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The next time I fall in love, I shall do some things differently. That is, given there is love to jump into in the first place. It had come to my notice how little the chances were and how it was a matter of random luck. Love was not clay; we could not mould it through a nudge, a push now and then. Love was like water; it flowed when it wanted to, in the way it wished to, and when it had to leave, it tore through rocks; your walls to keep it in did not stand a chance. Your walls to keep it out did not stand a chance either. So, I have now left my wall halfway. It was a fool’s errand to even build it. But I have kept the little I managed to make before this little epiphany—not as a blockade, but a reminder. The next time I fall in love, I will let it flow. I will give it way to arrive, and I will give it way to leave.

The next time I fall in love, however, I will be tired. I will be cautious, and I know this ahead of time. It was good to know or at least have an inkling about how we may act in a situation before it arrives. But I will not plan. You could not plan around love. It was the one thing I could take away from my escapades with it. I could not make a to-do list of things to do, no calendar was good enough, and truth be told, that was the better part as I’m learning now. As much as we know when the sun usually sets, it is the unexpected glimpse of one that we remember. Love was like the sunset in that regard. You caught a glimpse of it. You sat across from them, perhaps as they stared across at the view or as they sat in the same room, doing nothing in particular. We only remembered the glimpses.

Most importantly, the next time I fall in love, I will not tiptoe around it. I will be bold. If there is imminent destruction in sight, I will look them in the eye. Go on, destroy me, I’ll say. There’s not much left anyway. I don’t see how I will make out of this alive, and I am too tired to run. Fire at will; I surrender. I surrendered long before I met you.

There has been a mellowing lately. I have noticed more. For the longest time, joy had eluded me, but I have learned to catch a peek now. There was a strictness I had put over myself for years. I am slowly letting myself be, yet as all things are good in moderation, I’m not letting this lightness engulf me. I found myself singing a song the other day; as tuneless as my voice was, I found everyone must sing along with a song or two now and then. It was not enough to only listen to music. We had to participate.

I believe it was last week when I sat to read outside. The sky was in its golden prime at about five in the evening when the tree in the adjacent complex caught my eye. It was a particular group of leaves dancing to the breeze. The colours caught my eye, and I realised how each leaf was slightly different from the other, even when they belonged to the same bunch: golden, brown, green; there were a plethora of different shades between them, too. I kept looking at it for a while, away from the urgent pleasure of reading, from all my thoughts. It is how I remember that day now.

I indulge a little now, too. My abstinence against certain foods is now weaker. I let myself enjoy the occasional dessert. The other day I had the most fantastic slice of cheesecake at a place I had thought I would never go back to. In many ways, there has been a complete reversal of how I carry myself with some things. Wanting to get into bed in time, I now have fewer cups of coffee, which has been all the better, for it has brought back that kick, the taste I had absolutely forgotten. All leftover work waits on the desk until tomorrow. Although, I stay up to play a few rounds of chess now and then, losing most of them in the daze of exhaustion. I do not intend to win anymore.

I don’t know what to feel about all this—I believe I have now found the balance I was searching for under every rock, in every place, nook or cranny. I found it within myself. There is a discipline to do things, there is gaiety in most things, and I am suspended in between. The other day at dinner, I nonchalantly told my mother how I was happy lately. I do not remember saying this to her ever before.

All of us have our little crusades. Ideas we believed in so strongly, we could fight over them. Some end up burning the world down for them. Most only lose some sleep. I was among the latter. All I could do was lose sleep. I was never one to fight. Perhaps, the way I lived my life was my way of fighting: my complete disregard for the opinion of others, even though the words managed to gnaw into my conscience. There was no bravery in blatantly ignoring what others had to say. It was the childish way of living our own truth. The truth was we lived, breathed and spent our days with other people. The trick was to let everything get under your skin and then get used to it being there. If we could live how we wished to with a thousand critics screaming inside our very heads, we could brave anything the world had to throw at us. It was in finding the music amidst the noise. There was always music in the noise.

What was I fighting for? I often forget. There was a lot at stake. I had never been one to conform. Lately, I have been waging war against the idea of more. But I did not march around with a banner and a strong argument against the collective pursuit of it. On most days, I was fighting for a kinder, softer world. The truth is, I did not know how to fight. I was an artist; I knew how to exhibit. My life was an example of beliefs, a museum of ideas. The peculiarity of this method was not lost on me: it often took years for your arguments to take hold, for your way to be understood, but you could not ask someone to be kind, you could not teach a child to be soft; you had to be kind first, and you had to be soft yourself. It was the classic literary advice: to show, not tell. It was how I lived my life and how I waged my wars.

The way I carried myself was the strongest argument I could put forth, and so that was what I did. It occurred to me early on how not everyone rallies to your cause. It’s often only a few people who walk up to you. I learned to take the few and live in the image of how I wanted the world to be. When no one joined in, which was often, I learned to go alone, go all the way. It was the only way I knew how to fight—by myself—and sometimes, I won.

When I woke up today, the apartment had a sepia tint to it. In the confusion of not having fully stepped out of my sleep, I thought of myself in a film, as if I had been transported into how I remember some moments—golden and warm. A second later, I realised the sun was shining outside; even at ten in the morning, balmy air wafted around me. It occurred to me I had left the balcony door open behind the curtain last night. It was the source of my amber daydream. I conducted this pointless investigation curled up in my bed, with my eyes still closed. Worrying about why something is the way it is was a sure-shot way to wake yourself up. It was the only way I knew how to wake up; all I thought about was why things were the way they were.

I always found it interesting how the first few moments after we arose dictated the step of our days. I was well aware that a moment should not hold our days hostage, but all that was talk for people who lived with avoidance. That is not to say it was not good advice. It was the most important thing to know about better days—the direction of our days could change from any point. We did not have to wait for a fresh start if some event ruffles us up at quarter past three in the afternoon. We could wait a minute, take a deep breath and get a hold of our day the minute we wanted to. But I was not too scared of feeling what I felt; I had an outlet in these words.

I was talking to someone I had met for the very first time the other day. We spoke of levity and being okay with embarrassing yourself, enjoying ridiculous humour and spending our days with a sort of lightness about them. Then, it occurred to me how these words make me sound more serious than my usual disposition, which is in all senses of the word, klutzy. It was all the others without a place to dump what they thought, who carried their days with a seriousness beyond my imagination and planned their lives for decades to come, worrying about every little thing. My worries were under metaphors and imagery. I wouldn’t know what I would do without them.

Where would it all go? How would I carry it all? What would I do with it?

I worry I would eat myself alive.

Nothing good was ever easy. The expression is much older than I am. I did not have the patience or desire to look up its origins. Not that words can be attributed to any one person. Everyone has thought of everything there is to think. Some forget what they think of, most ignore it, few record it. I was among the few. Yet, it does not make these words mine. Everyone before me has thought of these same things—over and over again. It is disheartening when you think of an idea—it appears before your eyes in a flash of inspiration—and you find how someone has said it before. Does it make it any less your own? Was any of it yours to begin with? Ideas belonged to no one and everyone at the same time.

It was also about how we perceived ideas. No amount of inspiration ever gave someone an ounce of patience to sit with their thoughts. Patience was cultivated, quite like the garden most people try to grow at some point in their yard before realising it is easier to get vegetables at the store, hanging up the tools in their shed. Few find the patience to deal with the failure and persist. Once the garden burgeons, the entire family enjoys vegetables with little to no effort for years to come. A person who thinks of a clever concept on a bus ride to a bustling workplace often forgets the novel thought amidst the papers, graphs, and meetings. I had lost a plethora of ideas this way—even when I had noted them down.

Nothing good was ever easy, but people thought easy and simple were the same. Often, when we lack the patience to truly understand what words meant, which is a quality in dearth in my time, we assigned more meaning than intended. When they read the words, they often read them as: nothing good was ever simple. It was the most common error. It was an error with radical ramifications to how their attempt towards anything good panned out. Everything good was ever so simple. Missing this distinction, we often spent our lives in a convoluted mess of misunderstanding, complicated events that scarred us over and over in the same places, as we continually, almost obsessively chanted: nothing good was ever easy.

Most love was lost this way; most lives, too.

As happy as I was with my new life, I did understand the troubles brewing softly under the carpets of cosy comfort. Like how we often notice someone looking at us, even if we can’t see them directly, I sensed a peeking, too. I could not be too sure what the future entailed, but I knew it wouldn’t be just sunlit skies and shining days. All of us are bound to run into the shadows now and then. It’s how we make sense of the light. As I sat on my desk that night with these thoughts, I stared at the blank, digital page. I alternated between looking at the off-white wall, reflecting the lamp’s yellow, and the screen. In an instant, I could feel it: the fear all artists had felt before.

The sureshot doubt, the certain uncertainty, the question without an answer: what is it all for? Like a soft whisper, a hand on my shoulder, the warning crept up to me: this was going to be a long and lonely road. It was a faint echo in my mind, almost as if it came from someplace else, some unfamiliar corner I had never visited. Completely engulfed, practically lost in that moment, I was truly alone—without friends, without family, without anyone; me, sitting with my palms on a keyboard, stuck in time. For a second or two, I could see through the years. They had all gone ahead, in different directions. I was still there, facing the page. It was the first time I understood the toll. I understood I may have a very lonely life in more than one way.

It was the only time I ever found myself in the presence of the greats, those I looked up to, those who came before, and something in me told me I had it. I had what they had. If nothing else, I was stubborn. I had the nerve to think I belonged with them. I had the tenacity to try and the drive to stick to it. And I had so much, oh, so much to say. All that was left was to write it down, one word at a time.

I left the city at the tail-end of winter and came back at the onset of warm, comfortable spring. It made me think about how much changes in about a couple of weeks. Yet, when we wanted change, we rarely noticed any for years. What is that point of inflexion, I wonder? When do things warp into another? How is change so invisible, so elusive, and yet so present? They say the only constant is change—show it to me, then! Point me to it when it starts to happen. I want to observe it as it unfolds; I was tired of being a witness to the before and the after. I could only beg, but it would be a pointless exercise. Change happened when you weren’t looking. When did I become so happy, so blithe about all things? Was it yesterday, or was it a month ago? I could not know.

Why don’t I feel the weight anymore? I’ve thought a lot about where I forgot it, and I have no answer. Life was a lot like seasons in that regard. We could not know the precise date when a season shifts. The meteorologists, the scientists, the calendars have a lot to say about this, of course, but it did not matter what date spring began on; spring began when you showered on a slow Saturday afternoon, and as you picked out your clothes for the day, you decided you did not need that extra pullover. Perhaps, only a shirt will do just fine. Spring came in the ballpark of the same time for all of us—at least those in the same hemisphere—but when it truly arrived was up to the person experiencing it. It was the same way with happiness; it was the same way with love. You could not put a time stamp on experience.

What do I do once the pain is over? What of my countless notes about it? I wonder if my sentences, the ones yet to find a place in these passages, are now worthless. Then, it occurs to me how seasons change, how they always return. So, I bind all of them in a neat folder. Perhaps, I will revisit them in some time. Naturally, I could not say when it might be, but I hope with all my heart it is not soon. After all, spring has just begun.

In life, the only constant is the feeling of regret over the handful of mistakes we make; when it came to mistakes, even one was enough. We mull over the very events that shaped us into those who did better, or at least, tried to. I noticed in most people an urge to do better. It wasn’t in all of us, and I had my encounter with all manner of miscreants, but it was present. Just how I could not live a day without meeting a terrible person, I rarely spent any days without coming across a noble one. The memory I chose to go to sleep with dictated what I had to say about the world. And for that, all I could tell anyone was: the world was a gentle place if you gave it a chance, and if it ever feels like it isn’t, it’s calling upon you, passing the baton into your hands. It tells you: it’s your turn today.

If my penchant for walking has taught me anything, it’s that you meet a lot of people on the streets; the more of them you meet, the more you learn how almost all of us are trying to only get through the day. There are days I obsessively think of, moments that haunt me, times I failed to act at the right time or in the right manner, losing the most crucial thing we could possibly lose: people. We could not know our last second with someone. It was important then that we spent it as best as we could, even in times when reconciliation is impossible. To let someone go softly was the only thing I had not learned yet. Not that I have found an opportunity to try since I last held on too tightly.

If it comes to what I hope for, I hope I don’t have to let go at all. I was terribly fond of people, especially all I loved and will love eventually. I hope when the time comes, when I find myself at the crossroads of holding onto someone and letting them go, I hope with all my heart, I make the right choice. The memory of an unseemly farewell was seldom forgotten; all you could do was write about it.

My silence was a private affair. It was too important, too intimate. I could share words with everyone; I was always full of words, saying more than necessary on all occasions. I would not dare share my silence with anyone. It belonged only to me. To sit with someone without saying a word was the greatest declaration of my love. I sat by myself on most days—happily. With people, I was loud, obnoxious, opinionated. With myself, I was calm, quiet, restful. I preferred the latter, but it was not to say the former was pretence or a lie. We all had parts we wanted to show others and parts we wanted to keep to ourselves.

That is not to say there was anything to hide. There is rarely anything to hide about silence. It wasn’t a question of introversion or a label of any kind either. I did not believe in labels. The moment you labelled yourself, you became permanent, unchanging, stuck in your ways. It was a question of accepting the fluidity of being a human being, of having different sides to oneself. Everyone has more than one person within themselves—only a few of them admit it, and rarely any of them lives according to all the kinds of people they are. It was a difficult balance to maintain, but it was worthwhile.

These words came out of my silence—the things I did not say, even when I was with other people. I could not write a word if I said everything out loud. Where did this habit come from, I wonder, and which came first, the words or the silence? I could only ponder over it but couldn’t answer clearly. The only thing that mattered in this confession was how I have now come to terms with these pockets where I don’t want to say a word to anyone, of only being able to maintain small talk to get a cup of coffee, of dreading no one I know walks into the café.

And if push comes to shove, to talk at length, to laugh and to tell all stories I could without contempt, softly telling my preference for silence to wait for me by my desk. To tell it: I will be there soon, and when I’m there, I won’t utter a single word.

Maybe the cost of moving forward was to spend time and live both in the past and the future simultaneously. This was as true for people as it was for countries and societies. I think of this strand of thought, unravelling it as I wait for my train on a dilapidated platform in a crowded railway station with trains that belong in a museum standing on one side and those which came right out of a factory on the other. People seldom realise this contrast framed right before their eyes. Perhaps, because they have places to be. We never stop to look around when we’re rushing towards something. Running towards something, however, did not guarantee moving forward. For that, we had to be okay with what came before and the possibility of what could happen next. To move forward was to be present in every sense of the word. You had to be in the moment, not lost but aware.

As much as I tried to continually move forward, it was easier said than done. It was a fruitless attempt. You had to be present to protect your state of mind from the pull of the past and the desire of the future. I was always in a state of present aloofness. I was there, but I was almost always somewhere else, too. Often, I was at the desk writing still. That is not to say I did not know how to move forward. For all my words about the past, I did not quite care about it. For all my imagination, I barely thought about what could happen next. All that had happened, had happened. There was nothing I could do about it. All that could happen, would happen regardless of how much I wanted things to stay the same. We could not halt the flow of time without consequence.

I think of this for a little while. Inspired by this sudden epiphany, this newfound clarity that visits me now and then, I look around, forgetting I have a train to board for a second. I look at the surroundings, the tracks running long till as far as I can see. I look at all the people. I see myself in all of them—so many different journeys, all heading in the hope of happiness. Just then, an announcement for my train’s arrival echoes through the speakers.

Like all times before, I lose the perspective; I have a train to catch, I tell myself.

All writing in all forms is a question: do you feel this, too? All writing is a dance. It’s all a coordinated movement between the writer and the reader. There has to be a dash of entertainment in it to make it worth the reader’s time, but it is really all about the question. And of course, the more familiar an emotion, the more people engage with the words describing it. All writing in all forms is a plea: I hope I’m not the only one.

There were different kinds of writers. Some needed a novelty of experience. They were probably the good ones who could channel new thoughts, fresh ideas, visions for the future, and most importantly, ask new questions. Some were dreamers. They created fantastical worlds, their only question being: do you want to run away, too? To escape was their strongest desire, and to help others do the same, was the highest reward. Then, there were those like me; we did not have anything new to offer. We were champions of the everyday, the commonplace, the mundane. We wrote about what interested us—nothing interested me.

There was only a mild intrigue about everything coursing through our veins. We asked questions, sure, but not those which changed the world. We only had questions to make sense of the tedium. Our first question was often: is this all there is to it? And before anyone could answer, we immediately followed it up with a remark: we must learn to live with it. Our novelty was spread between the cracks of the daily drudgery, and our escapism only offered us a moment of respite. When all was said and done, we were as unnoticeable as those lost in crowds.

We were all asking the same question: do you feel alone, too?

They tell me a lot of things. They tell me how I had wings in my shoes, that I was a quitter, as if it was the right thing to stay put when every cell in your body tells you to leave. They said I left things and places faster than most people, as if that was somehow a problem. To me, it was a simple decision, and I made decisions quickly. It suffocated me—sitting in places I did not want to sit in, living a life I did not want to live anymore. It killed me slowly. Perhaps, it killed all of us, and I was the only one willing to admit it. I was the only one with the winged shoes, after all. At least, I could try to run. It was better than being stuck in one place all my life.

They tell me I fall in love quickly, as if it were a flaw, as if I was the one who did not understand what it was about. To me, loving someone was a simple decision, and I made decisions quickly. I did not have it in me to wait around for inspiration or dire circumstances; once I knew what I had to do and all I needed to know, I jumped. It was the only way I knew how to live. It was the only way to fall in love—by immediate choice. The error was in waiting too long, being too slow. Most love was lost in waiting. People had a tendency to wait around for everything, even answers.

They tell me I was too particular, as if there was any other way to live besides knowing what we wanted, or trying to act like we did anyway. Surety, even in pretence, was the only way to kill doubt. You could not become more certain by acting unsure. It was a fallacy. It was also a trick. To be more sure about something, you had to risk being wrong. And me, I was the most uncertain of all people I had ever met. I had to be sure: about my favourite breakfast, about the music I enjoyed, about who I loved, about what I wanted, about everything. It was the only way to check if I was wrong. How else would you know?

They tell me a lot of things. Often, I have nothing to tell them in return, as if my explanation would change a single thing about what they had to say and as if their acceptance would make a difference in how I carried myself every day. We were doomed to live how we lived, for better or worse.

What would I do without you? I often thought of this when I looked at you or when I brought a bagful of what weighed on my mind to you. It was the only thing on my mind when I asked you for assistance on one of the many wars being waged inside my head—my mind has always been a tattered battlefield. You were the cavalry. Then one day, you did not arrive. They say the cavalry was always late, so I continued for a while, knowing all too well I only had to hold my ground. Then, it hit me like a bullet in the back—there was no cavalry. At least, not anymore.

And somehow, I dragged myself out of the no man’s land into the trenches I had dug on my own. Nothing left in me, barely breathing, holding out for hope: the cavalry may yet arrive. Lost in the daze of exhaustion, I dozed off, losing count of the days. I opened my eyes and saw nothing still. Alone, I crawled through the trenches until I found myself away from it all. I climbed out of the pit and into the forest. Struggling to walk in the labyrinth of my blurry thoughts, of my befuddling state of mind, of the maze of confusion, I somehow managed.

Time passed, and the wars in my head had all but ended. The end was all closing in, and I sat by myself. At least, that’s what they thought. I spent time alone, but the ghost of expectation was with me. The memory of being left behind was the undertone of all I did. I sat alone with it, and we talked over and over about the same things. The question still weighed on my mind: what would I do without you? And then, slowly, I found an answer. Perhaps, it wasn’t even the correct answer, but I had come this far, and there was more to life now than the memory of you.

What would I do without you? I would go on for as long as I could. For most things, that much was enough.

The sense of doom has never left our side for once. It was the simplest observation, especially if you read a little bit of what went about in the world before you stepped in it. The further back you go into the pages of history books, the more you notice how the collective feeling is always of fear, of questions—uncountable questions. It is never the right time or age. It is always a little off. The world will never be the paradise promised; it was always paradise lost. It often took knowledge of impending catastrophe for someone to realise how good life was, despite their handful of qualms with it. They often remark how they will live better if given a chance now, for the lack of a better word. Why does it play that way? I don’t know the answer, for I’m no different. I, too, tend to look at life from the same lens—a lens of not enough.

But, I am learning now. Perhaps, I may disagree with this later—when the memory of my personal hell and the state of the world is blurred—but today, there is only one thing I believe I should be doing: wasting time. When I say wasting, I don’t mean to let time be of no use, but better use. The more I have thought about it these past few months, the more I know what I want to do. I only wish to loiter about and sleep in the sun without a care in the world. It was the better use of time. There is a freedom when nothing weighs on your mind. Take the rain, for example. Earlier, when the sky turned a pale blue, raising the softest alarm known to us, it imparted a hurry in me. I must finish whatever I am doing. The thought dictated my days. Now, when it begins to rain, all I think about is how I will get an hour or so when no one will demand much from me. The showers make doing anything impossible, even when you’re safe inside your home. At least, it is a believable excuse.

The more I look back at my short life, the more I notice how I’ve missed out on so much. To be happy, you must be present. I don’t intend to be oblivious anymore. I will find a way. There is still time. For now, I only want to make the most of the day ahead, and when I say make the most, I mean laughing enough to make sure I remember it.

At the zero word mark, there is nothing but sound. The clock ticks in another room, equal intervals, naturally. It tells your right ear time is passing, and you say nothing for you know. There’s more; the vehicles outside, the honking, the one guy who uses it to craft a tune as he cruises through the street; the sound of the wheels and the engines—some roaring, some soft, all of them in unison.

At fifty or so words, there’s more still. Some construction in the neighbourhood, the repetitive striking of a hammer, starting with equally spaced knocks but going faster as whatever is being driven into whatever takes its place. A nail, perhaps, you wonder. What else could it be? Then, another series of knocks speeding up with the enthusiasm of a child banging a toy on the floor.

It’s about two hundred words now, or so you think, and the washing machine in the washout right beside where you’re sitting is playing a song of its own: the motor whirring at its own pace, the symphony of a mechanical twirl as clothes spin inside it serving as a first-rate lyric of a song you aren’t quite enjoying but don’t mind. Then, the sound of the keys on your keyboard as you write further, thinking about nothing much but how to deafen the noise. Then, you stop to take a sip of the coffee which is probably colder than it was already when you began writing—slurp! You set the mug down on the bed, a muffled thump.

Just then, someone talks too loudly on the road, or the building beside you, maybe. Why are they so loud? You listen in on the conversation, half out of annoyance, half interest; finding nothing of significance, you get back to the words. You tread on, a car is unlocked. Inching towards the end of it now, you hear a leaky tap! You cannot quite place it; it could be in the washout, masked so far by the machine, now in its drying cycle. A vendor on the street passes by—his voice growing louder with his approach.

Almost done, you hear your breath now, soft but audible—the inhalation, the exhalation. As you reach the end of this unique sensory experience, a crescendo! And then, nothing. All noise fades; there is no sound now.

There’s only silence. You can now start the day.

Now I don’t know much about how to make money. I know enough to know I can make my share, but from a long time ago, ever since I remember, really, I have not cared about these games people play. I would rather lay in the grass and read a book. It is not that I do not want to care about building a career or having a series of calculated steps that make my time and life appear spotless on paper; I cannot care. It is not in me, and the more I accept this, the happier I become. The greatest injustice we could do to ourselves was to live a life that wasn’t our own.

The world runs on money—my beginnings have taught me as much. It did not have to drive my life—this, I had learned much more recently. I was not naive, but I was now more open to the idea of living life the way I wanted to. There was no aversion for money in me. In fact, I very much wanted enough of it, but a plethora was out of the question—I would not know what to do with it. The most important thing I could offer the world was my soul; therefore, giving it was impossible. The next most important thing I could offer was my time, and that I wanted to spend on things that inspired me, instead of becoming a pencil pusher, following instructions verbatim, creating instructions for others which they followed to the line.

Sure, I could do this and get a life where I would not have to worry about much, but I know I will worry still. I will worry I am not writing enough, or thinking enough, or even sleeping enough. There was always going to be worry. It was about the kind of worrying we were okay with inviting into our lives. If I had to work on something—which I have to anyway since coffee grows expensive by the day—I was better off making smaller bets that saved me time and did not once ask for my soul.

When I think of all this, I remember a normal day: me, sitting in a seminar hall, reading Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, not a care about the jargon on the screen ahead. I should have known then what I know now. All of that is a means to an end. Words to me are an end in themselves. A good sentence is where I start and where I end. All in between is nothing but padding—context for my life to exist.

There is a mirror. There’s nothing remarkable about it. As far as mirrors go, it is terrible at its job, for it has a spot where the reflection blows up like it would in a funhouse mirror. But this mirror is in my brother’s house now. It’s the same mirror from the room where I grew up. To see it in another place knocks me out every single time. It is such a simple act—to move something somewhere else, but to me, it is one of the truly fantastic things about how we lived our lives.

There was magic still in our identical, industry produced goods, regardless of how prosaic they seemed. For millennia, the story of humanity has been intertwined with the making and using of things. They were here; lives were lived, and this object, this little thing, was a part of it all. It may not be its most glorious part, nor the most vital one, but it made this life real. Pots and pans tell us about those who came before long after they can tell their tales themselves. Love is often stored, not in people’s hearts, but in broken necklaces kept safe in a pouch. It is often stored in a little ceramic planter—a reminder of a single day in a life teeming with days. We could not remember everything, and to recall what we forgot, we had things.

A home was a beautiful place, not because some interior decorator made it so, but because it had contributions from others. It was a collaboration, an orchestra of memories. A book a friend left at your place and never came to take back. A pen that did not belong to you, but you can’t quite place how it landed in your drawer. Chairs and tables stored laughter like a time capsule. When taken care of, things lasted more than we could ever hope to do.

There is a mug. There’s nothing remarkable about it. As far as mugs go, it is terrible at its job. Wrapped in cracks, it is not safe to use anymore. It knows more about me than most people could ever hope to do. Perhaps, it is cracking now, for it can’t hold anymore. It reminds me of simpler times—when love was easy, when all we talked of was art, when the bills were infrequent, and the struggles, fewer.

I have forgotten much about them; only the mug remains. It still tells me to keep writing.

I was tone-deaf to the sound of certainty. I could not know it even if I had it in my hands—not that I have ever had it in my hands. There is not an atom in me that is certain. Perhaps this is why I have searched for it all my life—in places, vocations, and love. My finding has been to no avail, but I have learned something else about it. I have learned to revel in the lack of it. To embracing being lost, to moving without knowing, to doing despite the odds is what it means to be human. It is the simplest truth there is, and it is the only truth there ever will be. To be human was to be uncertain. There was freedom in not knowing. It was the only thing I was sure of now.

I have not known who I am for a single second. All my words have been attempts to reach some conclusion for this inquiry, but I have been grasping at straws, and I have nothing to show for my search. All I have managed to understand is that there exists in me—in everyone—an immense ability to start again, to redefine ourselves at the slightest hint, at the smallest wish, at the softest urge. Before we knew it, we were people vastly different from who we thought of ourselves to be. Perhaps, that is what I was supposed to be—an example. Even if that were only for the ten or twelve people who were privy to the events of my life.

And what of life? Life is cunning. It’s like a little fox who you notice peeking at you from between the woods. As you look away to call a friend or take a camera out to treasure this moment of pure happenstance, the elusive fox runs away. When you look back, everything is changed. There’s no fox, only its footsteps. They remind you of how it was there once, that you did not imagine things. Before you know it, life changes, and there was not much you could do to change this—only accept that there may be something else soon where there was a fox once. That even the footsteps are gone eventually, forgotten, trampled by a deer who walks over them or washed away in the rain. You could only look at the clearing from between the forest, but you could not know.

It is the only lesson I have learned so far—that I don’t know a goddamn thing, that it is meant to be this way.

March was here, but in my head, I still wandered about the streets in winter. Some part of me was permanently frozen in Octobers and Decembers long gone. I often wondered why it was that way; it did not sit right with me, this inane calling towards colder days. There was something about walking on a chilly evening that pleasant days could not compete against. We all had our own affinities, and I always felt at home in the auburn leaves leftover from autumn, in the cold, drab air, in the craving for warmth. Perhaps, that was it; that was the answer. No matter how much warmth I received, I was hungry for more. This winter inside me was maybe a longing if nothing else.

And yet, when warmer days arrived, this craving would not go away. Some of us have felt so terribly cold at some point, nothing was warm enough. Maybe, that is all I wanted to tell myself until I found a warmth I could call my own. There was a warmth in briskly walking by yourself on a wintry evening. Maybe, this romantic attachment in me—of walking by myself, of nodding hello to strangers sitting around a fire, of the last cup of coffee from the café pulling its shutters down, the last song I hear emanating from within it—maybe all of it was a proxy for the warmth I knew I deserved. Perhaps, it was all my way of waiting.

But then, I often forgot about this obsession with warmer Octobers, if any could exist. I forgot the time, the month, the year; I even forgot who I was and what I was waiting for. Often, I found warmth in familiar faces, around a hearty dinner, in conversation, in the love I knew was all around if only I stopped walking away from it. It was in those tiny pockets of time that I realised the only truth there was: we only felt the warmth we allowed ourselves to feel. One might still shiver on the onset of spring, and one could still be content around a table in the middle of December.

As I had this epiphany, I realised it was almost the second day of March. Winter was slowly fading into the shadow of a colourful spring; I felt my obsession fade away, too. If there was a moment to seize, it was this one right in front of me. And if there was warmth, it was here, here and only here.

It has always baffled me how in films when they want to show a passing of time or a phase in someone’s life, there is often a pattern—five or six activities. They will either quickly get better or worse at them in the spirit of time. Of course, it depended on the context in which direction they swayed. There will be a B-roll in between, showing some scenery or clouds. Then, we met the new times, the new person, almost within a couple of minutes. By saying this, I don’t intend to insult any filmmakers. It takes immense effort to condense life honestly into a few minutes, to show without telling as they say. But, I want to point out how we tend to think our lives will work similarly.

In real life, things work differently. We often forget it when we walk out the theatre, ecstatic, inspired, enchanted with what life has to offer. In life, when you start working for something, it isn’t a montage of two minutes; you live the months, or if you’re unlucky, like most are: decades. I disagree with the adage: life passes in the blink of an eye. Life passes slowly; it burns. It’s memory that is fickle. Like a good system of keeping records, memory can roll things up and make them feel smaller, merely because the days were unchanged, but the days were there! You lived the days. It was difficult, and sometimes, impossible, but memory does not recall it. Memory recalls how you were a child two seconds ago, and now, you worry about honouring your bills or trying hard to be the child again. All adulthood was a path back to what we did as children.

The emotional transition in films is often stirring, but I believe we often forget how slowly emotions change, how life vacillates between grief and joy and drudgery, and how they return. Oh, how they return. I still miss my dog four years after he left us. I miss the sound of his paws on the floor. The echo returns like all echoes should. I don’t grieve him now, but sometimes, the missing is different. I feel what I felt when he left us. It is how life works; we must recognise it. We have to live all the days over and over before things change remotely. To live life is to go through the days slowly; to remember it is to forget them.