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I woke up at an hour I dare not say. I had been tired to the last cell in my body, and I did open my eyes now and then all morning. Then, I pulled the blanket over myself and slept again. To be out in the world meant that you had to be ready for it, and to be ready for the world was not something you could take lightly. I was not ready the first, second or third time I woke up, but I was ready when the doorbell rang with a parcel.

It always came in the nick of time. You could spend your whole life preparing for a moment but only feel ready at the precipice of it. You could wait years to confess something and miss every opportunity, but only when your heart was thumping harder than the pistons on the engine of a train and only when your voice shivered as if you were standing knee-deep in snow on new year’s eve, did you find that you were ready. Every moment before the second you would utter the words would convince you there was still time, but only when you finally say what you had to say would you learn how tardy you had been.

This was true for all things. There was a trick to it: you let life decide. You let the moment push you to the edge. There was no such thing as being ready in my experience. I was nineteen years old when the beats of my life changed overnight. When I woke up, I had no choice but to learn to dance.

How it changed is irrelevant. They say details make things intimate and vulnerable; I say they are alienating. If I tell you about a cafe without telling you the street it is on, you will see the cafe you frequent in my words. If I tell you its name, it will go in one of two ways. If you are familiar with it, your concern will turn to the veracity. And if you don’t know it, you will think of it as some mythical place in an itinerary you might never fulfil.

Life thrust me into readiness that morning all those years ago, as I am sure it has pushed all of us at some point. But it was not immediate. Funnily enough, it was precisely like today. My phone chimed, and I somehow knew why and how life would never be the same. So, I did the reasonable thing: I pulled the blanket over myself and slept, but when it chimed again, I was sure I was ready.

I walked to the cafe this evening. I had not done this in days because they had been long, and when not that, they had been stormy. I crossed the patio and pushed the glass door, which was locked. The lights were still on, so I stood beside some girls who, I realised, were waiting. But I had not yet decided to wait, and then, I decided it was not worth it, that the walk to the coffee shop was the change of pace I needed in the first place. The coffee is but a dog ear in the corner of that chapter.

I walked away, but as I walked over the grass and out the gates, I could not help but think of how everything was topsy-turvy this year. I had noticed the blossoming sidewalk on my way, with bougainvillaea and other flowers I do not know the name of yet. I whiffed their aroma as I spontaneously bent and manoeuvred my way from under them, and I remembered June was about to begin. It was a tardy year, and in some way, it was the first time the world emulated my disposition.

Then, I thought of the arbitrariness that surrounded me, of how we rarely ever knew what we would do or say until we did those things. It’s all in the capricious decisions based on the most flimsy rationale that life happens, justified only by the person making them. The rest is but entanglement, how paths intertwine and how each decision affects the other, and often, we remain entirely unaware of our impact in changing the tempo of someone’s life. It was the most obvious observation made nonchalantly on an unremarkable evening. For a second, I thought about all the people I had crossed paths with, how we had gone our separate ways without realising what the last word was, and that is what had all my attention for the rest of the evening—of how little it all had mattered, how little I had thought about it, and how we often only collide like molecules in a room.

I reckon if I made small talk with those waiting alongside me outside the locked glass door, I would know a few more people in the city, but then, eventually, it would all come down to not knowing each other. I would move someplace else, or they would stop coming to the coffee shop, and we would not realise a thing like no one never does.

To whom it may concern,

I leave this hastily written letter and all my words in hands I trust.

I began writing this barrage of prose on a whim, like how I do everything. When it is the end of the day, when the work is slowly subsiding to the edge of my mind, a parallel to the setting sun outside, I often decide to take a walk. Now, I do not plan to go to the coffee shop on most days, and often, I stand outside the gates to the patio and decide whether I should stop for a cup of coffee or let it be. On most days, I stop for coffee. In many ways, these words have been like any of those walks; like most of them, there is now a decision to make. Before I pass the building by, and it is too late to go back, I must make a stop. I must leave things as they are, and I must get a bit of rest. That is what I plan to do for some time—to lay under the sun, to live a life, and to let time happen to me in its own way. I seem to have said all I have to say for now, at least how I tend to say it.

Now, I must wait for either of them to change. It is an age-old adage, after all, that change is good. We must reinvent ourselves now and then, lest it all get a bit stale. It seems I have found my proverbial coffee shop, and I must stop for a moment and take stock of where I am and where I want to go—which is always more important. I shall sip my days away and not have a word to say about them. At least, for a little while, I hope. Breaks are awfully scary, after all. You think you will take a week or two; before you know it, a decade has passed.

But then, for how long can a writer live without writing? Not long, I reckon. Not long at all.

For now, however, I must live this wonderful, beautiful life I have built.

I have sat here for three hours now, wondering why no word seems to click and no sentence begins to form. First, I thought that I had lost the nerve, that I had drunk the last drop from the well, and maybe, the pond was dried up. But then, I realised that a thought had been stuck for a while now, and the gears had finally come to a halt. Now, I have to dislodge it somehow, and I do not know where to begin. A few days ago, in a conversation about nothing in particular, I told a friend that strong emotion is what we need to write. Anger, grief and love are the usual suspects, and I seem to have none. I seem to have lost all my anger, for I realised it was grief, and all that grief in the past has made me too cautious about love.

All in all, mellow emotion can only take me so far, and it is not for the lack of trying. I try to open my heart, but it is futile; the key is lost, and I do not know where to begin my search. I have retraced all my steps, and I cannot find it. How easy it is to write about someone you love! Like magic, the words flow out of you. It has been a while since I experienced this, and it was not a problem until I did not say it aloud. Now, I have; it has but paralysed me. All my emotion is mellow, like this ever-present cup of coffee on this table. Nothing has ripped my heart to shreds recently—no love and surely, no grief. And while the world has plenty of reasons ready to fuel my rage, my patience makes it impossible for me to feel any flavour of it. In the end, these words suffer for all of it.

How long can one write about the seasons, their changing, and about people they do not know? How long can we talk of the world that does not know of us, that thinks of us like a statistic, a number among many? How long can we speak of joy without being able to share it outside our words? I see a sort of indifference growing within me. I do not know if I can write much longer if things continue this way. For the first time in my life, I am unsure. Perhaps, all things reach the end of the line one way or the other or, often, for reasons beyond our control.

More than the struggles of right and wrong, more than adventure and novelty, my life will be filled with the struggles of the mundane. Most choices will barely matter when day after day, I will face the dastardly deplorable decision to lie down in bed under the warm blanket for a minute or so. Often, this, too, will be like playing with fire. On many occasions, I will be unable to douse the flames in time, lose control of things, and inevitably fall asleep. Then, in some dream, someone I have never met will come across and ask me for the time, and the mild realisation will open my eyes and drag me out of the dream and out of bed in one fell swoop.

I am always at battle with myself, pushing to go a little further, just a smidge, just a bit, with no consideration for the state of things. There are worlds inside me; I have little else to think about. I often stay occupied with this dilemma of resting or working, these inner struggles of the daily to the point of aloofness in the real world. Sometimes, I feel as if I only pretend to be a person, but, in fact, I am a more simplistic experiment. I look around my life as we often look at a landscape from far away, knowing we are not in it but that we are here to watch it unfold, that without the narrator, there is no story, and no moment is true without someone experiencing it. My days appear to me like a field of flowers, verdant and lush, spanning acres, and then, they feel like a gaping gorge to cross, an incredible leap. But mostly, they feel like a sort of grey, flavourless cafe, with a simplistic table and run-of-the-mill decor. Most of my days meld into one another because of how similar they appear from afar.

Should I have a cup of coffee or slash and burn my entire life? These are the kind of questions I ask myself on most days. I never have an answer, so I live again through the day, and then, when I do the dishes, and there is still time before the clock hits midnight, I look at the bed and enticed, I overestimate my ability to lie down only for a second, only for a minute, only enough to not lose myself in my dreams. Then, I wake up in the middle of the night with shame, get to the desk and get to work.

Earlier this afternoon, I had the time and inclination to write the right words. Why did I not sit and write then? Well, because there were obligations to complete and meetings to attend. I believe most writers, including me, prefer writing in the morning or as soon as they wake up because there is little to no noise in your mind. There are no troubles, and reality is often masked by the world of your dreams. If you let the day get on too far, it becomes harder to find the words. They are often quieted by the echo of the people in your life, the jokes and banter from a television show, the calls from your account manager at some bank, or the plethora of emails and messages, all of them asking for your attention, a piece of your mind. I missed the opportunity to write with a cleaner mind once again. It does not mean I cannot write to the best of my ability, but the writing of the morning and the writing after you have lived through a day are different. You can read any work—a poem, a few sentences of prose, or a novel—and know precisely when it was written during the day. It gets glaringly obvious once you notice it.

I will not go into the differences or give you a rubric on judging which is which, for that is not my job. As is evident, I barely have my own life in order as far as the knowing of things is concerned. In many ways, my life is not some chic, snobby orchestra that I like to pretend it is; on most days, it is messy jazz playing in a small, cramped pub that smells of booze spilt on its sticky floors. I believe most lives are like this in the end. We try our best to do it all, to live like we have any control over anything, but ultimately, we are all just building it as we go. It is a creaky tenement in need of repair at all times, always. It is a project that never sees its end. It is a garden that always needs weeding. Some days are straightforward, some are topsy-turvy, and an artist must sit and work on all of them.

A lofty goal; if only I could talk to someone about it all. But then, they would only tell me “there is always tomorrow” and to let it go, that this obsession is pointless. I reckon it is called a lonely profession for a reason.

I have little to say about where my life is going, but I know that when I was done unpacking and cleaning some of the apartment last night and when I was done doing the dishes, which were not as many since I had only come back earlier in the evening, I went to close the curtain on the window. Before I dragged the grey curtain, I noticed this white cloud—a streak across the hills. Almost opaque, it seemed to have wrapped around the mountains like we do a scarf around our neck. We do it until we are sure it is spring. I cannot tell you where my life is going, but I am still curious; I still look around and doubt myself. If all those are true, it will be okay eventually. Wherever I end up, I will have made the correct decisions to get there, so I will have little to complain about. A simple cloud can make me feel incredible joy. What else is there? What else, indeed.

When they ask me: what did you do with your life? I will tell them I worked hard. Yes, I worked hard like my father, my mother, and their parents before them, but I stopped to look at the birds when I could. I will have that to my credit. It will have happened. I will have stopped a thousand—no, a million—times before to look at it all, to look at the big, bright world outside. I do not need a hut in the hills or a shack on the beach. I have no need to reject all we know.

Talking to a friend about art at a late hour when there was little else to do but talk about what we spent all of ourselves doing, I was asked to describe all my work in a single sentence. Of course, I could not do it. “But what will someone get out of your words?” He asked. “They will have read,” I said.

We talked more after that, but today I remembered that moment again. I know the answer to his question, too, and it is precisely how I have lived my life so far. I have done things for the sole purpose of doing them. The parts of my life reflect its whole and where it is going. Like how I write or how I love, it will have been lived for the act of living.

I will have lived and died; along the way, I will have stopped to look at the sky. What else is there? What else, indeed.

Enough days without a goal in sight, enough sitting around idly, enough chatting about nothing with everyone I meet. I must begin my life again tomorrow—the time for vacation is over. For a good reason, too. A life that is always on holiday is no life at all. Everything must ebb and flow like waves under the red sun in the evening. Stability is a myth, and to lie down and do nothing each day is as terrible as never stopping at all. All extremes burn those who reach them; to stay in the middle is a careful balancing act. It is also a virtue to cultivate. The good news is that we get to try every day.

At the end of the day, I sit here, still baffled by the fact—as I have been for years now—that we can be in one place when we begin a day and entirely another by the time it ends. It may seem simple, of course, given that the plane was brimming today, as they always are, but it is still a marvel and one that is not as old as one might think. It is a novelty in the history of this species to have the dust from two places with hundreds of miles between them gather on the same shoe in the span of one day. But all this is possible because the world works. Despite all its problems and errors, it works. For all the issues we have yet to solve, we have solved twice as many, and it was only possible because some people did balance it out: to work and to wonder in equal parts.

A puppy sleeps about twenty hours daily and runs and pants for four. A person has no such liberty. We must find something we are good at or at least can do and then do it, so the world works. Most people I meet see this as some sort of burden. I see it as a privilege. All our contribution is a walk on the tightrope we must learn to do daily. Most of it is some sort of work; the rest is, well, rest.

A peculiarity I have noticed in these past years, building a life in a place and tearing it down to go somewhere else, is our tendency to get used to things. It is almost laughable how I, like most other people, think there is any sort of definition to myself when all it takes for me to get used to a different self is a few days. It is funny how quickly we learn our way around new streets, how fast we learn the language and the slang, how parts of ourselves change completely, or how a place we vacation tends to hold us as tightly as where we came from, so long as we choose to stay.

It baffles me because of how strict we are with our preferences, when in the end, if you only try to jump ship and live somewhere else, it would all fit eventually, after some mild discomfort. Our preferences do not matter as much as our circumstances at first, and mostly, it is what happens to us rather than what we choose that determines how our days are going to be, where we will live and how we will sound. All that is true until we choose.

It tears me up when I look around at other people, at this world we have built. Nothing matters; nothing should exist, yet all of it is here and fights back every day. I have so much love for this attempt, for it all, of how we continue seeking. There is little that amazes me more than this tenacity to keep going, this urge in all of us to keep moving. Last evening, as I sat watching the waves ripple over one another, folding like the hands of lovers, intertwined, unsure of who held first and who held tighter, it all occurred to me in one fell swoop: this life, the things that have occurred in it is all one massive coincidence, but now that it has happened, I must take charge.

That is how the story of humanity goes, after all: one day, a group of people began walking away from the middle of nowhere because something in them chose to do so, and in their footsteps, they wrote the story of all of us. Humanity is a story of call and response. Till there are people, there will always be the great attempt. As long as things happen to us, we will continue to happen to them.

The taxi drives by the sea, and the breeze makes me smile, almost spontaneously, on an otherwise muggy day. It has been a calm afternoon, filled with walking under bougainvillaea trees blossoming with white, magenta and pink flowers. They say a good bouquet has no wasted elements in it. It fills me with certainty that I, too, belong. In all these little realisations, my doubt has slowly dissipated into thin air over the years.

Cities have memories, too, and this city has made me remember several things I had forgotten once. The many neighbourhoods I walked through all those years ago have said their hellos and greeted me like an old friend. The one you forget but who remembers you and comes to you after looking at you from afar and says, “Do you remember me?” You pause, look at them, and quickly search the archives of your memory. “Of course!” You say, “of course, I remember you!” The days I’ve spent lately have been like that, only there are no familiar faces here to remind me of things, but there are places.

I thought of love—on second thought, that is untrue. To say you thought of something suggests you were not thinking of it before, but for all my misfortune with it, I am always thinking of love. I did not think of love, no. I only cupped it with my hand like how we do water when we drink from a stream—interrupting it, taking some of it for ourselves. Perhaps, this is also how we love others. Now, after all these years, the limitless love I held for someone has slowly reworked itself into love for this scenic world, like a parting gift never given ends up on the shelf.

I am deeply in love with the people and the world around me. I seem to have forgotten how to pick the crowd apart to find someone in it. Just the other night, as I looked at the water, sitting amidst thousands of others, I could not even find myself in the crowd, let alone someone else. All my want to stand out has disappeared like faint remembrance.

One might say I am lost, but “no,” I would argue, “now, I am found.”

I sit at the table in the corner of this coffee shop, fighting my sleep. I can only think of one thing in the pockets of my wakefulness: that there are people in my life, and I do not know who put them there. They seem to have appeared out of nowhere, like a patch of flowers in the early days of spring, and now that they are here, I must do my best to be around them. Some people I recall entering my life like a guest who knocked on the wrong door, but the others, I can’t much place. One day I woke up, and they were in my life, and now, our paths are intertwined. Now that they are here, I am a part of their stories, albeit little, and now that it is this way, they are a part of this story, too.

Behind the music in my ears, a private concert we take for granted, I listen to the murmuration of the crowd. I am shocked at how many people exist together and how we meet each other. “Can you help me move about this life—all of it seems a little too much to go through alone?” We ask each other this when we smile, make eye contact, and talk more than necessary with a stranger as we both procrastinate at the same table, tired and bored. But it is all too cliche to talk about. It is like breathing. Talking about it does little than make it appear harder than it is.

I walk around a city like I waltz around in life—with a sense of security even though I do not know my way as much as I like to believe. It is the people, the people around me, that make it possible. The privilege of being able to meet others and the joy of having some of them stay for years makes me glad. Sitting here, I can almost see myself from after. Call it a trance of exhaustion. I can see this entire cafe, like how we often observe a colony of ants, seeing everything all at the same time. I see myself, one of many people, living. I see all the people here as dots in Brownian motion, some moving towards each other with stupendous force, bound to cross paths. Perhaps, that is how it plays out on most days. It is only that we are too occupied and distracted, but sometimes, if the day is bright enough, we can see it for what it is and always has been: a collision course.

The alarm rang at six, and I watched the golden, almost fiery sunrise through the window, and then, I slept again. In the sleep I got from that point on, I dreamed of a life that was impossible until a few things went differently. I woke up a little later, and as I stood under the shower, I realised again that our lives seldom depend only on us. It is sensitive, changing at the softest of nudges. Life is built on the countless backs of uncountable people making decisions day after day. Despite what we decide and the stress we put on our agency, our lives almost entirely depend on the world around us. To say that it is not this way is a bold claim, and like most bold claims, it is naive. My life today is as much about me as it is about other people; in many ways, they have made it happen more than I have. I have been an agent, but their decisions have made possibilities impossible. That is what life is in the end: the murder of possibility year by year. Whatever we do and whatever we choose, the pool of our choices decreases year by year, and we have as much say in it as others do.

By saying this, I do not mean someone cannot begin again, but that any beginning would come with the baggage of what has happened already. What they do with the burden of that knowledge is not for me to say, and I hope they are triumphant. Regardless of what we think of ourselves, a simple decision that was never ours to make can change the trajectory of our life in unbelievable ways. This life I live is an unintended outcome. If it were only in my purview, it would be different. And what of happiness? Happiness has nothing to do with it. It is a measure of how synchronised you are with your life, not how it went or goes. But it would have been different had it been up to me; I know that much.

In the cafe I am writing this from lives a cat; its sandbox and bowl are in one section. The people here, customers like myself, open the door now and then to move about. Where the cat can wander off is not truly up to it, but how long the door is open and if it has a chance to sneak. The intention is not the only thing that matters; what matters is that the door opens at the right moment.

Historically, we are in the best place we have ever been. One has to zoom out to see it, to detach from themselves as one makes this scrutiny. When we look at the world and make an inventory of it, we must ensure we are outside it for a moment. It is true of every measurement. We must ensure our involvement with things stays minimal and not interfere when we measure. Bias is simply to look at the world as if you’re still in it, but the looking itself puts you out of it. Looking at the world without paying heed to this will always make it appear less prosperous and more miserable, for all your problems will appear to be the problems of the world. That is seldom the case, however. The personal rarely has weight on the social. The personal is just that, the personal. It is yours; it is a private journey.

This is not pride or hubris. This is an objective way to look at it. Numbers do not respect emotions; how we feel matters little to them. It is not that I do not struggle myself; no, sir, my life is not a cakewalk, and I do not spend all my days devoid of worry, but I jump in joy when I can. When I say the world is better, I do not mean it is also not terrible. They say the world is seventy-one per cent water; it follows suit. It exists differently, all at the same time. It is an acquired skill to look at things this way. Not taking things personally is not easy, but it is the right thing to do if we want to say anything about the world, lest we sell those toiling away short and glaze over their effort. We almost pinch their work and their contribution like we do a candle if we put it that way. When we look at the world, our intention should never be to rob it of its light. People work to keep it alive daily, fanning its flames in their little ways. Some call it altruism or benevolence or duty and whatnot. The words rarely matter, but the actions do.

Invented problems are not our concern. They are the concern of marketers who tell us something is wrong, make us hysterical and paranoid, and then sell us a solution. Our concern is to look at things rationally. There is no greater responsibility, no greater act of freedom.

In this world, fortune favours not the brave but the loud, the audacious, the mildly aggravating. It benefits those who toot their horn till those listening go deaf or start blasting their own in return. The place for nuance is a small table in the corner of a coffee shop no one visits because it barely gets any sun on it. That is to say, there is no place for it at all. There is little room for the subtle, for the unsaid, for the subliminal. It is a grating world for loud people. The quiet ones, the private ones, the recluses perish. It is not enough to be good; it is only necessary to be loud.

Frankly, the bar has never been lower than it is today for most things. The poetry you find on the bestsellers list in a bookstore—an eerie and haunted place in itself—pales in comparison to the sawdust most writers leave on the floor, shredded, or in the rejection pile. But it is sure of itself, so it is on the shelf. In many ways, this should embarrass us, but it does not, for embarrassment, too, is a silent, personal experience. There is no space for it, not anymore, no. Even our hurt must be a ten-second advertisement with a gut-wrenching hook and a bright typeface. It is a world of performance built by performers in their image and in their favour. Many of us have given up now; in our unique and personal ways, we have given up. All we want is to be left alone, to our own devices.

The time for slipping a sentence that split into strands and slowly took hold of a person is over. A sentence should be short! Poor Hemingway would ail to see the desecration of his advice and all his life’s work. The time of sitting in front of a canvas, crying tears of yellow paint for years, is gone. It is now a world of brevity, of getting to the point quickly. Hurry up! No one has the time. They are too busy shouting their names off their rooftops like fledgling cuckoos, screeching louder than the rightful heirs of the nests they have managed to infiltrate.

It is all too loud and a sad state of affairs, but we do not care. We, the others, are only trying to get a moment, and if the world allows, a few hours of sleep.

I often walk past a lot of buildings I once used to enter regularly. There are coffee shops I do not visit anymore. Some changed ownership, some do not exist, and some are snobbish enough for me to avoid them or only get a coffee in a cup to go, all the while watching my watch and the door. Some places burst with people who even sit and talk with superficial superiority. Their insecurities ooze out of them like their money which, sadly, never ends and, even more sadly, perhaps, never finds better use. It only gets spent on a larger car, a longer coat, and a prolonged and annoying pronunciation of words. Eventually, the city knows which places to avoid. Of course, for all those who don’t visit them, there are more who do, and it does nothing to affect the sales, and the places keep running for years.

Then, there is the old school. A campus I often walk by now; it happens to be on the road that leads to everywhere; I cannot really avoid it. It baffles me each time I pass the gate, and sometimes, I see people in the same uniforms, albeit with little changes here and there. It makes me feel so much simultaneously that I cannot put it into words. This is precisely why I wanted a life elsewhere, always seeking an escape with someone else or on my own. The same streets are often a reminder of every step you took along the way. There are people I spent days with here who have left, long on their way to different places all over the world, and I have left, too, but then, this town brings me back to itself. Of course, I will not live my entire life here, but a good chunk of it has been lived already. I cannot change it. But that is not to say it has been terrible by any accord. It has been life—the good and the bad.

But it knocks me out every time I pass by an old place and notice it has changed. The posh, extravagant restaurant we always wanted to dine in is under renovation now. We could never visit it. The board above it has changed already. It was a Saturday, and I walked past it once again, like I have a thousand times before, and like I have walked past many of my dreams, knowing not every one of them comes true. But some do, yes, some do, so we keep dreaming.

Countless metaphors, innumerable ways to say things, but nothing rings louder than your father sharing something in plain words. The other day in the middle of a discussion, my father told me that we do not do things for ourselves but for what they may become in the future, whether we are here to see it or not. Despite the context—its differences—I have since applied it to what I do when I write, or at least, how I think of it. My words are not seeds; indeed, no child will sit in their shade, but they may be a crutch one day for someone struggling to walk among the living. Perhaps, my life from this point on, once this realisation sets in, will be a never-ending journey to be able to live with this reality. It may seem particularly odd to someone who has never looked at it this way, but all artists are selfish. To think you can say something about the world that has never been said before, to think you can splat some paint on a canvas, and call it a masterpiece, is selfish. It is conceited.

But how can I not walk down a street and come back to write about it? This life, the world, even if I was not a part of it, would be worth talking about every second. I do not know much about true love that one writes ballads about. Still, if it was any comparison, the streets, the sizzling, greasy food being cooked in pocket-like stores, the people rushing and sometimes, colliding with one another, the children sprinting across to run an errand, the faces of joy, pain, and worry, the friends walking together, the lovers laughing along, the occasional miscreant, the rare good samaritan who stops to help someone with their bags, all of them make my world go around.

It is a privilege to have the patience to notice all of what we call life. I write about it not because I know how to live it better. I err over and over; I trip more than one might imagine. I write about it all as a reminder. For whom and for what? Well, time will have enough to say about it, and I may not be here when the moment comes. My only concern is to ensure I look around with my eyes wide open and that I have something to say. The ripples of a life lived well travel much farther than those who live it.

Woke up early this February morning with a voracious craving for nostalgia, of wanting to live some things once more, even if I know how they will end. One day, a long time ago, I had a simple, childish epiphany. I realised that nothing else mattered in the face of the little time we had for things, especially with others. Ah, I miswrote. Perhaps, a correction is in order—it was childlike, not childish. My only mistake with it, if there was any to take account of, was to think others, too, had this realisation. But it is rare, almost impossible, for people to realise things together, and surely, not in the same way. Eventually, I learned to live with this failure of judgement, and for all the trouble it has caused, it has been a valiant attempt to stay kind, and remain patient, even when no one around me, no one I meet, seems to have realised this still. I was right, of course, for the moments I held tightly were fleeting, and now, the only thing to do is to sit and remember them. In the end, this knowledge carries little weight: that I was right, that I am right, and that not a single part of it has changed.

But I can remember, and so I will, and when these days pass, them, too, I will remember. I will remind those I still share time with of how things were if they forget. Begrudgingly, I will do it, but I promise I will remain calm, and I will not lose the last smidge of my patience. I will wait, like someone waits on the other end of the shore or across the river, waiting for the others to cross. But some rapids, we must cross ourselves. So, I will pace about the bank and continue waiting, and if others don’t make it across to this understanding? Well, then, I will be the one to carry the memory they were unable to hold. To all those who worry about trivial matters to lose out on the moment at hand, I vow to remember all of it, to remember them. Perhaps, with a soft anger in my heart as I wake up with the first light and take a minute to get out of bed—the weight of everything that has happened holding me down like an anchor. A capsized boat, after all, is waiting, too, and it, too, remembers.

Maybe these words are pedestrian. Maybe anyone can write better or more profoundly, and perhaps, I am wasting my time. But even if all that was true, what else would I do with the time? Eventually, we must all do something. Writing these words and trying to earn a living so I can continue doing so takes most of my time and days. It blows my mind when someone I meet tells me novel, more irritating ways of saving more time. What do you do with all the time you save? I often ask them, and more often than not, it is the first time they come face-to-face with this question.

Humanity has spent centuries trying to save time, but we are busier than ever. Even if you meet someone who successfully saves enough of it, they rarely have anything to show for all the hours they saved. It almost makes me think that we are not meant to save it, only find the things we would happily spend our hours doing, and if happiness is too lofty an intention, then necessity.

The world works with some rules, such as earning a living, as ludicrous as that phrase sounds. A cat does not have to worry about it, but we must, so we use the time for that. A cat takes a nap on the curb because it has no bills to pay. I have little to say about why we do, and neither do I feel it is my place to say any of it, but now that we have the bills to pay and the life to live, we must. The circumstances we fall in are rarely in our control, but we can do our best. That is how I live, so I don’t want to save seconds. I believe I want to spend every waking hour doing things, not for a goal but because of a simple question: if not this, then what?

It is funny that all the people who tell me their tricks for saving time rarely have enough of it to take a walk, grab a cup of coffee, watch a film, or even sit quietly. It is almost as if they are their own enemies. I do not share this ambition, and I seem to have an awful lot of time on my hands. Frankly, too much of it since they keep asking me: how do you get the time to write every day? And I tell them: I don’t know.

If anything, I have always found a day to be incredibly long. I keep trying to fill it with tasks, but some of it is always left to spare.

They say eyewitness testimonies are unreliable, and it is true. Each time I try and recall summer from years ago, it always seems yellower than the last, warmer and, in a way, more elusive, and every time I remember heartache, it, too, feels exaggerated. As I sat by myself on a typical Saturday at the cafe, I deliberated replacing my usual americano with a cappuccino. Then, I remembered how I was getting drunk in bars just a few years ago, being open to picking fights with famous artists, and I laughed. I remember never being able to keep my mouth shut. Now, I refrain from even talking about what is on my mind. All my bravado and wit are now reserved for a few puns when talking to friends or family. Looking back, it all feels so larger than life. Perhaps, when I was in those adrenaline-fuelled evenings, they were not as glorious, but that is how memory works, and we will never know.

I eventually could not resist routine completely: I chose an americano, and if we’re being honest, I chose two. Still, I went for pancakes today instead of my usual full English breakfast. We should, whenever the occasion presents itself, deliberate and consider change for the sake of it. The world is generally mundane, and everyone adventuring out in the woods eventually needs to come back to town for a supply run or go to the bank or the nearest ATM. Ultimately, everyone returns to the humdrum of society, even if for a minute or two. No matter how much you resist, something will bring you back to the usual, and so, I do not resist the call; my strategy is to trick it.

I trick it by making changes here and there—minutiae. Sometimes, I find a new favourite; often, my preferences are bolstered. But we must keep changing things here and there if they can be changed. When something works, such as my habit of walking about on a Saturday afternoon, looking up and taking pictures of trees, we must preserve it. It is all an experiment in the end. I have been so many people before, and all of them seem enticing in how I remember them. Today, however, I can only be who I am at this very moment.

This banality will feel larger than life when I look back at it eventually, too.

Last night, with all intentions of finishing my writing, I decided to lie down with my eyes closed for about five minutes. I made sure I would get up and out of bed, so I did not change my clothes, I did not do the dishes, and I left all the curtains open. When I woke up, it was the first light of the day that hit me through the open curtains first, and then, it occurred to me my nap had lasted the entire night. I had not realised what had happened until I noticed the clothes I was wearing, and then, I remembered the dishes. While there was frustration, I quickly realised what had happened was already over. I could not let it plague the day ahead, so I began it earnestly.

I come from a fastidious and punctual home, so parts of it are ingrained within my very being. We must be toe-to-toe with time in all our endeavours. But a punctual home is often an impatient home, too, in some ways more than others, and so, I thought of patience, of waiting and resting. I thought of what I will do differently. In the early hour that began the day in reverse, with me dressed up, with the dishes all piled up, and with the curtains wide open, I had little else to do than sit and make a cup of coffee, but mostly, just sit. And so, I sat, and while I do give myself the due rest I deserve even without a night of sleeping in denim jeans, it was more important to do it today. The body can be moved further than we think, but we must pay heed when the mind decides to lay itself down. When the mind says, I cannot go any longer without taking a minute or two, all punctuality and, indeed, all urgency must go out the window.

It is a realisation that has not come easily; frankly, I have lost much to gain this understanding. There are parts of me now that do not fit well with what I was taught growing up, regardless of the intentions of the lessons in question. But that does not mean I cannot keep both parts to myself. In the end, life is but a balancing act. Where we come from and where we go are part of the same story, after all, and all threads must connect in the end. At least, that is how it is for good stories. I do not know which one my life will turn out to be. Not yet.