hold me anymore.

I look at myself in the mirror. The girl staring back looks like me but isn’t-something’s missing.

I imagine, a hummingbird from the heavens above, a piece of soul she carries that was meant for me. But she knew my spirit and she knew my love and instead of me, she brought it to you.

“May you be loved as true as I do you, no matter if we be a we or not.

May you always be loved, if there had to be a reason, let it be because I loved you and will always do.”