Bookmarks

When this day began, I looked at the time and realised I had overslept. This was according to plan. My wish for the last two days of the year—which I had, in fact, come up with the previous night before sleeping—was to spend them quietly, without much to do, without anywhere to go. All I wanted was to sleep in, wake up late, shower, read, and maybe watch a film. If my friends managed to make time for me, which has gotten rarer than in a blue moon, I would meet them for coffee or drinks, but if this did not happen, which I assumed was how things would transpire as it is not as straightforward to see your friends after reaching a certain age, I would not think of it twice, and simply continue the restful weekend.

And when I woke up and realised it was high noon, I smiled like how you do when things go your way for a change. Then, I got a message from the bank saying there was some document discrepancy, that the account had been blocked, and that I had to visit. Of course, I sighed; of course, this is how things have to be. And then, with the reluctant disposition of a child going to school, I got ready, went out, and got it all sorted out. I smiled through it, of course, as one must do when one knows that the others are only doing their jobs, but to say there was no measure of anger in me would be a lie. Now, I seem to have swallowed it yet again. Now, the day is marred with the banal troubles of the daily.

My wish for the next year is to live for myself.

The colour of this year was interruption. I have spent the year catering to the needs of others and dousing fires, beginning with text messages or calls. And to think I had only just started living for myself in the year that led to this. Once you get a taste of something, it gets harder to not crave it. This is true for love, but more importantly, this is true for peace.

Sometimes, I wish I could buy an estate, raise high walls around it, and only go out for groceries and such. But then, I remember how I would never be able to make that much money. And there goes that dream, just like the one to spend the last two days of the year unbothered.

But then, I reckon, to live is to be bothered.

It feels like December tonight. The air is cold, and quiet nostalgia wafts about, interrupted only by the earthy fragrance of chamomile. The sole, stubborn pigeon still flutters around the air conditioner unit outside. The idiot flies away and knocks his head on the balcony ceiling when I get out to shoo it. I have begun to feel terrible for it now, so sometimes, I let it sit and cause a ruckus within some unthought-of, permissible limit, like how you allow a child to make a certain level of mess before you chide them for it. Tolerance is an innate human quality. It exists in us by design. And so does impatience. And often, they clash with one another, and then, you must find a way to rein the impatience in with one hand and extend the other forward. Pigeons or people—all could use a little bit of leeway. Life is hard as it is, and for some, especially on chilly December nights, it is harder.

Smooth jazz plays in the background for no reason besides the moment calling for it. Let us ease into it, that which has happened, that which will happen. There are three days for bookkeeping, for us to tell ourselves the final tally of how we were. We must look at ourselves as honestly as we can only so we can be better. There are no Gods and monsters for grown-ups. We wish there were, but everything holy that could ever exist is up to the hands that hold everything in place, and when there is nothing to hold, the hands that hold each other. And if there are any monsters, we make them, and sometimes, we make them in our image, and we make them so alike that we cannot tell them apart from us. It is easy to live with make-believe ideas of life, but it is much harder to take responsibility, to know that everything that is and everything that is not begins and ends where we do, that our decisions shape some of it, and the rest is a coin toss.

The year has ended. Some decisions were made, few were acted upon, and the consequences rolled in like the morning newspaper. No time to fret anymore, only to lie down and rest a little, sip some tea, listen to music, and look at what is to come eagerly.

Pigeons or people, after all, could always use a little bit of leeway.

Fortune tellers scare me. They are certain beyond reasonable measure. The surety they provide people is lost on those like me, who have come into fortunate situations but only at a cost.

As I sit on this bus, I think about seemingly random events from my life that I would never think of in one sitting, or ever. It occurred to me just now, without a nudge, that all the good that has happened to me, and there sure is so much, has come with absurd costs. I am forced to think that this would not be the only box in which life delivers presents, but my name is on it, that it has never come easy, that with every sweet memory, there is a bitter one entwined within, and if bitter is too extreme then sour would be a good fit. In any case, the flavour of nostalgia is all messed up, and now, I sit, craving water.

For all my early financial success, I was pushed out of the flow of time, like how you often take a service lane running beside the highway to get ahead, but you find an entry into the mainstream traffic eventually. I am still looking for it. I have travelled far now, and this has brought a sort of loneliness I could not put into words, for even if I try, the only look I get is one of disgust, which, too, is fair. How would one expect others to look beyond the measure of money when it is a measure that comes hard and often does not come at all? But it would not change the last decade for me. Both can be true, after all.

And I have found love so many times, but it has never come easy and, often, has presented itself in impossible dichotomies strictly out of my purview. I have found love only to be asked to let it go. Over and over, this has happened, and now, I envy people I know who did not have to go through this ordeal, who have had it, as they talk about my finances, easy. But I know things are seldom easy, and if I were to extend empathy, there must be costs they have paid, things I would never know about. But then, again, both things can be true.

Little else is on my mind today, and it may remain like this until the end of the year. Of course, I will laugh and be merry as one does, but I will also be thinking about everything I do not tell others, as most do.

I stand by the kitchen shelf and watch the machine slowly squeeze crema out of the grounds and into the cup. I watch the kettle huff and puff in the other corner. I think of this act I have done a million times by now, and if that is hyperbolic, a few thousand times would be a good count. Unlike the coffee, not a lot comes out of the thought, but I still think about it, about the intricate mechanical processes behind the simple act of making a cup of coffee for yourself, about how the entirety of science and engineering has contributed to it, about how even the mug I pour both the shot and the warm water in has been around, as a design, for centuries.

The mug is, after all, perfect design, and I often argue with friends at parties and dinners that there was no need for intricate glasses, that the mug was perfection like the plastic chairs found globally are perfection. No matter where it is found, a typical person’s plastic chair looks precisely the same. No matter what neighbourhood you are in and what country the neighbourhood is a part of, the chair and the mug remain. We only add complexity on top of things when they cannot be made any simpler.

There is often no insight in life, just beauty and banality in equal measure. We live our lives day after day, and then, we are asked, “What have you learned?” Nothing. I have learned to live my life. Nothing could be any more or any less important to me. But none of what I have learned can serve as some grand truth or philosophy. As a writer, I am expected to peddle meaning to you while you haggle with me about the cost and tell me to “write shorter pieces”. It has been twelve years since I first called myself a writer, and I have still not found my way. This makes me chuckle on this fine December day.

Do not ask me about meaning or what I am trying to say in these words. I have as much to say as you do, and if you think you have nothing to say, then grant me the same privilege. I do not have answers. I make coffee in the morning, move my body a little when I can motivate myself, work at a job I sometimes enjoy, and, on most days, try to help someone when I am out for a walk. I reckon that is about all one can do.

As the cold air from outside started to set in the apartment, turning the warmest blanket cold, I got off the rug and turned the kettle on. Unsurprisingly, the end of December is colder than the rest of it. Out of laziness to not brew a proper cup, I put two heaps of instant coffee in the mug and poured the bubbling, boiling water into it. I did not need to stir the water; there it was: warmth in a cup.

There is nothing outside this balcony door. The sky has turned to a depressingly light shade of grey as if this were some kind of void, and this apartment was floating in it, away from the real world. The rest of what should be there has been consumed entirely by the fog and the haze. Ever so visible, the hills have been cropped and deleted from the landscape. The houses have begun disappearing. It might rain soon, and then, it will all be alright. It is not about the coldness but the dryness. Once the rain arrives and dampens everything, the days start to feel less cold.

By two in the afternoon today, I had a headache—not a particularly debilitating one, but the one that inhibits your faculties and demands you sit in front of the TV with a blanket wrapped around you. I woke up this way, too, but how I carried myself this morning only worsened things. It began with the urgent realisation that my life was happening, that the decisions I had left on the shoulders of eventuality had not met their conditions and contingencies. It was all supposed to go to plan, but nothing did, and now, many things remain undone as tasks labelled “someday” on my to-do list.

No more, I told myself and began to write the plan for the years to come. This involved a lot of financial arithmetic and collection of hope. The latter was the hardest and grew my exhaustion tenfold, but I was able to chart a course. The last five years have brought a barrage of broken dreams, which have, in turn, postponed and delayed the rest of my life. I have danced to the whimsical tunes fate has played on its flute. I have managed to stay on my feet. But no more! I see now that this blank December sky is but a canvas, and I can see the rest of my life in it.

It seems I have learned how to dream again.

Woke up inside a hole in my head and couldn’t find any rock sticking out to grab onto, to climb on from. Finding no visible and apparent way out, I realised my wits had betrayed me. Nothing made sense, but this was not something new. It had happened before, and it had happened a thousand times over, and each time, I had found a way out. All that was left to do was make a cup of coffee, and not just make it like the clockwork of every day but to do it softly, with the painstaking attention and the impossible focus of a watchmaker. Then, when it was ready, to take a whiff and let the aroma conquer the farthest corners of my mind, leaving no gap whatsoever, and in doing so, lift me out of the hole I was in. Before I knew it, goosebumps spread all over my body and with each wave, I learned, once again, that everything was okay. It was always about the moment, about taking control of it and reining it in. It was always about telling your mind who is in charge. An exercise done patiently but swiftly, before it can cause any damage further down the day. Presence is the only rope we need. And if you do not prefer the flavour of coffee, well, you must pick whatever you like, and the result will be the same. That, I can promise you.

Once I climbed out and found my way to the desk, I had a conversation with all my fears. I told my fear of never being accepted as I was that there was grace in rebellion, at least the kind that begins at desks made of engineered wood. I noticed my fears of never being chosen and always being chosen second whispered to each other and nodded in some sort of absurd agreement, and softly, I smiled at them and thanked them for making me who I became, told them they were my favourite ones, that if I were ever to pick and choose fears, which was not a luxury many could afford, I would choose them both over and over. Finally, I looked at my fear of always being alone, sitting quietly and staring at the cup of coffee before it. I asked it to look around at all the lives we had touched together, and all my fears disappeared, as they often do.

Then, I wrote a little and began the day. The ghosts of Christmas looked different for all of us.

All the money in the world could never buy an ounce of peace. They do not sell it in stores. You cannot order it today and have a package delivered tomorrow. It can buy comfort, sure, and opportunity, yes, and we must not discount it, but peace comes differently. You need to build your way up to it and craft it with your own hands, and often, it might look messy and absurd. It is not a tranquil garden. It is the quiet moment as you alternate between the different roles you play in the land of the living. It is a couple of moments sometimes, and sometimes, it is even shorter. I can speak only for myself when I say this, but for me, it is a house of cards. My peace is engineered so shoddily and so broken is every single part of it in itself that it is held together by tape and hope. There is no stability in it, and that it remains intact day after day is as much a surprise to me as it would be to anyone else. But it is my own, its shaky foundations aside and notwithstanding. Every day, I make repairs to it, and when you patch one hole, ten new ones open in it. It is, quite frankly, a full-time job. This leaves little in me to care about the world at large, not that I am apathetic but mostly, I am exhausted. I do not like getting involved anymore. There was a time when I went out of my way to solve and fix things for others, but most of my days are spent tending to this Macgyvered masterpiece, this chaotic contraption that I call peace.

To be left to my devices, to be left to my solitude, is not a preference but a side effect. My personal pocket of peace causes me to remove myself from people, from places, and situations I cannot help or lend a hand in. Often, we begin things in life and do not know where they will lead us, but that they lead us somewhere we do not expect is more common than one might imagine. This is what has happened to my life. Most of my days are spent scheming in secret to get all the moments of peace I can get, and peace aside, since we cannot discount that money can, in fact, buy many things, the rest of my days are spent in earning a living. How else, do you reckon, have I been able to write these bookmarks for so long?

For all the due attention I pay to things on the daily, I forgot to notice or even acknowledge how this is the last week of the year. December was here, and now December is leaving. Little you can do about it, of course, except watch. I woke up early today and stood on the balcony for a change. I stood there for a long time, an hour or so, sipping from the cup, which might as well have frozen over given how cold it got, and of course, the coffee agreed with it, but to break the moment would have cost me dearly so, I continued sipping the coffee, colder as it was, bitter as it had become. I stood there and watched the morning.

An entire year has passed me by, and so much has happened; why, then, does it feel so empty? As if I spent the whole thing sitting with my hands tied, no agency, nothing to show for it in the end. So many words written and no piece stands out to me with even an ounce of greatness. All the places I have visited are tucked into my memory. What we do not share, after all, disappears. If you did not tell someone about it, did it even happen? By that measure, most of my life has not happened. I might as well have just sat and imagined it.

All the little things that never swim up and out of my mind when someone asks what I am up to remain there. Then, they are forgotten, like the many instances of small talk you have with strangers as you go about the city.

A friend at work asked me if I knew what the half-life of coffee was, and I did not know it. He told me it was five hours. I wonder if he knows the half-life of memory, not of the largest heartbreak or the greatest joy but the mundane. I reckon it is about a day. A day or two is all you get to share an anecdote. I do not remember any anecdotes. I regurgitate the few I have gotten a chance to share.

I look back at this year and feel as if nothing has mattered as much as it should have. Perhaps I need new stories, but more importantly, I reckon I need someone to tell them to. I have changed in ways I cannot define, but more importantly, I have changed in ways I cannot remember.

And now, December is over, and it stirred me, but this, too, I will forget by the time January rolls around.

If you happen to find yourself in front of a conflict, the only good, right and noble thing is to try to make it smaller, to push it inward with both your hands until it is the size of a pebble. Then, you must toss it away.

And if you cannot do this, if the people involved are entirely irrational, and if not irrational, then, I reckon, deaf to the sound of reason? Then, you must remove yourself from the situation. It is natural to want to add fuel to the fire and feed it until it consumes everything around us; there is a primal instinct in all of us to do this, but it takes a person of character to ignore the urge. And what if you, yourself, are in the ring? Even then, you must try to avoid all conflict. I cannot recall a situation where giving into my urge to deck someone or to say something harsh brought with it an appreciable result. I hope you remember this if you have never been in a fight. But I reckon all of us have been in an argument or two.

It is impossible to be a person without disagreement. It is, however, not only possible but quite common for disagreements to grow into animosity for no other reason but because, like a virus, they were not contained. Most believe it to be opportunity. It is indeed an opportunity. It is an opportunity to display how small of a person you could be if given the chance. To say I am immune to this would be a lie, and I have walked away with many arguments and fights only to lose a friend or worse, if an outcome as abysmal as losing a friend exists.

There are not many correct things in life, and it may all be chalked up to opinion, the countless differences, and the many manifestations of personalities, but there are some without ambiguity.

To apologise, if the situation demands it, regardless of how big or small the error is one of them. And if an apology, whether in truth or as a white lie, is too much to ask of you in the spur of the moment, then to stay your tongue, to not utter a word, to stand where you are until you can leave, and then, to go without the softest sound still, says more than anything clever or poisonous you can imagine. To remember this shows the mettle of a person. Nothing else comes close.

I finally land in my bed after a day longer than the stories I spin to convince myself of whatever I feel amiss in me on a given day. On some days, it is patience I lack, and on others, it is goodness, and then, there are those when I carry not a single ounce of empathy in me. Like all of us do in situations, I concoct narratives, and I make stories up. I choose all the parts I would like to keep and lose all the parts I do not require, and then, what is left is an unreal, almost fictional version of my life. I am sure all of us do this to some degree. We convince ourselves of our better natures. Today was one such day, and then, whatever transpired, transpired, and now, here I am in the final hours before I doze off.

And indeed, I dozed off before I could finish the thought and the piece. It seems now, in the fresh, unburdened hours of the morning, I have lost my train of thought, and I am glad for it. It is not suitable for the body to hold morbid thoughts inside it for long. It eats you from the inside. It pays to sleep when the body suggests it, and it pays to let sleep erase the poison we accumulate during the day. The human body, and especially the brain, is a sponge for it.

We possess the unique ability to look at the most picturesque of landscapes and still find something wrong with them. We can look at a beach and comment on it in the most grotesque way known to the universe simply because a thing or two are not to our liking. A dog can come to the beach and start rolling in the sand, not a care in his mind about the minutiae. If left unchecked, this urge is what dictates our days. We must look at the world with grace and kindness. The light of a new day reminds us of this, even if we don’t realise it immediately. Even if we never look inward, the light manages to find its way inside. The question remains, “How long do we let it stay?”

And that is up to us. That is the only thing up to us in this messy, salty broth of life.

Alternative title: Of Whys and Why Nots

I slept in and woke up at noon, made an espresso, and sat at the desk to solve several crosswords, a habit I have immensely enjoyed these past months. It did not take me much time to fill the boxes with the correct letters, and then I started to think about how I have been asked “why” more often than I have asked it myself. I do not want to think about what it indicates about me. There are questions for noon, and there are questions for midnight.

But at least I can do some inventory.

I have not asked “why” for these crosswords, nor have I asked it for the daily game of chess I play despite never improving at it. I have never asked why for why I exercise or walk. I only want to keep myself moving. It is, perhaps, as simple as that, but most people do not seem to look at it this way. The money I invest is also meaningless in that I do it because what else will you do with it, or that, in some sense, it is the right thing to do if you cannot find a better use for it. There are, of course, better uses all around, and when I have some money, it goes to them first. Then, what is left gets put into different places where it grows ever-so-slightly. There is also no particular reason why I want it to grow. It is, again, better than not letting it do so, and this somewhat logical idea is my sole reasoning. As for why I read (read: try to), there is again no answer, nor is there any for why I love profusely.

My life has now become a sequence of rhetoricals—why I drink coffee, why I sit here and write endlessly when there are, I imagine, better uses of my time, why I refuse to let the child in me die, why I refuse to draw lines over the world, why I strictly take every little thing in this world at face value, why I believe that most people can be better than they currently are, why I try to look for a better future in the bleak fog of time or a better tomorrow, if future is too grandiose an expectation, or why, while knowing the ins and outs of human nature, while knowing, firsthand, the personal tragedies I have faced simply because it did not exist, I argue for our will to make the right decisions at the right times—all of these carry the same answer.

“Why not?”

I sit in my room in this vacation bed and breakfast and try to write a little. Getting nowhere, I realise the bluntness of my attempt and my sentences, which fall flat in the face of the moment. I seem to have developed a curious case of reclusivity, which most writers are famous for, and it is quite difficult for me to write while others breathe around me. This valiant but hapless attempt to write has made me think about the practice overall, of course. My hands seem to have frozen on the keyboard. No words can come out of them until I am in a room by myself. 

This would not do. No, it would not do at all. Rarely do writers ever find themselves by themselves. Other people are always around us; if they are not in the same room, they are still on our minds. How would I finish my work, this great volume which says nothing at all then? I must fight this, and if writing an entire page is impossible, I must write as much as I can, finishing it later when life allows, when I find a moment of my own in a room of my own. Yes, that could work in the long scheme of things. It could be the perfect way to have a life and write about it, too. And I would have cracked a problem long plaguing my breed. A whole piece is too big of an ask on abnormal days, and when I say abnormal, I simply use it for its most literal form—something out of the ordinary.

On days like those when an entire piece seems impossible, I can paint outside the lines, craft a sketch, and colour in the details later. This is, after all, what painters do, and this has worked fine for them for longer than any of us can remember. Only a few days are as different from the others in a year anyway. Most of our lives are a basic continuation of similarity. It is, but the differences are peppered in between. And why, pray tell, am I trying this hard to do it all? Well, how can you write when your nephew walks into the room with a smile drawn on his face, his tiny teeth shining through it? You can, and you should get off your chair and lift him up. There are fewer things more important than this, and writing, to my surprise, does not make the cut.

Between all that life has offered and all that life ever will, between watching our times change with the flipping of the calendar’s pages, between the perfect continuity of the narrative of this life, I see a moment of its own. It is what we all want. It is the moment before the moment. It is the moment tucked into the sheets like an infant, cranky and tired. It is the slice of time with no before and no after when you look at it, segment it under the microscope of retrospect, and yet, it is so vital, so critical to the grand story that it would not exist without what happened before it, and it will continue to trickle into what happens after, like a hue that accidentally mixes with the others on the palette.

In one such moment, I saw my brother, older than me and towering in how I have always looked at him, paying little heed to the fact that I grew taller at some point. Under the soft and dimming glow of the setting sun, I saw him play with the waves and jump in them, and for a second, for a second I will always remember like a slice of time you know you will never forget after you first look at it, I thought of the sheer humanity of him, of how he has always been larger than life for me, of how we have never given him the privilege to simply be a person. And I would speak for myself only when I say it did not cross my mind much. But there he was, standing with his son and his wife as the sand drew their silhouettes under their feet, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

In life, there are moments, and there are moments. There is no difference between them until you see them for yourself, and then, you know it suddenly, and then, you know it forever.

Often, when I walk through strange towns and cities that I will never consider moving to, I imagine if there was ever a scenario where I would willingly move to them and perhaps start afresh. Perhaps, a life where writing was at the centre stage, a small place to live in, a casual day job, if my savings do not last me, a person who, too, has left much of their life behind to share the bohemian fantasy with, if they will have me. I would maybe make coffee during the day for strangers and steal their stories between sessions of small talk. Then, come home and write it all with my tired and possibly scalded hands. But to do a mechanical job where most of my wits will be about me by the time I return home would be critical in this rebellious second half. We would survive on passion, for work, for art, for life, and if all the bills were paid on time, we would not need any more or any less than anyone in the world needs to survive. It would be a dream in a sense, but, of course, I would never be able to leave my life behind.

There is a web between everyone we know and us; there is a tapestry in this life, and a life is rarely about one person. I wonder if things would be any different, and when I say things, I simply mean happiness.

There is a thought I have felt one too many times in cities I have walked through enough to remember them like the back of my hand. I often chuckle and sigh and try to walk it off. I reckon I would carry everything that is a part of me in a suitcase, deliberations and all. I guess it is how it is for all of us. But this time, I did not have to look so deep into the abyss to find a reason to stick to the regularly scheduled programming of my life. I looked at my nephew, and he babbled something incredibly important to me. I reckon he had the answer, and I seemed to agree with him. There was little to think about from that point on. Why should we move to greener pastures if the ones we graze on are green enough?

The bottom line is honesty, and it is so little, so sparingly present in the world that no matter where you look, you find people who lie, and when they are not lying to others, their wits are unequivocally busy with lying to themselves—the only thing they have left to do. This exhausts me, of course. Take a trip out of the city, and by the time you arrive at the airport, you will have found the end of your patience, and if, by some grace of luck or fate, anything is left in you, a conversation you accidentally eavesdrop on will nip it in the bud.

To face the truth is often the simplest thing anyone can do. Simple, of course, is seldom easy. But then, this game we play with ourselves, as we tuck the truth under affectations that make us seem more posh than we are, or attempt to leave a positive impression but fail and fumble, crashing into the box of desperation, or how we paint ourselves as an observer—neutral and detached. I am the last out of those oddly specific illustrations. I am far too aware that I am no impartial observer. In fact, I care deeply about this world, about people, about society. My detachment is a farce which lets me sleep at night. And sleep, too, has oddly disappeared under the weight of exhaustion tonight. I lay here in this foreign bed and worry about the world. My brain has ceased to make a coherent thought. My body wants to sleep, to call it a day. And yet, this is all I can do: think and worry.

The truth is that those of us who feign detachment are often attached beyond measure. We do not make bets on the world; our entire existence is already at stake. We are almost always too involved for our own good. At least, this is all the truth I can spare for myself in this wave of exhaustion. It has been an absurdly long day. Yet, the only thing on my mind is the world, other people, their idiosyncrasies and antics, their shortcomings and failings, and their vehemently redeemable humanity.

Recently, they have painted the town all over in colour, and it feels a bit jarring given that this only happened when I made up my mind to leave. Like a lover who starts to glow, whose eyes get bigger and bigger as you mention the thought of parting your ways, this city, too, has shown how much it would not prefer me to be here. Of course, I exaggerate. The freshly coated walls hide murkier truths below them with the reluctant pizzazz of a prima donna. But what do we care? The everyman does not think of the world below or the one above. He walks on the sidewalk even if it is paved with broken blocks, and he walks on it if it is pristine still.

Now, I must come back to this city after I leave, for a tryst, a moment to see it once more, like a lover who leaves impatiently, almost impulsively after a fight, who begins missing the other as the bus starts to move, as the plane begins to fly, who thinks of nothing else on arrival but to get back someday. I am too familiar with the feeling, and often, this town has been at the centre of it. What I am in love with now is not a person for a change but my life here. The life I wish to leave because it has become too comfortable. What a curious thing it is to be a person. We only want what we do not have. The trick, I wonder, must be to lose wanting itself.

But then, what is a person if not someone who wants?

To live is to want things; to live properly, I reckon, is to be aware of this fickle nature. To live properly, correctly, and rightfully is to know that some things you can only want from afar, like a morning with a person you will never be granted, like a different beginning, an atypical path you never took, like a wish to try it all again if you could. It is in knowing that none of this is possible and still yearning for it, like the dog who waits near the gates of the building no one lives in anymore.

To live is to want for the past and the future and for a better present, most of all. To live is to want to leave, and to live is to be asked to stay. To live is to be suspended in the middle of all you ever wanted, all you will ever want, and the absurd wish to not want at all.

There is an odd sort of idealism in me. It is neutral, almost quixotic. It is not an urge to change the world or transform it into something it is not, but to accept it for all it is and hope for it to correct itself and fix its course. There is belief in the right and true, and there is no need for a god to threaten me into believing it. I believe in goodness because it is the only course of action from where I stand. I feel out of place wherever I go, and yet, I find commonality in a jiffy, almost instantly. I meet a person, and they tell me their story, and I see we are all the same in the ways that matter.

But my neutrality has a tinge of selfishness to it now. It wants to be seen how it sees the world. And this selfishness does not sit well. In fact, it does not sit at all. Like an impatient dog, it walks about in the gallery of my mind, wagging its tail and asking to be let out. Of course, I cannot do so, and I contain it as much as I can, but often, it sneaks off before I realise, without realising, I make a demand from life.

A demand that begs for another person who understands me as well as I do others, who sees me like people see the sky, without asking the purpose of it being blue. But so far, it has been a request denied, over and over. The stamp has begun to lose its bevel. The edges that would make up the words have blended into the background. Now, like a dilapidated version of its old self, it slams only a blot on my soul. I cannot read the words, but I know it is still a request rejected. This has caused great awryness within me. It has also caused a swig of loneliness, which has not gone down softly. It has cut my throat like the sharpest of liquor. It has made me wince without my realising it.

To say I was exhausted would be an understatement. Why, then, do I go on living, and what causes my spirits to remain high? The same idealism, what else! The death of hope never occurs. I want to feel hopelessness and dejection, but before they can even think of squatting in the vacant rooms of my heart, the light of hope drives them out. It seems my mind knows no permanent despair, only bits and pieces until they disappear.

The orange sun of the winter evening today whispered something in my ear. Its amber hue on the blank canvas of the white wall was a lie. There was no warmth in it. The fog ate it all before it reached us, and then it covered the town like hopelessness covers the vulnerable. I stepped outside onto the empty streets. There were a few cars here and there, but no one willing to be out. A breeze of reluctance blew about as I took step after step to reach the main street. No cabs ready to take me where I wanted to go, I addled over getting coffee at the patio, which, on one look over the wall, looked as drab as the look of an ex-lover and as repulsive as a posh snob’s hospitality. So, I avoided the cup and hailed a ride.

The first step in the door and the sound of claps and laughter echoed louder than any concert I have attended in this life. The cold sun, the opaque fog, the death of all hope vanished instantly. There sat my nephew on the bed, surrounded by everyone, and I went in and lifted him up and put him on my shoulders. To think this would be a long day with such happiness, so approachable, so easy to find, so wildly easy to grab. To think there should even be a complaint in this life now. How easily do we forget the reasons for joy? How easily we forget the good parts until they are in front of us, cackling, stumbling!

There is nothing to say except this: this life has more purpose than ever simply because there is this child, this bumbling ball of joy running around the house, his antics surprising all of us as we lean in and bend forward to shield him from the already cushioned edges. Why should I go on with hope in my heart? Because there is someone watching. What else could it be? Little else matters in the grand scheme of things. The tribulations of the day, the ache of the heart, the parts we could not reliably fix or change or move ahead from remain where they are, but the present echoes with joy; it shines with a light unbeknownst to us, and it runs past us with utmost speed. The cold, dead winter sun can whisper all it wants. Frankly, it can very well find its way to hell.

And when you make your life incredibly simple, your only wish remains for people around you to do the same. This is a wish seldom granted, but every day, you wake up and wish, with all your heart, that people would not jump the gun, would not go out of their way to make a mess of what would otherwise be a perfect day. More than drugs, more than attention, the world has a severe and, I would wager, incurable addiction to complexity. There is nothing we can do to help it, of course. When given a choice between a straight road to a calm clearing and another which winds and goes straight to hell, people will choose the latter, and when you cover their eyes and ask them to choose once more, they will pick it still. This baffles me, of course. A little thought before action, a peek at the possibilities it may lead to, is all the foresight anyone needs. We do not need to predict the future, and we cannot do it even if we try, but we can get awfully close to it if we keep our eyes open and use the little nugget in our heads. This is but an abstract thought on Sunday noon, but often, the spectator must comment on the game, and the audience must critique the scene. This is one such moment on one such day.

And when you have pleaded your case, and when you have given your recommendation, and you see that people will do as people have done, and when the world, or at least your slice of it, is hell-bound on its road to complexity, only one course of action remains. You must remove yourself from the situation. You must pack your bags and find a different crumb of the world to feast on. But what if there is no such place? That, too, is possible. Well, I will let you know when I reach the end of my patience and the end of hope. I do not believe myself to be intelligent beyond the bare minimum required to be a person. If I could conclude that simplicity is the cause of joy, I am sure there are people far more capable than me somewhere. All I need to do is find them.

There must be at least one other person who avoids the convoluted like the plague, if not a plethora of them. One would be enough at this point. Frankly, one would be plenty.

Physicists say the moon, along with the rest of the universe, is continually drifting away from the Earth with time. It is, of course, marginal. There is no chance we will ever see it shrink, but it may be that when enough millennia have passed, provided people still exist, if we survive the perils imaginable or otherwise, it will start to seem smaller, almost a dot. But would the people then think we were liars? Does a child who has never seen the moon have any reason to believe in its existence? Would the poems seem farcical, and all the pictures seem manufactured?

We are limited to what we know, and when you are a child, knowledge is little; children are, then, bound to what they see, and then, that is what they know. All the people I meet who fail to be kind, and if kindness is an impossible order, to be civil, make me think of this recurring conclusion.

But the world is filled with excruciating detail, and you only see what you know. If you have ever only known pain, you may find it difficult to see hope, and if you have seen nothing but plenty, you will never understand the echoing lament of dearth. And this is where we come in, the people sitting and making art in one form or the other, who make the people their muse, who make the moon their star, who make paintings of solitary herons or sunsets over a city barely anyone in the world knows of, who spend a good lot of their days watching the world instead of participating in it, who when asked about their dreams and goals claim there are none for they are glad to be where they are, who write ballads to the knight in the night sky, who chronicle stories of hope otherwise lost to urban apathy, who change the narrative with the simple action of putting something down on a page.

The children in the far future will know of the moon. They may think of it as fiction, an idea perpetuated by those who came before, almost as if it were propaganda, but it will still stand for something. It will tell them that there is always a blot of light in a blanket of darkness, and if, for some reason, you cannot see it, you must will it into existence.