Clothes

Oh! I should have known, you will say. But should you? And do you?

Out in the world, we will be known by what we wear and how we wear it. How we wear our smiles, our losses, our grieves, our wins and our character.  The colours of the clothes we wear will be reflective of what we are today. Their patterns and prints will be the mazes we are lost in today, the ones we want to be lost in. not be found. The fabric we pick today will tell you about our porosity, do we mingle or should we be left alone?

We would wear clothes so that you cannot catch sight of the naked, real us. You will not (and should not) see the hurt that swims in our brimming with happiness eyes, yes, the froth beneath is the foam of our tears. Every happiness, smile, a laugh, a clap, deep down causes a sweet, slandering pain. You will never make out the stammer in the voice that narrates the day’s stories to you; you will miss the sharp intake of the breath, the unavoidable lump in the throat and even the delete-able pause. All of them, masking the loneliness, the anxiety and the bloated love that we sometimes feel, all together and then one by one. The feel levels all set to heightened settings. The clothes will mask the hesitation in the steps towards you, and then sometimes the overt eagerness to come to you. They will not make you wonder how you can be wanted and un-wanted so much at the very same time. The fanning of the smoke from the smoldering eyes will belie you about the source of the fire. You will not even notice the cold white coal deposits sitting on our fingertips, left behind while being brushed away from the eyes. Some of them still ablaze and burning black holes in our souls. We hide their burns in the blazing hearth fires. And the soaked blood that does not leak out in the streets and add to the stench of rebellion, it lies dried up in cakes in our clothes. A scratch beneath its surface would reveal its ripe hurt. Don’t mess with it. Leave it alone, it will stain your fingers and mark you for life. Let our clothes soak it all in and dry it all, inside out till it becomes flaky and falls apart leaving back no stains, no evidence of the massacre.

Clothes, they veil us, hide us …but they save you. they save you from us.