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Something about sitting in a field and doing nothing in particular attracts me. I don’t know where this urge, this want comes from. I belong to a family of people who work hard—I work hard. I want to work hard at things I enjoy, but the field calls. I could not be sure where it is, and how far this call has travelled, only to finally turn into the softest whisper for me. I wonder how many aeons it’s spent floating to land on my deaf ears. I continue with my days of hard work. There is still time; I assure it as if it will listen to me. I continue doing things; the call continues asking me to go. It has been years. We play this game every day.

In these years, we have worked up an arrangement. Like a salesperson who won’t stop coercing me to buy whatever they are selling, the call keeps telling me things that will make me cave. Like a customer who won’t budge, I continue haggling. In the spirit of this dance, I now humour it and cease all activity for short periods. It is the best I can give it, and for a few days, it is silenced. I find time to sit by myself and stare at the nothingness of one solitary leaf on the patio. I look at it and think of nothing in particular, just like the call suggests. I sleep on the grass on my balcony, a poor proxy for the vastness of a field. Still, grass is grass and moments of inactivity are moments of inactivity.

Like a puppy who manages to find a way around all barricades, like a genie who twists the words of those who wish for things, I playfully find little ways to find my balance. There is no need to escape anymore. There is a life I have built; my longing for a field is a part of it. But there are things I have to do, and there are people I have to be around, to lend the occasional hand, help a little wherever I can, and live!

I want to live among the living, amidst the sheer busyness of life. There will be enough time to lie down—the call must understand this much. In paying this understanding forward, I must look at the sky, stop and smell the flowers and laugh now and then. It shall be this way until I run out of time. Most of us end up in a field, one way or another, but to live properly is to live among the living.

They ask me about my sudden inkling, my sudden draw towards flowers, towards colour, and as much as I want to tell them why, because there are reasons I could sit and fill pages about, I often wonder: is it not enough? Is it not enough to stop and smell the flowers, to look at as much colour as the world bestows on us, and to do it because we can? Is it not enough to love the world without reason, without a tale of epic change or some grand adventure dictating this decision to embrace the light and everything it falls on? It is, it is enough; I have invited colour into my life like how we invite an old friend. Like how we do not know anything about the friend, I do not know anything about this colour I talk about, but I am willing to ask questions and indulge it, so it spills and continues to spill further into my life. Where do you come from, I shall ask it? And it’ll tell me: a little bit of everything, but mostly joy.

There has never been a spring like this before, and there will never be a summer like this before. I have built a garden in my mind. Naturally, I spent a lot of time there; I reckoned there must be some colour. It is hard work, but every good thing in life is hard work. There are a thousand patches of periwinkles, daisies, pansies, and roses. There are long, winding vines of bougainvillaea creeping about on the railings of the cottage I often retreat to. Indian laburnums planted all around the periphery shower their yellow on everything else. It has taken me a long time to build this garden, and the cottage in my head has survived the harshest of winters. What changed? One day, I let the snow fall as it may. It changed everything.

It is the paradox of paradise: you can only reach it when you stop trying to find it. Fields filled with crunchy autumn leaves are the only promised land we need. There is heaven in winters if winters are all you get. The torment of monsoon is still a blessing. And if you wait long enough, and if you’re patient without expectation, all of it gives way to warmer days, filled with colour and all things bright and beautiful.

Should there be a reason for how the world has always worked?

In the torrid afternoons of summer, I sit by my window and think of the rain. I reckon it would feel like a lover’s hand on your cheek as you close your eyes and turn inward towards the hand, knowing this is as safe as you are ever going to feel. But there are no rains today, and that is life; if we were to get what we wanted instantly, it would take the joy away from it. To enjoy the cold respite of a shower was to wait for it. To relish in the unmeasured depth of love was in patience. There was no other way. The hand may come just yet, I tell myself, there is still time. It may rain just yet.

And what of the evenings with the winds blowing about? I reckon it’s the city growing impatient; it’s the collective, unfulfilled need to leave this state of languor. It’s not just the people; the Earth grows tired too. And yet, the rain does not fall. You believe it will rain as the dry leaves taxi over the gusts of wind and move about the city, as the birds struggle to maintain air and are forced to find shelter in balconies where children chase after them, pushing them back into the windy terrain, as people rush home as if the world is ending. And then, as everyone prepares for the sky to shower on us all, the clouds give way to the blues again, and blues they are; it is summer still.

It is not the absence of recess or a moment of peace that kills us; it is the hope that it may yet come, that it is on its way, that the rain may be here soon, that the love will be here soon, that is what slowly takes the life out of people, piece by piece, like shards of rock being mined from a tunnel. The tunnel does not know it is being stripped off the very reason they visit it. It was too dark for too long, thank you for coming. Yes, take all you want. It is alright; I am only glad you’re here. Then, one day, no guests arrive, and the tunnel is left darker still. The rocks that used to shine are not there anymore.

So, what must we do? We must learn to be; celebrate the mugginess, the aloneness, the darkness. To live was to live with what we were given and hope without clinging to it. It is the desperate clinging to hope that swindles everything out of everything.

I woke up at about quarter to eight with nothing but a memory of who I was up until the previous night. It was a calm I had not known yet. I wanted to wrap myself in it like we wrap a blanket around ourselves when we’re too comfortable in sleep, lost in the surreal happiness of not having to live just yet. It was nine soon; it was still early. I got out of bed, stretched a little, and made coffee. There is freedom in changing who we are, and while sometimes change is gradual and a slow burn, there is nothing like shocking yourself into a new person.

In many ways, it was like taking a freezing shower on a chilly day. There is a shiver when we step under it, and for that reason, we are scared. What if I catch a cold? We ask. Perhaps, not explicitly, no, but there is an indiscernible blur of worry in the way we stand near it. When we are in it, when we finally take a step forward, and the cold water hits our body and trickles over us, our body responds in kind by heating up instantly. Then, there is no reason to get out. Then, until it is time to get out, there is little else we want but to stand under the cold spray. Often, this is how you have to change things: in a shock, as everything else quickly adapted to make way for it. There is little else you want to do then but be the person you sprung into life with a seemingly impulsive decision.

With the nutty aroma of the coffee wafting about in the apartment, and some escaping it like a furtive thief as I opened the balcony door to let some fresh air in, I sat down to write. I stared at the blank screen with all my energy, energy I had never felt before. The cursor blinked as if to challenge me, and I yawned, half out of sleep, half out of an unflappable self-assurance. I wished I could share the peace I felt so strongly in my heart with all of them. It began to spread around everything like fog spreads over a hilly landscape, slowly filling into the crevices and the troughs, like the most exquisite scarf to ever have been worn.

The golden age had just begun, I thought. I was exactly where I was supposed to be; I was who I was supposed to be. And what was more, I had never felt happiness quite like this before.

One day, there will be gold. There will be happiness, and the sun will throw its affectionate, golden strokes on all of us. I’ve thought of this sentence every day since I wrote it, of how I had written it almost instantly, a split-second, as I sat to write the other day. I still don’t know what to follow it with—this is how the muses work. Unlike what most people might know or think, there is no divine intervention. If you sit by the window to write when you wake up, the muses show up, and they softly whisper into your ear, but that’s all. It’s an idea, an inkling, a feeling on most days. If you’re lucky, and if they like you, it’s a complete sentence. I was lucky that day; I was the chosen one.

What after the idea? You get to work. You get to the slog. And like how a rope must continue pulling buckets of water out of a well, over and over again, until it breaks, you must pull everything out, repeatedly, until you die. There is no other way to do this, and if someone told you there was, they lied to you. Ask any of the greats; they will tell you how it is all about sitting with the thought, and writing, and thinking, and writing, and doing it in such a way that each time you write about it, there is something new. Writing is more like mining than it is like painting—you keep digging. You dig when you’re talking to others; you dig when you’re walking; and when you’re working some job to pay for your bills and get the bathroom light fixed.

It happens rarely, but there are instances when you strike gold, when the Earth sounds different as you hit it, and you know. You know in your heart this is it. This is the sentence I’ve been searching for; I’ve dug for days in the hope of finding it. There it is; I’ve struck gold. Then, the summer sun starts to shift towards the evening, and a blade of light falls on your foot near the window. And suddenly, you understand. One day, there will be gold. There will be happiness, and the sun will throw its affectionate, golden strokes on all of us. There it is; I see it now.

People often asked you if you knew the meaning of life, why we were here, and why we did what we did. They did this as they casually pointed towards the sky, the sun drowning in the hues of red and orange, thousands of shades splattered over the sky like some abstract painting fit for only the grandest of museums. They did this as they told you how it reminded them of their mother, of how they should call her soon. And you continued to sit there, listening, not knowing how to tell them they were the answer to the very questions they posed. All that we asked the universe was in us. We were here because we loved; we did what we did because we could; most people wanted to do good.

But we did not know how to go about it, so we asked: tell me, why am I here? Nobody questions this unless they know they possess a capacity to do something—to do good—but can’t find out how. People too sure of their goodness seldom did good. They never had a reason to try. In moments of crisis, it is someone who has a million doubts and questions in their soul who comes around, who steps up, who finds a way to make things better. The others are too sure they are good people; they don’t bother stopping. They don’t bother walking up and saying: I think I can help.

I only wish I could help someone see this, but I, too, have doubts within myself. I think of myself as a good person on most days, but I, too, have made mistakes. And if someone told me I was good, I would not believe them. And in this dilemma, I live my life. I sit and watch the sunset alone. I ask myself, why am I here, and why did I do what I do? Then, the sky reminds me to let it go, look at the colour and forget the rest. I sit there, sipping coffee in silence.

I was much more used to these silences than I was used to the sound of other people’s reassurance. Perhaps, that is why I craved it. Yes, that was it. I loved other people, but I loved them at an arm’s length. There was an invisible circle, a boundary around me; everyone could see it. I was careful, perhaps, too careful. I’ve always thought leaving no mark is better than leaving a scar behind.

I would much rather be forgotten instead.

It is a privilege to go through the same town, to watch it change and evolve, like a friend changes, whose dreams change with them and who slowly settles into a calmer version of who they used to be. I think of this as I drive around with my friends around town, recalling how cafes, bars, and even small joints for street food, were all gone or changed or replaced, and if nothing else, renamed. The passage of time was my only comrade, and it was also my only adversary. All people felt some things stronger, more vividly than other people did.

Time passes; there are no years when we look back, only hours—hours, or at best, days. The gap, the empty space, is what we talk about when we say we lost time. You remember how there used to be a cafe where there is now a bank, and a cafe where there used to be a bank, or that the two brothers who ran a food joint split over a feud, or how the place you used to frequent, the one with a story on every table had now shifted to another location—with new tables, and with them, the hope of new stories. To find a semblance of constancy in this untameable flow of what we call time was a blessing. I think of this as we arrive at one of the few places that have not changed as much. That is to say, some tables are the same, and you can still see the sunset from there on a good day as you have your coffee.

I could always feel the passing of time like one feels their breath—tick, tick. Once we become conscious of our breathing, it only gets harder to breathe for a little bit; once we become aware of time, it becomes harder to let it pass without trying to do it correctly. And just like there is no correct way to breathe, there is no right way to let time pass. There is a reason we call it passing. It moves on its own, and for a little bit, we go with it, and then it leaves us behind. As morbid as this thought sounds, there is freedom in it. Perhaps, I would have been a different person if I was not so attuned to noticing this laminar flow of time.

Just then, I am interrupted. What are you thinking about? They ask me. Nothing, just time, I chuckle. This interruption, too, was a privilege.

The trick was to keep your eyes peeled. There was always work, and there was always something to fix. The trick was to look around anyway. It was much harder to do this than put it in some words. There was always the tedium of the everyday. There was always some overdue bill to pay. But we had to keep our eyes peeled for the serendipity of the little wonders around us. A tiny flower sprouting somewhere, a ladybug landing on your hand, little birds flying about in what only seems to be a game of tag. This is what we had to be on the lookout for; this was all the rest we needed. It is tempting to leave life to live on a faraway island. It is enticing to completely change who we are as if, magically, as we change, so will the affairs of the world. Many have left their old selves behind to have their new selves conjure up tedium of their own; they keep leaving themselves behind when they only had to stay.

If you stay in one place as one person long enough, you start to see the many gifts that life offers. You see, for example, a capacity in you to handle the greatest of burdens. It does not appear instantly. But you see it build over time. There was, perhaps, no solution to live but to live. Everything else changes. The tide rises, and people manage to swim. The earth breaks, and people know to jump. The gales blow, and people learn to fly. The tenacity of the human soul was something nature not only understood but rewarded. But no one does it alone. As iron clad as the human soul was, we needed the others. People continuing to live together was the only way people could live, and people continuing to live was the only constant in the world. All that is to say, as long as the planet rotates about its axis, there will be people who live, and they will live together. In that, too, there was beauty.

It was marvellous how we go about our business on this planet, hand in hand. It was glorious, the way, even little by little, things change for the better. But the trick for all of that was to keep our eyes peeled. There will always be things to fix; there was always work to do; we might as well look at the sun while we’re at it.

We might as well let it kiss us softly.

In light of the airy but busy day, I walked up to the balcony to take a breath. There I watched a few birds play—the sky was their playground. Something about their size, excitement and the overall gambol told me they had just learned to fly. The day passed as most busy days passed; I did not know when it ended. By the evening, I had nothing to do except make a decision. So, I pondered over it as I sipped coffee in the evening. After the day had ended, when I descended into my palace of one, I stood on the balcony again under the blanket of the night. The sky was barely the playground I had seen last I saw it. It was quiet for the most part; the honking broke the pause now and then. All of us needed to breathe after making a decision, no matter how fortunate or otherwise the result. We needed to stop for a while when a decision was made. A pause, perhaps. I remembered the birds and their playfulness. It had rubbed off on me. All will be fine, and if not, there was always another decision to make. As long as we could decide what we wanted to do, as long as we could brave indecisiveness, all would be fine.

They often talk about metamorphosis and becoming a chrysalis, of turning into a beautiful butterfly, but no one talks about how the caterpillar must first turn into a gooey liquid of its remains. They never tell you how inside the pupa, as it slowly transforms into a butterfly, it still knows who it is and who it was, and perhaps, who it will be eventually. Why would it go through all the trouble if there was at least not an expectation? They talk about the butterfly breaking out of the soft shell made when it was still a wriggly worm, but they don’t tell you about the most important thing of all: despite dissolving into nothingness, the butterfly remembers. It remembers when it was but a caterpillar, and perhaps, it also remembers when it was suspended between life and death and how it kept waiting after all.

They never talk about it, and the butterfly never mentions it. It was an untold secret since the beginning of time: all beautiful things were created by choice; it was always a decision; all decisions came at a cost. Often, the cost was remembering.

June reminds me of nothing but a summer many years ago, one that I almost always forget, and one that manages to creep up on me, catching me off-guard. As much as I want to talk about you, there are some things all writers must cease writing about, and as well as I can articulate the little I remember of the love I felt for you, I do not know if I can do justice to what I’ve written previously, about June, about the sea, about you and about me. Some stories are better left unwritten, after all. And if it is impossible to resist the urge, they are better left written partially, like an unfinished draft. Some stories are left better off without an ending. This, too, has been a lesson.

When you write about and in love, you write from a place of absolute happiness or pain; I feel neither. I feel a gross indifference towards the person you are, and for better or worse, this is how it has to be; I believe it is the same for you, but what things are for you is not my concern. Spring brought with it a lot of joy, and also, calm. There is a large bundle of papers in my mind, wrapped and tied; old, torn pages with corners blunted by time. It’s a list of all things I’ve learned to let be in the world. Very carefully, I’ve added your name.

Your name does not cause havoc in my heart anymore. While June will come as June always does, and while I cannot much forget the years that have made me who I am, I have found grace in these steps forward—yours and mine. It is an unfortunate state of affairs they could not have been in the same direction. It makes me glad there have been steps, that we have, in our own way, walked away from the promenade in June all those years ago. I often thought a part of me was always stuck there, running and searching for you frantically, trapped forever in the forest of people and umbrellas.

Then, it rained the other day—early summer rain—and it occurred to me how all of me was here as the sounds grew louder and louder, and the city appeared as if submerged for a second. It occurred to me that I came home from the promenade a long time ago. We only reach some places so we can learn to walk away from them. This, too, has been a lesson.

I often wonder what will become of my life when all I get to say is said, and all I’ve yet to see is seen. When you write, you do not know what will become of the words until you are at the last word. Then, almost magically, you know. This is it—you tell yourself—this is where it ends. This is all I could have done about it. Perhaps, it is the same way with life. The only difference is that you are not here to see what it becomes in the end. You cannot give it a quick glance and check for misspellings or places it seems a bit abstruse. You cannot fix the punctuation. All pauses are there to stay forever, and if someone remembers a comma being in the wrong place, that is what remains until the last time your story is told. Then, it is all forgotten for good.

Of course, it is such a trivial thought; it does not affect how I will live or what I will do with my life. I will do what I feel is best at the moment, and then, all that happens will happen as it does; the stories will be told like they are eventually told, and there is not a single thing I can do about this but that does not mean I don’t think about it. On most days, it is the only thing on my mind: what will I leave behind? Who will they remember? I have so many people within me; I do not know who my appointed champion is, the person I want others to remember; I believe I have not yet met everyone I am supposed to be. I wonder who I will be when I leave. Legacy is a problematic word to think about, let alone think about leaving.

I did not even know I enjoyed looking at trees as much until recently. It is a little change, of course, but it has been my experience that the tiniest changes make the largest impact. Perhaps, that is how I shall think about my legacy, if not forever, then at least for today. Perhaps, when I slowly approach the last word, when I am done with this life, I will revel in this insignificance and laugh: I had so much to say about so little; I wrote a lot of words.

Some people thrive on order. Some thrive on chaos. I thrive on a suspension between the two—an ordered chaos. It is a capacity to enjoy the sheer humanity I have in me. To be human was to be as constant as a mountain and be as mercurial as the sky, both at the same time, simultaneously. I do not fight my order; I do not despise my chaos. They are in me in equal amounts, overflowing in their own way. When carrying two mugs filled to the brim, we often spill one or the other, I spilt order sometimes, and on other occasions, I spilt chaos. This duality in me was always more complicated than being one or the other. I envied people who could pick a word and use it to describe themselves forever. Something in me did not let me make a home in labels. I don’t know what it was, but it had, on most days, made my life much larger and, on some days, much, much worse.

I was like the clouds which have teased the city for the past few weeks. Days spent in overcast skies did not amount to any rain. Then, it rained on a sunny day—the sky changed from a bright, yellowish overlay to a stolid, pale blue in a split second, commanding the breeze to change into howling winds in a snap. They often joke about how you could not forecast the weather in the valley. I believe this philosophy, this weather had rubbed off on me growing up. Like this town, I could not tell you who I would be today, only what I could be, what I thrived on. On one end was my liking for everything in the right place and my desire to know everything before it happened. On the other was a unique propensity to grow and keep my wits about myself on stormy days.

I was always on the tightrope, carefully balancing myself as I walked from one end to another and then back again. I had been scared of falling for many years, and my steps were shaky. I now know how that cannot happen. I know this delicate balance, this propensity to keep walking on the rope over and over was to me what the rock was to Sisyphus. Now, there is nothing but my walk to nowhere.

And when I needed kindness, the world was awfully kind to me. I would get more work, people would read my writing, strangers would be oddly helpful, almost as if some memo were sent out: careful, his heart will break soon. And it did. It always did. I wish I would’ve gotten the memo first. Yesterday, I was at the coffee shop. I ordered my coffee. Beside the cup, on the saucer, came a doughnut hole. They do not serve them with coffee; I wonder what’s special about today? I questioned silently. Then, the memo occurred to me. For a second, I became sad. I was not used to it. Even the smallest acts of kindness scared me. What do they know? What do they know that they won’t tell me?

Perhaps, this was the damage that many told me about. We must fight the damage. It was not enough to be kind. We had to let it happen to us until it felt like it was how the world worked—even if it did not, especially if it did not. To be kind was a decision; to accept kindness was a rebellion. We had to take up arms against the damage. We had to pull it out like a weed in the garden. We must go out into the rapids of every day, and learn to tame the waves, learn to come out on top, and even if we go under, we must remember there is no other joy as delightful as being washed over by goodness—to believe that it exists without a reason to do so. Most good things in the world exist this way. Most people are kind in this way.

There is hope yet for this world if when someone offers in earnest to make you coffee, instead of creating a mess, a raucous ruckus of “there’s no need”, and “you don’t have to”, and “no, no, I just had coffee”, you say, “yes, thank you so, I could use a cup if I’m being honest. I am glad I am in here with you; I am so glad we know each other. Isn’t the weather just lovely today? It’s so cold. I would not want to be anywhere else today. Thank you for letting me in.”

The secret to saving the world was accepting a cup of coffee without retaliation. Most rebellions happened this way—in silent agreements. “I love that you are in my life.” “Thank you, I feel the same way. I am glad I was here when you were here, too.”

If we can do this, there is hope yet for everything.

I woke up today. There was little time to begin the day, but I took it regardless. I set the kettle to boil water. I took a spoonful of coffee grounds, put them into the portafilter, stamped them, twisted it back in, and waited until the machine laughed and made all possible sounds. I laughed in turn, and then a stream of golden nectar started to drop into the cup. I poured some hot water over it to cut the espresso, and I sat on my chair. It occurred to me: it had rained last night. I knew because I had been up past midnight, working, and heard a commotion. I thought it couldn’t be anything else in this town at this hour; it must be the rain. Outside, the storm raged, and the petrichor wafted around like a profuse scent, like those we often smell in a bakery right when we enter it. I left the door open with a curtain pulled over it and slept to the sound of the patter and thunder. With this memory of the rain sparking my curiosity about what it managed to do last night, I got off my chair. I went to the balcony with its moist grass, barefoot. My first step was enough—the grass felt like a paddy field, which woke me up in ways my coffee could never have.

I walked over the grass carpet like some guest invited to open an event. I watched the world around, how it had washed anew. The sky was clear enough to see the most faraway hills, now visible like the back of my hand. The lychee and mango trees spread all around the neighbourhood. June was almost here; the fruits of spring arrived right on time. A couple of bulbuls flew close to me and landed on the adjacent balcony. One of them looked at me to wish me good morning and went back into the air. Then, a flock of parakeets flew over the sky as if commuting to work together. I would not know what they do, but they seemed in a hurry. It was Monday, after all. Perhaps, I was the only one who had time to stand on the balcony sipping coffee; even the birds had places to be. While I thought about the day ahead, I knew how the worst that could happen would be a few things left undone. There was nothing to worry about, as long as there was tomorrow. As long as I stole these pockets of time, there would always be tomorrow.

And on some mornings, I woke up in thought. I do not have it in me to grieve the loss of a thousand promises. I do not know how to go about it. I shall go back to sleep. And that is what I did. When I woke up again, it was alright. I would get out of bed and brew myself a cup of coffee. The grieving was not pushed to some later date or under the pile of dirty laundry and other banal but essential things a man must do to live. This is how some of us grieved—we kept going forward; we got out of bed and made coffee. Many a friend would tell me I best deal with things head-on, that I must continually talk about them. All of that was in good intention, naturally, but it did not occur to them to ask: where is all your pain? And if they had asked, I would tell them: it is right here on my skin, and in my eyes, and in my cups of coffee, can’t you see it? I take long walks with my grief to nowhere in particular; I stop to rest at a bench under a tree decorated with bunches of freshly sprouted lychee; I forget the grief on the bench like we often forget a book with all its annotations or a handkerchief with an ancient, permanent spot of blood on it.

Little by little, I do this, and slowly but steadily, I find my footing again. I must keep walking to find it. I pulled the blanket over my face for a few more hours, if needed, but when I was in the world, I was of the world, in all my faculties. I was coming of age when a lesson was inadvertently hammered into my mind by myself: time goes forward regardless. I have never been able to change it. I have known for years this is how it will be until I die. I have always accepted my time is limited. Strictly for that reason, I could not allow myself to live my life in the name of things that have happened. I was not a shrine to days past. I was the celebration of the ever-glorious now. I must find it in me to laugh, not as a facade, but as a genuine celebration of time. I must carry the ashes of how I thought things to be, spread them here, there, and everywhere I go. To grieve was to honour the death of who we would have become had things gone differently. To heal was to become something regardless.

Lack of ambition was impractical; no one could want nothing at all. It was not a virtue to reject this, as popular philosophy would have you believe. Wanting things is what drove the human life, and when I say human, I don’t mean some ascetic existence, but an utterly human one, the life we see when we go outside and look around. To live without the dirt of the average human day, the grit and gravel of our meaningless existence, was to deny ourselves the very experience of being human.

Abstinence from wanting was a great concept, but it was a concept. To take it to heart was a way to stagnate. To be human was to slowly kill ourselves in trying to get what we wanted. This did not guarantee we would get it, only that we would eventually die. This was how it was supposed to be; there is no sadness in this realisation; there is only peace. Most animals die running and panting and eating; humans die wanting.

Every want and dream comes at a cost, and all dreams are priced the highest in the aisles in the supermarket of time. This is because there is a premium on it all. Sometimes, we pay it freely and of our own volition. Other times, which is more often than not, life takes it from us by force. Life always takes higher than what is written on the little tag when we first pick a dream up and turn it around, looking at what it is made of and what it can do for us. To dream was to be ready to give something up.

This made it difficult to dream and, perhaps, infinitely easier to not want something. The hermits, the recluses, have not figured some great truth out; they’ve only taken the easiest option out of many. The dreamers are the ones who have found the meaning of life. To dream and to fail was to be human. Everything we see around ourselves was once a dream; even language, even these words, were a dream to convey clearly, to want to save those you can from imminent danger, to warn them.

As meaningless as life was, it was in dreaming—about love, art, money or a cup of coffee—where happiness existed. There was only the pursuit; to be human was to keep chasing until we ran out of time or parts of ourselves to trade. To live was to dream life away.

Gravity works well and at all times, but a child has to test it by jumping off a tree and breaking an arm or two. I was never that child. I was one of the safe ones—the scared ones. But I did my share of testing for all things told to me. Even in our fear, most of us were brave. There were many ways to be brave. Some played and climbed and jumped off trees; some stood up for other people despite the cost they had to pay; some gave their hearts away without an afterthought about the consequences. They told me people were unreliable. Scared as I was, I trusted people anyway—more than most could fathom. The jury’s still out on it. I’m waiting to prove them wrong. There’s a sort of bravery in jumping off a tree, knowing too well you will fall down. It is still brave to want to fly. It is brave to check things you are told to be true.

There is bravery in going forward with all your dreams stuffed into a tiny box with a misspelt label, taped, tucked under the table or in an attic. There is courage in packing them up in the first place. All people will do this at some point: they will find an old box, the cardboard breaking off the sides a little, and dump their dreams into it. No, not because it is not in them to achieve those dreams, but because they understand how you cannot always get what you want, that it is no reason to lament or struggle over, but a part of this thing we called life. It was a noble pursuit, even a heroic pursuit, to chase after your dreams, but it was gracious to understand when to stop chasing.

As brave as wanting to fly is, at some point, we must realise when our body is too bent, too broken, and there is only enough healing our legs can manage. There is happiness in cutting those old plasters down, in throwing them away so we can walk forward for once. There is only so much we can verify for ourselves; we should sometimes take the world at its word, pack our questions into boxes, and keep them somewhere, forgetting them altogether.

I grew up in a house with many boxes stacked over one another, the cardboard towers touching the sky blue ceiling. I wondered for years what was in them. I stopped when I noticed we still laughed.

Last night, I stood on my balcony under the moonlight. I started thinking of the lowest point on it. Naturally, to someone who has not lived my life, it would be all but a single plane. But there is a topography to all things in life. There are mountains and valleys in homes. There are oceans in coffee shops. They are mapped in our memory. They help us remember. This balcony, I thought, was a lake spread through time. Towards the corner that faces the hills is the lowest point; I recalled how I sank there a while ago. I stood beside my silhouette, beside where I had stood that day. I told him it was okay, that he was only learning to swim. There was always the fear of drowning. It doesn’t mean we’ll not try.

And as is with moments when you’re standing by yourself, drinking wine, I was transported back to a distant memory, the moment I could have changed everything. There are moments like that—sometimes seconds—that we know were formative to the people we are today, crucial to the lives we lead. They seem like the tiniest slivers of time, but you know in your heart: this moment, I will remember this, and you do. I remember it clear as day. All I had to do was get off my chair. A few seconds, that was all I needed. We have a habit of asking for time, but a few seconds is usually all we need. That’s all we ask for, and that’s all we’re denied.

And then, I thought of my life today and how, for better or worse, I refuse to trade everything within it anymore. There was a time I would have given everything away for some seconds. Now, I was deeply, madly in love with my days, with the life I lead. And so, this correction brought me back to the balcony, and the topography faded. There was nothing but the envelope of the night sky and the echo of leftover life—bats, some birds, the intermittent honking. In that moment, I thought of change, of how it is encompassing and whole; to want a different life was to lose everything first. Few could make the trade; the others learned to live regardless, with their victories and failures alike, one day at a time.

I was among the others. There is no other place I would rather be, I thought and went inside.

I did not want to wake up yet, but then it began raining outside. I felt in me a sudden happiness. The same happiness I find in myself when I look at flowers now, or perhaps, trees and even a wedge of sunlight in the room. And so I got up and out of bed, made some coffee, and walked over the cold comfort of the moist grass for a good ten minutes. The past has a terrible way of masking the little joys of life. It isn’t until we’re all here in the present, feet on the grass as it rains outside, no matter how wet the grass is or how slippery, that we realise what we have missed. It is impossible to be happy, though, if we don’t get out of bed. We have to permit ourselves to smile. So what if some things did not go per plan? It is only life. The scaffolding around our dreams is never as steady as we’d want it to be—it does not mean we stop building; it only means something is being built.

They are building a library in town. At least, from what I could see and read. I do not much know about these affairs of the world. They often use the wrong words for things. It isn’t until when something is built that you see the error. They often use love when they only mean fondness, for example, and empires, kingdoms have collapsed because of these errors—what is a life in comparison? There have always been more Lancelots than there have been Arthurs. Only that there are fewer stories. As I catch the lamentation catching up with me, I look at the hills ahead. The morning shower has drawn a sheet over the valley—a gradient of colour, the details of which I will never remember as accurately as I want to—but it makes me happy to wake up to this sight. It makes me happy to wake up at all.

It was imperative to live in this way—to have within ourselves a light that always pointed toward the flowers, the sun, the rain, and the little joys this life had to offer! The murmuration of unbuilt dreams and libraries often caught up with us. It is important to remind ourselves the day has just begun, that there is work to do still. After all, there are libraries to build and dreams to fulfil.

It is funny how a song sounds different at night compared to the morning. It makes me think if I’m even the same person when the day changes. We change a little after every night as we begin anew into every morning that comes after. If the day does not have enough pull on who we are, dreams get the job done. For me, dreams were a repetition of my general days. It had always been this way. I was perpetually living two of the same life. I did the same work I was engaged in, lived in the same place, the same town, with the same people. Of course, there were slight, dreamlike variations, but the general feeling was the same. I had my theories for this. Mostly, it was just my obsession with doing things right. A day was rarely enough. I had to live them twice, at least. I have always dreamt of my own life—it was an irritating affliction.

Yesterday, I sat on the patio, and I read my Pessoa, which seems to be finally showing signs of a book that becomes your friend. There are cuts on the pages, the corners bent out of shape, the pages are yellow, and there are spots here and there. As I read, the wind blew about from all directions, the grass swayed in perfect choreography, the discarded leaves and petals circled and formed twisters that amounted to nothing, and the trees shook violently as if performing some shamanic dance. It was a moment of pure, natural passion. I kept reading as the coffee got cold and dusty. Then, I spent the rest of the day with some discomfort here and there. No day could be perfect—most days found a way to give you some sort of pain.

In any case, in my dream yesterday, I wrapped my work up to go out and read on the patio. It was stormy still, and I still read for an hour or two.

At night, after working at a stretch in lieu of sleep, I watched the full moon in all its glory. Sleeplessness was a noble excuse to get things done. Then, I hit the bed. I saw the full moon again in my dream and hit the bed again, turning the music out—I had been listening to the same song for hours. When I woke up a few hours later, the song was still playing.

I shook the feeling off, made some coffee, and sat writing the first draft of the day.