how do you leave a city once you’ve given it your heart?

.

maybe dilli is nothing but a city, and maybe the sound of a metro pulling out of a station isn’t supposed to make you fall in love each time you listen to it. maybe we’re supposed to keep walking into — and out of — identities, never wearing the same mask in another place (not because we can’t, but because some lives only belong to certain streets and can only thrive in the unremitting sunshine of a certain gaze). maybe i’ll come back later, as i always have. maybe my life will go on existing here, haunting all the points in space and time that will lie outside my body’s reach. maybe this is what i want. maybe the new place will be just as magical, just as heartbreakingly beautiful. maybe my heart longs to run to new places to have itself torn up there anew.

.

even the promise of a new love could never make leaving dilli easier. some things never change.

some others do. i’m going to pack and squeeze dilli into my favourite songs and words, force all of it inside and keep pressing until it all explodes into numerous shreds of skin and bone and muscle and blood: spreading everywhere, spreading so far in a spray of ineluctable bloody mist that i’ll never be able to escape it. and then, finally, everywhere and everywhen will be dilli and i will never have to leave again.

gotta anchor all the magic i’ve ever collected to every inch of this city.

do not disturb.