Absolutely my dream drawing room.

... minus the styling on the white pillars, and walls two shades ligher.
Is it tragic that I have ten pounds to my name and I'm browsing the New York Times style section over my cornflakes?
Image from here

It has taken me 15 years to say this. Long periods of forgetting in between, but beauty is an ever present sword waiting to tear open any wall of time: What you were to me, what you were to me: Pure and startling and piercing beauty. Like chancing upon a swan nesting behind the rushes. Like looking up from a drink and seeing the love of your life. Like opening and old book an seeing a love letter hiding there. Each time, these things go right in, right away and stay there.

You did the same to me.

But you were so much more, so much more than I can ever list:
Prayers and long summer nights and praying like I've never prayed before for more time, more time. For somehow, death and time to be reversed and overturned. Just for me. For us. For butterflies and Russian and ice-cream and Camay soap and the sight of you smiling. For listening to you and talking to you and realizing that you never once talked to me as if I were a child, even though you called me Baby. Your white wicker basket that I swung from my arm as we walked through the garden, me pretending to be a big Parisian lady, or a raani, or both. Oh how I prayed for more time for us to pluck every single yellow leaf off the hedge. For more time for your flower filling and your tea drinking and you giving me cubes of cheese or strawberry jam. For the peace of those afternoons, the scent of those nights when we slept outside on the veranda under the mosquito net and the owlets in the trees broke up the songs of the crickets and chattered at us well past dawn.

The sounds, the smells, the feel of your cheek, the smoothness of your hand, the love I felt coming from you, the love I felt flowing out to you, the dizzying beauty in each thing you pointed out to me: each leaf or petal or movement or colour. Your stories: of Europe and love and clothes and the theatre and ballet and picnics and growing up and mama and the grandfather I never met but who I feel I know because of what you told me about him.
I prayed for more time for each of these things, each of them deep and wide enough for there never to be enough time.

You are my love of: Pink and rose and Central Asia and Kazakhistan and Mongolia and Italy. Italy! And the moon and stars and fresh air and God and good food and ballet and fashion and violets and pansies and poetry and writing. My patience with my own pensiveness and mama's pensiveness. My ability to sit by the garden pond and let the rain tree flowers land soft and gold on my hair and watch the tails of the fish flashing this way and that.

You still are all of these things to me. All of them and more.
Love and beauty and searching.
Is there anything else?

Somewhere out there you're walking or watching and pulling me; I can feel you. And each time there is blue or gold or green or pink or roses or music or cloud or flowers or steppe I feel the pull all the harder.
Tug, why don't you - I'm so tired of waiting to see you again.

Amy again.
It seems I cannot look at a single beautiful thing without thinking about you. Especially the kind of soft, indigo beauty behind the haze at the end of a warm spring day. When the vine outside the window rustles with the noises of opening buds and baby leaves and feathers. Nest building. And sudden birdsong like an exclamation point to the silence, the peace.
So many, many years ago, I felt exactly this kind of peace. When we read together, but apart, in your bed in the afternoons. When you laid a hand on my cheek and kept it there, cool and camay-scented, that afternoon that I had a fever and slept with my head against your shoulder. Like that afternoon when I was reading one of my nature books, and you were reading a large green leather bound one that I couldn't read the name of. And suddenly in the middle of the silence, you read out a sentence to me in Russian. And I couldn't understand it of course, but I understood it was something beautiful you'd wanted to share so I smiled up at you and you at me. And we spoke that afternoon about the Steppe, about long yellow stretches of grassland curving up and away into an immense vault of sky. About herds of wild horses thundering across a sharply empty landscape tipped at the edges with a ring of bare mountains. And I scarcely noticed where I was as you talked, until the smell of Janardhan watering the lawn wafted in through the window. That exclamation point, this time of the scent of water to punctuate the dry yellow stillness of the windswept Steppe.
The air around us heavy with beauty. We imagined it together, we smelt it together, we breathed it together.
Or that night when you were lying in bed and mum was on the phone in the other room, crying, and my father was driving over from the hospital and everything was very dark and quiet except for the crickets in the garden and the moths near the bedside lamp. And you suddenly squeezed my hand and opened your eyes and said 'Darling baby. You're here!' and put your hand against my cheek and wiped away a tear. And that sound right then was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard and I smiled our smile at you but couldn't stop crying.

I miss you so much.

Totally Random

Is it wrong that I just watched a clip of Jon Stewart bashing the panic-mongering fools from Fox 'News' and totally got turned on seeing him skewer them?
Ooh want to kiss his face off.