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If I could, in some magical event, talk to myself from a few years ago, I would like to tell him some things.

I hope you don’t get what you want in life. I hope your dreams are broken and shattered into nothingness before you even have a chance to try. I’d tell him it was better than having them in reach, in approach, in the palm of your hand, barely; it was better than watching them slip through the gaps in your fingers. Dreams once broken cannot be dreamt again without being reminded of the shrapnel lodged in the heart.

Given how I remember myself, he would not take too kindly to it. Perhaps, he would be offended. An argument about how we made our own luck would ensue, and he would be right, of course. We are rarely wrong, just out of touch, out of flow with time. When speaking, we could not know which of our words would come back to us, in what form, or way. Life has a peculiar way to show all of us are eventually wrong.

I hope you learn to forgive yourself. When I say this, he would probably ask me what for, and I would tell him you’ll know when the time comes, but when it comes, I hope you don’t take as long as I did. I hope you make time for everything. When I say this, he would tell me how he always makes time for everyone. Knowing his response beforehand, I would let out a chuckle and a sigh and ask him to make some for himself, too.

I hope you learn to watch the sunlit, auburn leaves fluttering in the wind. I hope you learn to savour it. I hope you find the time to sit down and read—not to find new insight, but to enjoy it, to enjoy words.

I hope you laugh a little more, and I hope you don’t forget you are still early. There is more, so much more, so much left to see, to feel. Stay away from ledges, I would tell him, both real and those in your head. Walk carefully, I would tell him, especially toward oncoming traffic in a city you’ve still not been to yet. I hope when the time comes, you find your footing.

I’m sure he will tell me he knows all this, that I should leave if I have nothing more to say, that he can’t waste more time. I would laugh. Lastly, I would tell him, I hope you learn patience…

…but life will teach it to you anyway.

An insurance agent called me yesterday. I told her I had no need for insurance for now, that my needs were covered. She insisted I listen to her pitch. I said, alright, let’s hear it. She told me how they have insurance for all sorts of things—even domestic accidents. She started listing the domestic mishaps we only read in the papers: a gas line broke, a heater burst and someone fell down the stairs. The last one made me smile.

I wanted to interrupt her by telling her: but ma’am, I have fallen down the stairs all my life, do you have something for falling in love instead? But it would be untoward; I told her I was not interested still, thanked her and hung up. By then, the little joke had taken all the available space in my head. All I could think about was falling. I’ve never quite had the balance. Someone I once gave my heart to said this lack of balance would be my undoing—in every sense of it. All my attempts at finding it have been in vain.

I’ve fallen down all my life. I’ve fallen down the stairs enough times to know to not run as fast, and yet, I skip steps because I’m always late. I learned to ride a bicycle when I was ten. Most kids, by then, could ride without their hands on the handle. Being late is all I know. As much as I value time, I was always a minute or a year too late. Tardiness was both something I detested and built right into my bones. I’m always running because I’m always late, and in the panic, I fall. It was the only thing I knew to do.

But the other day, when you walked up to me over the patio, before you said a single word, I made my mind against falling. When I looked at you, I wanted to find a surety in my step. I wanted to walk with patience, no rush in my bones, no fear dictating my feet. I did not want to fall for you. I did not want to fall anymore. I wanted to walk with my head held high for as far as we could go.

Without saying a word, in every step I took, I wanted to tell you I’m here; I can keep myself up. I will stumble; it was in my nature to stumble, but for you, I will try not to. You made me want to grab the balance that has eluded me for so long. I wanted to choose to walk with you.

Goodness had little to do with the inherent qualities in someone. Goodness was about knowing in your heart what anyone in the world, especially you, is capable of, and then choosing to be good, to do good, every day. It was not virtue but practice, and you failed more often than you succeeded. Every person was capable of hurting another, capable of indifference, capable of tyranny. It was what made us human, after all. It baffled me how malleable our souls were, how changeable, and how naive each person was, including myself.

Goodness was beyond thoughts and words, of course. It was action. With the exception of children. For children were always good—even in their words. Until they grew up and they learned to choose how to act. The very appearance of agency was the loss of innocence. When they could choose what they wanted to be, people seldom chose good. It was why the world had, throughout history, been caught in a terrible state of affairs. The first realisation anyone had while coming of age was how all of us were terribly selfish.

Goodness was not being selfless. We couldn’t be selfless. Goodness was a measure of how easily we could think of someone else before we did anything. Some people quickly thought of others. They spent most of their lives in the service of other people. Some did not think of others at all. They spent their entire lives in a bubble of their own, in a public isolation, of sorts.

What about me? Like with all things, I was in between the two. Unlike both sides of it, and like most people in the world, I was going to spend my life constantly worried over things I could do nothing about, events I could not change, and people I could not help. It was a fate decided long ago. It was a battle I could never win. Perhaps, all I wanted was to be a child again. Wanting to be good was to be in a state of perpetual helplessness. All I could do was try.

Perhaps, on most occasions, trying was enough.

When was the last time I felt love? It was a difficult question to answer. The correct answer is, of course, this morning when I woke up and realised how anyone can have a heavy day or two. The less selfish answer was last night when I had dinner with family. Another response was when a friend listened to me talk about things troubling me over food and drinks. The further I go back in recent memory, the more I would stumble upon love, love, love. Yet, if you ask me about the last time I felt it, I would not think about it. If I did, I would know it was a second ago when a kid waved to me from the window right across from mine. However, since I would not think about it, I would only tell you it has been long. Often, our stories were marked by the days gone, the absences, the love lost. People lived in the daze of memory.

If you were observant enough, you would find a score of people looking wistfully at a table in a cafe. It was not an uncommon sight for someone to play with the band on their fingers, eyes fixated on nothing but the floor. The urge to change a song that came on suddenly was not uncommon, or pausing to buy a chocolate bar before you left the grocery store through nothing but muscle memory, a remnant of what used to be ordinary days. Tea preferences were often a shrine to someone we knew once. When being served coffee, they would tell you, just one sugar, please, recalling someone saying the exact same thing over and over again. The echo of the request dictating their days. Our mannerisms were rarely our own. Love—the loss of it—was hidden in the every day.

And why do things differently? I wonder. I carry every person I have loved in every living day of my life. More of me comes from them than I can keep track of. It was going to be the way it was, whether I liked it or not. Other people have a tendency to leave little bits of themselves in your life, like an insurance policy, as if they were saying: I don’t intend on leaving, but if at some point I have to, do remember me, and I will remember you, too. I hold nothing but love for everyone I have loved before. If anything went any differently, I would not be sitting here writing these words.

I got into a cab, said Hello, and the general small talk ensued between the driver and me. As we passed one of the fancier blocks of the neighbourhood, all with the lavish restaurants and cafés, he said how everything is corrupted now, that a logo was no indication of quality, that none of these neon-lit signs holds its ground. I understood where he came from, but I asked which of those places he had tried—out of curiosity. He narrated his experience, of the bland food, of the overcharging, of the terrible service, of all the fluff of modernity plaguing our towns.

I had never been to the restaurant in question. And I did not believe in having a strong opinion about something I had not experienced, either directly or through proxy. So, I told him what I thought. I told him how I thought food was at first sustenance, but it was a somewhat subjective experience beyond the basics. Even beyond food, good to him and good to me would be two different experiences. He never told me what he thought of this, but we did not talk for the rest of the ride until the very tail-end; it was a silent disagreement.

It was the oldest sin—to think our experience was the same as anyone else’s. It was the basic tenet of life. As much as we saw the same apple, we could never quite agree on it being the same red. We had our words, of course. Good, delicious, calming, relaxing, joyful, saddening, boring, love and whatnot. These were only labels. The experience could not match the words; they all fell short at all times. The words I write could not tell you how something feels. I could try to give you an accurate picture, but a writer either settled for plain descriptions or verbose exaggeration. There was rarely an in-between.

All we had with us were our words, and words fell flat. When all words were said and done, most lives were a great case of rapid, unending, unforgiving miscommunication. Humour me: what did you see before someone told you the complex, elongated tapestry of brown and green was indeed called a tree?

No matter what I picked, I always chose poorly. It was in my very nature to make the wrong choice because as much control as I exercised over myself, I was someone who thought from the heart. My decisions did not come from a procedure or some deep analysis. I acted on a whim. It was all gut, all feeling. It never has been thought. It never can be thought. Despite my logical pragmatism, regardless of how much philosophy I read, deep down, I was a terribly emotional man. Those who thought practically had no need to befriend Kant, Camus or Sartre. We craved what we lacked.

All my life has been an exercise in patience, and yet, it has been marked—no, scarred—by moments when I lost my cool. I remember being foolhardy, rebellious even. I remember saying too much, saying more than was necessary. It’s hilarious because those are days I can count on my fingers. I won’t even need to use two hands. I don’t remember the days I kept my wits about my head, when the voice of reason—of tact—told me to stay down. Perhaps, all my life has been a practice in patience because I am a terribly impatient man. It was in my very steps. You could notice it if you watched me on a general day.

All love I’ve lost has been because my ego was too large, too hungry. My obsession with extending a hand came not from some altruism or even nature—it came from regret. It came from not extending a hand when it mattered the most. It came from the haunting that needed no nightmares. I did not need to wake up to it. I was reminded of the times I was too selfish every minute of every waking hour. I extend my hand not to help, but from a need to absolve myself of the guilt emerging from the few times I can’t wash off my conscience. As helpful as I was, deep down, I was a terribly selfish man. There is not one sentence I have ever written that was not about myself.

As righteous as I seemed on the surface, I was a deeply flawed man. I knew three languages, to varying degrees—five on paper. And yet, when it boiled down to the brass tacks, I was only fluent in apologising.

Anyone could get used to sadness; to get used to humour was the harder thing. It was also the more necessary thing. The more hurt I found under my skin, the more convinced I became that humour and only humour was going to save me. Some people were more brittle than others. They were also more risible than others. It was a complex word to say they had a low standard for laughter. I came from a long line of idiots—connected not by blood but by being able to laugh at the smallest things.

As morbid as my words were, those who knew me well knew I had a terrible knack for making ill-timed jokes or how humour managed to find my life on its own. Perhaps, it was necessary to balance the ease with which I wandered in the depths of my mind. My brand of humour was peculiar. I found pleasure in ridiculous puns, everyday absurdities, harmless mannerisms. No story I shared with someone on a table was without a joke. If there was a living personification for the word klutz, it was me. I found it challenging to walk without falling, and I gave toddlers a run for their money in spilling things over myself.

Humans were essentially funny creatures, constantly threatened by the environment—made worse by the urban obstacles we faced daily. Laughter was easy to find. A jacket stuck in the door handle as you whiplashed back into a room you were trying to leave. Stepping on a puddle of water knowingly, and slipping. There was inherent clumsiness in us—even the smarter ones, especially the smarter ones.

Take the other day, for example. I walked, lost in the daze of some old memory. Just then, a dog looked at me from the other end of the street. We locked eyes. He was a stray, considerably large for someone who had to fend for food. In about a split second, he decided to give me a chase for my life. So, like any reasonable person, I ran. I was his special prey amidst about a dozen others. He chased me for a good hundred metres. When I stopped, I laughed for the hell of it. A man laughed at me too.

That evening, I learned how a dog chasing after you was yet another solution for escaping melancholy. Perhaps, not the most ideal one, but like any well-timed joke, it got the job done.

The world wanted you to be wise, but it wanted you to be wise on its terms—not a year too early, not a decade too late. To be as wise as your peers, no more, no less. To move along, to move together, no matter the cost, no matter what’s lost. This was a terrible realisation. I had always been out of synch. I never learned how to dance—my steps have always been missteps. I have unknowingly stepped on toes all my life. I did not intend on it, but some of us cannot walk too well in crowds, no matter how careful we are—and I was naturally fastidious.

I was impulsive. My decisions did not make sense to me until they played out in ways I could not fathom or predict, lest I expect they make sense to others. I carried out my days with an unwarranted sense of ownership ever since I was a child, reading in the school library by myself. In simpler words, I have, on all occasions, followed my heart. I do not recommend it to everyone. It tends to break more than it makes, but it makes for exciting days, and when you meet someone for the first time, you have a lot of stories to tell and many views to share.

The same effect is what most people grew tired of eventually because they could not match the novelty of experience, or rather, the aloofness and naïveté with which I carried my life. It was amusing to many at first, yet this grew into a host of different emotions at some point. I had been on the brunt of a wide gamut of criticism, argument, and even envy. It was not easy to stand on your own, as romantic as the idea seemed.

On most days, most people enjoyed the company of those most like themselves—in all senses of the word. I was no exception to this rule, but I had not come across someone who was so out of touch with time and reality as myself yet. I often joked about how I was good company in small doses. Truth be told, it wasn’t my own sentence. It was something someone said to me once as a casual remark.

By the time, I had become so used to this belonged aloneness, where I could stand with others and yet, have few count with me, that I found it fascinating. So, I stole it in respect of its accuracy. It has been the only way I’ve described myself since.

It baffles me how we see after the storm. The sheer clarity excites me—how we notice when the gales stop blowing, when the sun breaks, when the dust finally settles, and the rain turns to harmless pellets of water until it all finally stops. Then, almost compulsively, we look at the sky. Then, compulsively still, we tell another person the rain has stopped. It rarely plays out differently. Nobody asks, but something inside us urges us to tell them it is over. It has stopped raining, and we are safe again. When all is said and done, it is often said repeatedly to anyone you meet. I reckon it’s the most important thing to tell your fellow people—we are safe now.

As they often join you to look at the sky, you stand together in awe of what’s left after the blue-grey haze of the storm lifts. It was irrelevant how observant one was or how wise; no one saw clearly in a storm. As proud of our intelligence as we were, we were forgetful creatures. A few days of overcast skies, and we forgot how the sun felt. All we had was memory, but memory was tricky and rarely matched the real thing. The little, childlike peek through the curtain after days of torrential rains was how we recorded our blue skies. The colour surging with an odd sense of security could never match the general days. And so, we had to look again every time it stopped raining.

A few days of inclement weather made us grateful for a cup of coffee; an unintended walk on a rainy day made us understand the importance of our regular, dry clothing. It was only at the tip of imminent doom that we could recall how good it all was, and then, we wished if we could only get it once again. It happened over and over, almost as if a cycle of life. No one learned their way around it. We were forgetful creatures—we forgot both our blessings and our curses in the blink of an eye. While getting used to pain was possible, it was much easier to get used to happiness.

The sky was often the most forgotten thing in the world. No one could describe it to you in detail until it was lost, even if temporarily, and most storms were an act of tough love—trying to teach us a lesson we could never learn.

I often wonder how your days are or what you do on an idle weekend afternoon when the chores are done and the sun shines through your window. I wonder if you have the same white curtains which did not shy away from letting the yellow in. There’s a nursery on the path I often walk on. When I do, I smile about your hoarding of plants, imagining how many you must’ve bought by now. Last I remember, there were seven on your desk alone. I think about whether you still make those indulgent breakfast bowls with the oats, the caramelised apples, the cinnamon.

I wonder if you still have the dreams you had. I hope you’re fighting for them. Knowing you, you’re probably burning the midnight oil. I hope you’ve been resting too. I know your propensity to push yourself to the point of getting sick. We were always the same in that regard. As for me, my dreams have changed since we parted. I’m not very sure of what I want from life, not entirely. I do have an inkling now, though. I’m taking it from there—playing at being a writer lately. You always said I had it in me. Here’s me putting your claim to the test.

I wonder if you still sit near the sea by yourself. I wonder if you still cry looking at the sunset over the water. I hope you wipe the dust off your camera now and then. You always had a good eye for the beauty most people did not pay much attention to. The winter skies often make me think of you. When the sky turns pink in the evening, I can’t help but smile. I hope nothing much has changed on your side of the world. I hope you’re happy. I hope you still laugh.

It occurred to me the other day how my choosing you was always half the story, of how love is not about giving but also, being open to receiving. I hope you have it in you to do the latter when love arrives the next time around. As for me, I’m well on my way. I’ve had the warmest days lately, and if I were being bold, I think I may be happy. I’m always a bit unsure about it without you around, but I will have to get used to it.

I look forward to the day when your name will only be your name and not a quiet implosion. I think I’ll go and read in the sun now.

The desk feels awfully cold all of a sudden.

When you call people over for some games and dinner, amidst the merriment and laughter, an elbow often knocks a vase down. As it hits the ground and dissipates into bits of china over the floor, your heart sinks, and while you understand it was a mistake, your face has other ideas. It betrays your empathy. Your despair is apparent—the wrinkles of anger are chiselled on your forehead, your smile turns smaller, clearly indicating you’re maintaining the decorum. Your voice takes a pitch—an urgency. From that point on, everyone becomes careful. A double-checking of elbows ensues. People knew how to respond to loss. It was instinctual to look at it and understand. This was true for broken vases and hearts alike.

But when someone loses a dream, something they never had, no one sees it break, and therefore, no one understands. It was a lone loss, limited to thoughts. It was a grieving no one could help you with or tiptoe around. It was hard to grieve. It was much harder to grieve for a life you will never have. The outward appearance remained as spotless as the living room cleaned right before the night of games and dinner. When you lost a dream, your thoughts did not change. You still imagined the same possibilities you spent days dreaming of, but now, the thoughts brought dread. The knowledge of how the things you imagined would never happen haunted you. The dream died, and you could only mourn. No one else understood the gravity of the situation, for there was no shattering to see.

But dreams were not mere vases; they were houses: rooms of reverie, of possibility, beds and duvets of comfort, yards of freshly-cut grass and laughter, a patio flowing with warm conversation, and a little garden of hope; a little escape when the going got tough. Then, the house was haunted by what could be, the silence of something that never was, the garden that was never planted. Left behind in time, you stayed by yourself. No one knew why or for how long you’d stick around. Eventually, you burned the house down. Like all grieving, this one charted its own course. Like all grieving, this ended, too.

Then, one day, you dreamt again.

The other day while I was reading, a bee landed on the page. It stood around the corner. Then, it walked between the lines like we often walk around in the alleys, walkways and gardens built around some monument, appreciating them without an ounce of understanding of the why. We could never know for sure why someone did what they did. We only had a cheap explanation on a plaque now and then. Like we left the complex after an hour of feigning curiosity when instead we were bored out of our wits, the bee flew away as well. I continued reading. I had nothing better to do.

That was not entirely true. I had a lot of things to do, but the sun was warm. I did keep a check on my watch to see if I didn’t go overboard with this delinquency. This was not new to me. I have always sneaked to the library in school to read something. In high school, I often found myself in one of the labs because our teacher there listened to fantastic music to which he’d introduce me. My taste for all music is a gift from him imparted over two years. In college, I often sat in seminars with a book in my hand. The new trends in technology had no authority over the classics.

All we had, all we could grab from this world, were these little pockets of time. I was a furtive thief, quite like the neighbourhood cat. The one who belonged to no one but somehow survived. The one who called the neighbourhood its own and had a familiarity with everyone in it, but no one could tell you where it disappeared to when it did. No one could predict when it would appear next. The only difference between the cat and myself was that I had actual duties, like casting a vote, meeting someone for lunch, crunching numbers to earn some money. None of it was too interesting, but I carried it well to an extent.

This responsible delinquency kept my life interesting. I was always looking to steal a moment of my own. I often wondered why I acted this way. Like the bee lost in the labyrinth of sentences, I did not know how to make sense of it. Perhaps, reading would not be as fun if I only read for days without anyone asking me to go to the bank at the same hour.

All adult life was an act of quiet, harmless rebellion.

Perhaps, I was broken in some way. There was an almost unending capacity for forgiveness in me. It did not make sense to me. I look at my father sometimes. I look at his life, and I notice where I get this emotional altruism from. I see the consequences of it, here and there—and yet, I live a life guided by what I saw growing up. I look at my mother. I look at her immense capacity to go out of her way for others, and I see where I get my sense of responsibility from. I see how too much of it can take a toll on someone, now and then—and yet, I take the weight as if it were my own.

Combined with some of my own experiences, some lessons I learned through proxy, and some mistakes I made on my own, I had lost the ability to hold a grudge. It was a terrible affliction. Life was much easier for people who could hate easily and quickly. Those in their marble institutions and ivory towers could talk about kindness all day long; the average person got through their days by slicing connections on the slightest of misgivings. Why blame them? They were better off doing it this way than understanding.

Empathy was a privilege of people with enough time on their hands—to sit and ponder. Those trying to make a living, to save themselves, could not afford that kind of time. I often did not have the time myself, but in a series of events I could not even replicate myself, I had developed a distaste for walling people off. People who left a sour taste in my mouth could still ask for a favour, and on most days, I obliged. A friend or two often advised me how this was not a wise way to live. To their dismay, I did not learn a thing.

To be honest, I did not even understand on most days, and yes, I was no saint either—I was furious now and then. Still, I put my hand forward when asked for help. It was a taxing way to live. I could see how this capacity was misused by others, but I often reminded myself of history when I felt the need to change.

To me, humanity was a story of regular people forgiving each other, of lending an unwilling hand, over and over, even when it hurt, especially when it hurt, regardless of who gained or lost. History was checkpointed in treaties of peace.

There’s a palm tree about a kilometre away from the house I grew up in. It belongs to someone else—not that anyone owns trees. They just happen to find themselves within walls of someone’s property. Then, if they’re not chopped down for reasons beyond their comprehension, they continue growing there. They didn’t need to be taken care of often; they were capable of looking after themselves.

I often walk by this lone specimen. It stands by itself, proud and tall, almost as if it were challenging the sky behind it. I was too small to intervene. All I could do was walk by it and stare in awe at its reluctance to bow to anything, at its constancy, the permanence of this slender silhouette, unwavering. So, that is what I’ve done year after year.

When I find myself in the street it calls home, I look up at it like we looked at a friend who has always been around. Perhaps, not in the most active role, but their presence is what begets respect. In the same way one caught up with a friend, I reflect on my life when I walk by it. It does not take me long to say hello and leave—I am a fast walker. But, there is a camaraderie in the moment, a familiarity one would never understand by mere words.

The palm, standing tall still, has been a silent spectator of my life for long enough; I have reason to believe it might just recognise me as I recognise it too. I gave my heart and soul to someone on this precise street—in an event as simple as running into them. The phone call for my first job was answered on this street, in front of the very palm. This was where I fell in love with the rain again, learning to choose happiness.

In times of uncertainty, you needed a reminder to stand your ground. The tree is one of the few things in the neighbourhood which reminds me of myself through time. I walked by it again yesterday. I looked up out of habit, and it was there, as it always has been. I thought of the first time I had walked by it almost over a decade ago.

Not much had changed, and the little that had did not stand ground in front of its endless continuity.

While the minor differences are too many and too unimportant to count, I believe the one thing which separates me from what I remember myself as from a few years ago is the ability to be insignificant, to be unimportant, to be—in the most obvious sense of the word—happy. There was greatness in not intending to be great in the face of a world that runs on achievement. There was courage in the common person, in the nobodies, the people whose lives are rarely well-documented. Not all of us were conquerors, and those who conquered anything at all, did it arbitrarily, almost unintentionally.

It was easy to want some kind of worldly success but far difficult to exist without the subtext of elaborate dreams and impossible ambition. What was I on a random day without my pursuit for the picture-perfect life I could possibly never achieve? I reckon this understanding—or lack thereof—had prevented me from reaching this newfound levity earlier. The delay has only made me more shameless in embracing it. I am basking in the lighter days. I am not without ambition, of course. There are things I want from life. It is human to want. The trick is to not let it dictate your days. It is a dissonance, but it serves well to those like me—who held onto things too tightly.

I couldn’t be too sure about what changed or how I achieved this calm. But something did, and now I am happy, or at least, I have a sort of contentment I cannot put well into words. Words and language were a terrible proxy for our capacity to feel. The word smile pales in comparison to what you see when you see someone smiling, and if you’ll take my word for it, using the longer, more complex word for something is worse. In any case, I could not possibly tell you what I feel in my heart. I only know I have now given myself permission to exist, to breathe. I embrace the banality of life instead of making it larger than it has to be.

In a sentence, without wasting any more words, I’d say it only occurred to me for the first time a few months ago how I could not fail at creating a life that belonged only to me. I found relentless freedom tucked beneath that epiphany. It has not been the same since.

I believe life has an interesting way to start everyone out with a certain drive—a unique way to look at everything—only to have the world squash it before their eyes. This destruction was not immediate. It was how the leftover rain, falling drop by drop at an inconspicuous stone sitting by itself in the corner, managed to make a hole in it. It was a slow burn; one could rarely mark when it happened. A rock has barely any capacity to perceive the lengths of time, and even with their clocks and calendars, people were only a smidge better.

We did not realise how far we walked from ourselves until we cried, just like the rock broke apart and spilt the last drop, which struck the final blow. Crying was an event so rare in the adult life, at least in my experience, that I remember each breakdown. When I say rare, I don’t mean it wasn’t plenty. I have cried enough since I left home in the standard rite of passage. We pretend we’re different from the other animals as if we don’t act precisely the same way in most things. It was a staple characteristic of life on this planet—to leave the nest.

In any case, I remember each time I have cried since I was handed the reins of my life. I was meek for most of my childhood—too sensitive to most things. I often found myself overwhelmed. Yet, I barely remember all those times now. Of course, memory is fickle, and now that I have written these words down, they will ruffle some old strings, and I will find myself unexpectedly morbid by the evening. When I say I barely remember them, I only mean the moments are not available at my beck and call.

Perhaps, we should cry more often—for sadness, for happiness, for love—so we may not perceive it as something unusual but a regular, rote event no one pays heed to. That is all wishful thinking. For all I know, only in moments of unimaginable heartache did I find the strength to attempt to change things. No, to make them as they were before the world told me how they should be.

Perhaps, all those drops of rain do is tell the rock to move, over and over, and when they realise it cannot do so for it is stuck in its ways, they break it apart so it may become dust and move after all.

When I was a bit younger and a bit foolish than I am now, I used to think pain equalled greatness. With respect and reverence in my eyes, I looked up to the greats, for the more I read them, the more I found brokenness among all of them, connecting them through time. It was how I defined writing, too. It was the sharing of what ails us so others might feel at home, and in that slice of a moment, I too felt greater than I was; I felt greater than my words were.

Now, I see it for it is, and it is nothing but a habit. The greats did not write about the qualms and complaints of being human. They only wrote out of habit. It was the people who assigned them a role—the poster-children of all things that broke us. A note of optimism by any of them was left alone, considered branching from their usual, and forgotten as a lesser work. Perhaps, they were only asking people to stop with the clapping.

And so, I wish to never be great. I want to be commonplace, forgettable, and even dull. I hope you find nothing but a mild intrigue in my words, and occasionally, if they are good, I hope you’re entertained. No one remembered a poem that made them feel joy. Our narratives were always bookmarked by things that destroyed us. We thought of our lives in a stream of significant loss. It took substantial effort to think about the good, run of the mill days. It took less than a second to remember the pain.

The human capacity for suffering was astonishing. I would not fuel the fire. Naturally, life will break me. Out of habit, I may record a few words about it, and maybe they become all you remember from me, but I have to try. I must try to write more about the days when nothing ever happened—when I walked only to walk, when I drank only to have a drink, and when I was by myself not out of loneliness but happenstance.

Here’s to us—the commoners, the forgotten, the insignificant. Here’s to the people who lived and died for nothing in particular.

I wanted to write something profound. Simple, maybe, but profound. But here I was, sitting, waiting for the electrician to ring the bell only so he could help fix the water heater. It was all I could think of, and it did not bother me as much. People rarely talked about the simplest things—getting groceries, getting the heater fixed, and the dishes we washed every night. Yet, these were the things that our lives revolved around.

Sure, you could have all your dreams in the palm of your hand, a house so high no one can even look up at it without getting blinded by the sun. Yet, there is a good chance you would be waiting like me for the electrician to come fix something. If you were handy, you could handle most of it yourself. I tried to do most of it myself, too. But most of life was waiting for assistance. It was the very fabric of society. You were always waiting—in traffic, in aisles, airports and stations, your own home—for someone else.

I had a deep respect for every job in the world that actually moved it, simply because I could not do it. I had never been someone who went out in the day to physically change things for others. No leader, celebrity or CEO moved the world. They only talked in the high and mighty jargon. The people like cab drivers, people who handled deliveries, electricians, hairdressers, plumbers, and on and on held the world together. The others, like me, continually spewed bullshit in words and fifty-slide presentations about hullabaloo no one will remember.

They weren’t unnecessary—most people did something significant, and everyone worked hard regardless of what they worked on. I had respect for hard work, but I could not respect someone based on how high they were in the hierarchy. I have always had a problem with it. Labels and positions meant nothing to me.

I often came off as polite but disrespectful to most people who were full of themselves. Naturally, it confused them. They could not decide if I liked them or not. For the most part, I did not. I only treated everyone as a fellow human being with the same qualms, the same heartaches, the same broken water heaters—no less, no more.

There were no Gods among us.

Life ebbed and flowed between pockets of happiness and phases of devastating sadness. Like most people, I’ve had my share of both. I’ve smiled for hours staring at the cityscape, coffee and conversation serving as proper footnotes to these bookmarks in my memory. I’ve stood on ledges to see sunsets for what seemed to be the last time, broken and distraught. I’ve loved and hated the cold showers in June in different years. I still refuse to carry an umbrella, learning nothing from every single time I’ve come home drenched. The human soul was oddly stubborn. There was inertia in emotion, or at least, how we perceived it.

I’ve held onto happiness hard enough to be the one squeezing it out of my life as if I were squeezing some ketchup out of a bottle. I’ve built homes in despair, taking into account the one semester I spent at architecture school. Of course, the houses were flimsy. I did not know much about building them; I built them in people. Everything I’ve felt has always been enveloped by my state of mind. Sunrises have saved me from myself; crowds have made me feel a belonging like none other. Everything in my life has been romanticised to the point of annoyance. But now, I am neither happy nor depressed. I can see everything for what it is.

It is a good change of pace for someone who has scoured for meaning all his life. Without the lens of what I feel, I see a cup of coffee for what it is, I see people for who they are, and my days are just days, one after the other, all of them a combination of everything I have felt before in different measures. The sunsets are sunsets; you could never guess the palette for the day. The rain is now water and nothing else. The fluttering leaves, masking the sun in a game of peekaboo, are just the leaves. Conversation is conversation, nothing more, nothing less.

All my days are still as they were, as they always have been, and all of life is still incredibly beautiful, abundant, and infinite. I believe the one thing that’s changed is my desire for meaning from it all. An unbiased audience, I see it with an unmatched clarity now. Beauty never needed a reason to exist. It was only here to be looked at, calmly.

When I think of love, I remember little. They say grief blurs your memory. I believe they are wrong. When I think of love, I remember little, but what I remember, I remember clearly. Love is an accidental streak stain of red wine—a cheap cabernet—on the white corner of my otherwise spotless apartment at three in the morning. The broken glass serving only as an interrobang as it fell in synch with my falling heart. The base oscillating, stem still attached, surrounded by shards of broken glass until it came to a halt.

Love has been a long road paved with eggshells between two cities three thousand miles apart. It has been losing all I stood for only to continually talk in rote sentences and prescribed vocabulary, my words being pulled like a hapless marionette. It has been the fear of how a single word in the wrong intonation might spiral into an argument at eleven in the night after a long day working two jobs, only so I could afford a flight to visit for the weekend. It’s been running at the airport with the agonising pain of a torn ankle, phone in hand, doubt in mind, but boarding anyway.

Love has also been waiting. It has been waiting in a café for a date who never showed up. I believe a part of me never left from that little chair. I wonder if it’s still there, and if not, what does my ghost haunt now? Love to me is waiting for a promise of meeting again, of spending years holding on to the hope of insanity. Only for them to return, to tell me how they expected me to have forgotten, and how it was only natural for promises to break. It has been a masterclass in patience.

Love has been a museum of broken hearts—not all exhibits my own. But, love has been grieving for someone who is not dead. It has been a stalemate. Love has been begging for someone to stay, not for love, but only to lend a hand for a week; the fear of being left alone as your life fell apart. Love has been many things, really, but it has not for a moment, not even for a second, been kind.

And yet, a faint echo from somewhere deep within me tells me: it gets better. And so, I sit here—a sliver of hope on the table and my heart on my sleeve—waiting.