Only I exist.
Rolling in swathes of time,
Loosing count of days & years,
Memories wiped clean,
All joys torn apart
Only I exist.
Terribly alone,
Singular, bathed in solitude
Devoid of dreams
Cocooned, with my desert like mind.
Sans the slightest aspiration,
Only I exist.
Forgotten, abandoned
Fiercely stoic, nearly inert.
Counting breaths, caught amidst an infinite pause.
Frozen. Decaying.
Only I.
Only I exist.
This day, the day of the Drive, was years ago. And I have been aching to write about it since I thought of it to be any value. But then, there have been days when nothing has felt valuable, enough to retain, and translate into words. So I have gone back and forth on this and the memory of the Drive has simmered in my head. And then, out of the big blue, life squeezes out an hour for me on a random Friday when I am buoyant with hope and believe, anything that has simmered this long, must be of some value. Some, if not much.
It was a Monday, I presume. How many years ago, this was, that many years ago. It's funny because never before on a Monday had anything been planned. Anyway, so we packed small bags and the baby's things. Milk and towels and diapers and blankies and wet wipes and such. Such an stifling hot day it was in August. Humid and sweaty. The air conditioner in the car was in full blast. The baby was so tiny, in my arms. It felt like a toy. Except that he cuddled. But my head was so dry. And my memory was so faint, post partum. I could barely remember the friend or the relative I met the day before. I zombied through the nights and the days were - well - the days stretched between hours and prolonged into slow afternoons and suddenly merged with sleepless nights. Sometimes I didn't connect correctly, how hard everything was. But everyone told me, it would get easier, most definitely.
And there was a friend who didn't tell me anything. Just listened. Established her presence. And allowed me to feel what I felt without intervening much. I felt closest to my previous person with her, and when she suggested the idea of this drive, I jumped. But we had to collect an aunt, on the way. An aunt, would accompany. The aunt was a must. Those months in my life, it was difficult to have a view or an opinion on anything since the mind was not fully functional. So I nodded, for most things. And shrugged, subsequently. Nothing seemed to make a difference, oh my.
After settling down, when each one of us got comfortable enough to slumber, the aunt started talking. To begin with, it was nice. She was no stranger, of course we knew each other. But to share the close confines of a car for seven hours is something else, altogether. Aunt started narrating the story of her life. But very much in brevity. I respected that. I tended to the baby, wiped its pee and poop, aunt did not pause - she moved on to how people make a living, in the world today.
Now that I find debatable. I have slept over it, and woken up on it. I oscillate between having a purpose in life and being a full blown nihilist. Now, nestling a baby and cradling nihilism don't go well together, so I gather all my forces to hold on to whatever is good in the world and build my life around it but aunt started to float away in her tales.
Aunt, being the aunt she was, told us how her husband was no good. He wasted decades of his life, sulking at his government job and battled alcoholism. Battling is the wrong word her, allowing alcohol to rage and take control of his life, would be more like it. And now he was dead and the children were no better. The daughter had married herself off, reasonably well, given everything that could have held her back. And she had nothing to do with her mother or her brothers. The younger son, decided he would be a parasite and live off his father's retirement money, whatever there was. The older son, her first born, was a replica of his father. Started drinking very young and didn't know how to stop.
Aunt spent her days and weeks worrying about him. She told us, the mother worries about the weakest offspring. I looked at the baby's sleepy face, the one and the only.
This older son of hers, she told us, was educated and could do all sorts of jobs. He could be a salesman, anywhere. Or have a smug desk job. There was hundreds of thousands of young men, who started jobs in private firms and moved to Middle East and made fortunes in dirhams and came back to their ancestral villages and built concrete homes for their grandmothers - and mothers. They had wives and children and lived peaceful lives, away from intoxication of all sorts. Of course, some habits - a few cigarettes or day, or something was fine. As long as you could work and make a living, aunt said. But her son won't listen. Then there were hundreds of young men who would sit for exams - banking or the railways or postal and settle down with jobs. They lived in dingy quarters to begin with but outgrew them soon. And they escaped the downtrodden impoverished lives of their forefathers, who lived off the land. Also, there were young men, hundreds of them again, who started businesses. A grocery shop in a busy locality, if you managed it well, would make money. You just have to show some interest in life. Both me and my friend agreed. Aunt went on.
There were traders, who just sat in their homes and talked on the phone and made deals on laptops. All sundry jobs, making money. You just have to decide to make money and money would come. She was so staunch in her words, I felt bad for her. I did. I imagined her son, whiling away the Monday in some bar downtown or drinking away at home and telepathically ignoring what his mother was saying, a hundred kilometers away.
Forget men, the aunt continued. Even girls these days are leaving no stone unturned. Either they marry well, meaning rich. Or turn into beauticians or nurses or flight attendants or bank clerks. But they definitely turn into something. And in the city they meet boys who are salesmen or businessmen and then they marry and then they have two kids each and they are happy and they buy a car and they buy a house and they build houses for their mothers and buy gold too and keep buying new phones and shoes and televisions and washing machines and keep paying everything on EMI. Nobody the aunt knew, except her son, who sat in front of the TV and drank rum all day.
I sighed. I had forgotten how rum tasted. I wanted a tall glass of wine and to fall asleep afterward. And not wake up until we were there.
Last month, I tip-toed into any year.
It has been a very long time that I felt like myself.
I do not, perhaps, remember myself anymore. Frankly, there are no memories. My brain is either too exhausted to save and record anything, or it's playing the trick that she usually does - keep quiet and live on auto-pilot now and unleash the floods of what's happening presently a decade from now when these years will become clearer than day. I beg, it's the former. Because, I want to dissolve.
Because, I don't want to mean anything. Ever. I just want to close my eyes and rest a bit. For days and weeks, relentless.
Because, I feel like I've become less of a person, more like a non-person. Earlier, I used to hide myself inside a shell. But now, the self inside the shell has dissolved without a sign and only the shell remains. There is nothing that defines me. I've got no ideas.
I am a mere list of tasks, like a shopping list. I put food on the table, I eat, and I close my eyes, hoping to rest. But I never really. The disintegration that's happened over the years, is irreversible. I wish, something had remained. Some bits of the person I was stood beside me, against the tides of change, but alas, all is eroded. Leaving a weird tasting foul mouthed angry dreamless vacuum.
Whatever.
I feel beautiful now.
Inside-out
How my hair caresses my shoulders
My eyes, curious - are dripping with kohl
Brows, thick and steady like arches
Lips, brown, holding a smile.
I know I am beautiful
Like, I knew never before.
When I was longing for you
Decades ago.
I stared deep within, for this beauty
And shrugged, disappointed, finding nothing
How would you see my beauty,
If I was blind to it myself.
I would've held your hand and shown you myself:
Ah, see. Nothing is a-wanting
But now,
When perhaps, so much is lost
It dawns upon me
That, there is no one like me
Neither will be
I am so niche, like etched from stone
And so delicate, that will vanish in a breeze
What have we lost.
So much water under the bridge
For the past few days, I have been at rest. I breathe slow. There's no hustle. Or bustle. And my eye-lids are droopy. There's this light casual kind of burn everytime I shut my eyes. Like I can sleep half the day away. I close my eyes and fall asleep. I wake up, saliva leaking from the corners of my lips. Eyes are even heavier than when I fell asleep. I don't understand what is happening here. And I don't bother, either. All I want is more sleep. Some more, and more, of lie down time. Is it the buried exhaustion of years that has suddenly erupted, over a long weekend?
Also, I want to eat. Like gobble down the whole fridge. Sweets and cakes and chips and slurpees. Leftovers, won't be any more, left over. Cuz I'll eat them all. Like lick bowls clean. What's with this insatiable hunger. And the thirst. I guzzle down and chomp chomp chomp. And then I am off to bed. With no enthusiasm for waking up. Tuck me in, somebody. And don't wake me up, unless it's to feed me.
You know how flights work. You pick a flight with a four hour layover at some airport you've never meant to visit; just to save a couple of Ks - which you plan on upgrading your hotel room with, or buying some other compensation for your overtly critical overworked mind. You never upgrade your hotel room; rather you don't do any memento shopping either. All that you manage from your vacation is that you manage to come back home. Or atleast you've done one leg of your return flight, you're dragging your feet and sixteen hand baggages and your kids are getting lost at the airport, nobody has eaten anything in seven hours (they have!); and you're sitting there in a lesser known, not exactly obscure place, wondering how much better a direct flight would have been. You start to measure, obviously you can't measure such things, you drift and get lost until someone else gets lost, or someone else craves a snack, or so on and so forth.
Four hours is easy time, you wink and it's gone. You gather up, and board the flight. You wonder if the take off would be smooth, all the other flights on this vacay have given you the free falling in space experience. And you've been training yourself not to give in to fears, rational or irrational. Surprisingly, the flight is mid take off and you haven't even realised it.
You look out. Oh my god, the night lights are so pretty. What city is this? It's his hometown, isn't it. The x before the y before the zee. You wonder if he's home. Of course not darling, he left home long ago. And it left him too. When you met him, he was a bona-fide homeless nomad. He wouldn't settle and you wouldn't budge. Then he left you.
Today, looking down from the clouds, you wonder where his house would be. And where he went to the movies or where he played cricket. Or where he went to school. May be his parents still lived there. He moved and abandoned the country long time ago, and hasn't been heard of since - wreck of a lover that he was. You wonder if he calls his mother every day, or now and then, or has he called her now, like exactly now.
Then your mind drifts, you wonder if you got your ID back from that flight attendant, or whether you should get some shuteye. Knees are a pain, already.
So yes, in other news - the layover has turned out to be a fair enough compensation.
Unknot me, I have been so knotted up, you know.
Undo me, with your slender fingers
Fair fingers, and done nails
Enter deep into my knotted knots
Dissect them well
Seep into the crevices of reason, rationale & madness of my capricious being
Retell me, my own story
Erase the designs I have been caged within
Feel free, please
I give you everything, hereby
Tell me something I would want myself told
Unknot me, oh my ensnaring,
Let me also live a little, darling.
I couldn't catch my breath for months, after my son was born. Weeks slid past, while days only lazed around, afternoons coagulated. I never had the damn minute, to sit and breathe. To stop hyperventilating, all the time. I just couldn't cope. And i barely tried.
I got back to work. Then, came the pandemic.
Boy oh boy. Was that something.
Inside four walls, our caged souls, trying work and get through our days like nobody was dying outside. We cooked, took baths, watched tv, stared at the roof, never shut down the work laptop, and people never ever stopped calling. I nursed and spoke on the phone. I nursed and cooked. I nestled my son and stocked up groceries. There was no getting away, there was no where to go to. Roads felt so foreign.
I sat with my son on my lap in my balcony full of plants who were nearly the only company we had. I took pictures of our feet, his within mine. Just the way it's supposed to be. Still nothing ever felt alright.
An agony of ages simmered within my chest, refusing to divulge why. And I let it. Because without that much of free hand, those demons would come to consume me awhole. And I had to last. Mothers have to last.
Months went by, years also, I lost count. I could no longer wait and quit my job. Because I could no longer answer the phone. I just couldn't.
During those three months of notice, almost every afternoon, i stopped working at 5. I took my son to the roof. While he played, I looked up. I looked up at the sky. And its purplish hues. Orangish crimson hues.
I waited for clouds to part, and then to merge again and to form shapes. Like sketches that some god forgot to complete. I breathed in lungfuls of tired city air and looked at the chaos of tall buildings for as far as eyes could imagine. I saw flocks of birds flying homeward, I hoped I could too.
I skipped with my son. I ran with him. Whooshed away dozens of pigeons and giggled. I told him stories. We giggled some more. Lights came on in distant hotels, which had no guests those days. And we would go home after the sun set. On some evenings, we stayed longer, reluctant to accept the day's end. During those surplus minutes after the sun set, momentarily though, everything just felt alright.
One night, every couple months, I sleep to see an enormously real dream about you. It is so surreal, I do not have words. This is not a joke. Not a by a long shot. A decade old lover just cannot hang in there, so deep in my subconscious. And refuse to leave, like you're putting me through this. When did you get so deeply embedded in my head, Mekong. I fail to understand. My memory rarely fails me. We abandoned each other, remember? We broke each others' hearts. We were battered, agreed, but all set for separate lives. And it was eras ago. What are you still here?
The dreams bring you so close to me, they erase the many lives I've lived after you so easily, so conveniently. It is an escape, let me confess, because I've had to struggle through these many months and years. Life, had I chosen you, and you me, may have been easier. But who knows? May be I am cursed and I would gotten my curse along to you. Perhaps you're saved from me, Mekong. What do you know.
Then again these hallucinations - I have no control over. I sleep in anxiety splitting my mind between work and home. I live in such misery, I wonder sometimes why am I even alive. My subconscious sprouts in utter self-defense. And takes me hundreds of miles from where I've travelled to in space and time. And I see you and I sitting together in the park, on a random Sunday, growing old together, like we never separated for a day. I am taken by random incidents of our days, our casual happy lives.
It's like a parallel life. A parallel universe. So much so that I am misguided to believe that this life is the dream and that is what is real.
Later I wake up with numerous aching questions. If you and I were meant to be, then why aren't we? Why weren't we?
Will I get to swirl in your cloudy waters, one day? Accompany you from mountains to oceans. As you gather and split yourself from and to tributaries? Will I get a chance to build myself again, with you. If not in this life then, may be in another.
So, I don't know. Have you thought about this?
Hi there Stranger!
I've no idea where I'm going, anyway. I am almost always, pretty lost. I mean, I am so trapped in my short term goals that I don't even remember faintly what I wanted to begin with.
A cup of coffee would be nice though.
So, like I was saying, have no clue where am going. I just run. Away from and into disasters on an hourly basis. While, for real, I don't move an inch. I am trying to be an adult, like a proper human adult with responsibilities and such. Clearly it ain't working. But that doesn't stop me from trying, lest I disappoint.
Nearly every morning, in the foggy cold, I thrust into the elevator, my warm showered skin. Forget makeup, I don't even have lip balm on. And I have no idea why I am like this, where I am headed. Smal temporary idiotic pointless tasks to be ticked off. I guess.
And there you are. Sweaty. T shirt sticking to your body. Hair drenched, in well, something. Standing tall, by yourself, waiting for your floor. Unbothered. You have the most erect posture I have seen in any human, I swear stranger.
And I am next to you. A zillion thoughts ramming through my head. None of them about you. You don't exist for me. And vice versa. We don't look at each other. We have never exchanged glances. But we seen each other. And been seen too. Without makeup and sweaty. Anxious and hungry. Depressed and apathetic.
This doesn't matter. Nothing has ever mattered, this included. This is one of those hundreds of things in life that never mattered, while we waited for things that we wanted to matter, but didn't and shattered our hearts. You know, stranger.
I am so exhausted, I cannot begin to tell you how much I want to go to bed and not wake up. Yet, there I am, ramming into you in the elevator, every damn morning.
And I am sure, you have your things too.
But, I would like to say this.
I have been so serious and meticulous all this time, I am broken. I always carry a pent up wish to be just juvenile.
Standing next to you, feeling myself breathe, counting floors, must be one of the most charmingly juvenile luxuries I have allowed myself to indulge in. It's made me feel a bit alive, a tiny bit less empty. I don't know. Let me tell you that stranger.
Lately, how you pause in the midst of your phrases, my heart then, skips a beat. I count moments, looking for words also but they elude me thoroughly, with impunity. How could I of all, be so tongue tied. And that too, with you. The one for me, oh magical one.c
This way, you confuse me with your measured silences. Here, I have not the slightest. Of what's going on in that brilliant mind of yours. And whether a heart as irrational and inconsolable and capricious as mine, hides beneath.
All I know is that, while we speak, you pause. Mid way. Seemingly accidentally, but not much so. As if waiting for me, giving me an adequate opportunity to speak up and be heard. To rip open the hidden treasures of my soul and come out naked. Out front and lay on your palms, one confession after the other.
Shamelessly, remorselessly.
I count moments and wait. And then you catch up again and continue.
I wonder. What is that!
What are we doing here?