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How filled with stupor, how languid is this month of December! Perhaps, more than most Decembers, or perhaps, the others are blurred by the snow and the sleet, which my city never receives but I would very much like to see. You must agree that all Decembers are slow, and if you read this in a December different from the one I find myself in now, it, too, would be slow. A conversation with a co-worker who lives in a country so far away that I might never see him, whom I know only through a tiny picture on my computer screen, made me realise that we must take stock of ourselves now. I did not realise it myself this year, and I do not wish to extend my reach to grab the reasons for it. They can fly away for all I care. You do not need reasons for things: for feelings, for love, for living. Things only occur. Like now, the realisation has occurred, and I must take stock of the state of my life as it stands.

The truth is that my life is solitary, and not in the sense that there are no people in it. There are many. I see them sometimes, and I see some more than others. But this life is solitary because no matter how much I talk to others or how often, they will never know the extent of my average day, and they will never feign curiosity. They will forever be satisfied with the parts they know. The view into my life closes with my closing of the door at night, with no keyhole for them to peer through. In the end, it is an opaque blockade, and they will rely on what I tell them, which is not much.

I talk to people and tell them the parts they want to hear, and no, it is not lying, for I do not invent things; it is but curation. All of us do it, of course. But only some admit it.

We contain multitudes, or so they say. A crumb, then, is enough for each person. You share a dream or two with the wrong person, and by the time you walk home, it wilts like a plant watered a little too much. You tell someone about a thought, and they mould it like clay and make it theirs. What urge remains is often lost in small talk or the gambles I make (and lose) in the spirit of attempt.

Thus, this life remains at an impasse, which is the long and the short of it, December or otherwise.

When I woke up today, I wanted to pull the quilt over my head and sleep for a little more. So, I did that and let time pass. Then, the phone rang, and I let it ring for a bit. When it stopped, I picked up my phone and typed a message telling them I was in a meeting and would call them in a bit when I could. There was no meeting unless you count my sitting at the desk with a cup of coffee and solving a crossword one. But then, a white lie or two would not hurt a person, and for what it’s worth, I return all calls and reply to every message I see. Once I had solved it fully, and when the music brought me back to the land of the living, I called them and heard what they had to say, which was nothing as usual, to remind me of things I already remembered. Then, in the languid labour of every day, I sat to write.

Some days set their tone before you even begin living them. Today, I shall want for a slower day. But this day began not with rest but interruption, and now, I know it will be a day peppered with disruptions, big and small. There have been enough of these for me to know how it will all play out, and with that experience, I have a plan. I shall make myself scarce when I can, and I will put some things on tomorrow and still get some time to sleep in the sun.

There it goes, another unexpected call on this pesky phone. There, I lied again, for I needed to finish this piece; now, I have lost my train of thought!

Ah, yes, I need to steal a moment today, but now, I shall make it worth my time and steal several. At some point in life, all your time starts belonging to other people, like a botched will put into action, like some rights transferred without you realising it, like a deed signed haphazardly without reading the fine print. From that point on, you lay at the behest of others.

Could I get some time to read today? Could I take a nap? Can you give me an hour before I call you back?

This is preposterous, but there is no way out except losing your soul and lying. So, that is what we must all resort to, given there are things we want to spend our time for because if you cannot think of a few, the world is all the more eager to spend it for you.

I woke up on the indifferent side of the bed and could not care about anything for the first few hours. Tried to make a cup of coffee and stand outside staring at the hills. It tempered the aloofness slightly, but not by a large margin. To expect the coldness of the world to cut the coldness of the heart is foolish, after all. This frostbite of the heart is not new, and I have dealt with this before. With a little sun and a couple of reluctant acts of kindness, my heart will thaw again. It is unfortunate but all of us have sides to us we would rather not show someone else. At least, I have a confidant in these words. I reckon I could never be as honest with a person than I am with these words. And even here, I exaggerate sometimes.

I dreamt last night of things that have not happened yet. No mysticism, no, and no premonition or hullabaloo like that. It was fear, simply fear, of the little things that weigh on our minds in the breadth of the general day. When I woke up to check the messages and, more importantly, the date, I realised that, as always, my mind had gotten the better of me. There was still time. Today, once again, I shall ensure the fears do not come to pass. I reckon it has always happened in this order: action has followed the dream; the dream has, in turn, followed the fear. The facade of this life is an illusion. I am simply a man acting out of haste, patiently. Most things I have feared, however, have not come to pass. The few that did do not count in the grand statistics of this life. And most things that have come to pass, I did not know to fear for.

But we fix what we can fix, and we avoid what we know to avoid; the rest is the rest, and we cannot do much about it. Sometimes, I wish I could tell someone about my fears. They say it makes them smaller. I have not had the opportunity to experience it yet.

Ah, the sun has begun to paint the town golden now. I reckon this is the difference. In my dreams, there is light, but it is artificial. It is not warm. It is barely yellow, almost like some halogen light buzzing at the top of the world. There is no hope in it. This is what tells me I am dreaming.

Lately, I have found a deliberate attempt in myself to slow things down and, when that is not possible, to quiet them. And now, with the balcony doors open, I sit beside them and make a wish. To not believe in the mystical and still make a wish now and then would be one of the greatest hypocrisies of my life. To wish is human, however. So, here I sit, wanting things after all, hypocrisy withstanding.

The coming year has me rolling in quiet discomfort. There is so much I want to happen, but I am grateful, so grateful for all the things that have already. But if I were to list wishes down for this year, just in time, I would say I ought to bring more art into my life, more than I have, and visit museums a bit more, and if the city I live in does not have many of them, to find cities that do. It would be nice also to not experience them alone. I have been the sole spectator for all the good and all the bad, all the small and all the big, thus far. This is a teeming life, and I wish sometimes I were not watching it unfold all by myself. Regular visits, perhaps on Sundays after a hearty brunch, to the museums and galleries with someone—now there’s a wish if I ever knew one.

Resting matters of the heart aside, lest they hog the breadth of this piece, I want for more connection, more community. I know wanting does little, so it will be fate and me working in tandem for it. The importance of other people in this life was never washed over me. It has been an adjustment so far, and now, my heart desires to adjust no more but to expand. I wish for myself to allow it this privilege. For too long, I have kept it safe (for good reason), but now, I must let it soar once again.

All that aside, I want for more joy, more than I have had so far: more sun, more books, more love, more art, more luck, more coffee, more booze, more of everything imaginable. I anticipate an insatiable want for more growing in me. It has come before, and it has faced rabid disappointment. For once, I want it to tire of wanting things. For once, I want it sated. After all, there must be a time in every life without compromise. At least, I would want to believe that.

I walked in through the outer gates of the apartment complex and heard the wind chimes from one of the balconies in the sweetest of duets with another set from another balcony. I looked up from my phone to realise it was about to rain and that what did not come during the day often comes to you at night, which is to say that most things happen when they do. You can anticipate them, but there is no use for prediction. To predict anything is nothing but failure. It is failure to admit that there are forces in life that are beyond your control, and often, when something appears like the outcome of painstaking preparation, it is often just dumb luck. You find love when you do. Or if you can look back and pinpoint a few days which ultimately changed your life, they will also seem as if they came out of nothing at all. Then, you will try to make a story. I suggest you avoid that. It leads to only hubris and vanity. To be alive is to do things. Sometimes, things lead to other things. There is no story there. Things do one thing: they happen.

Anyway, I sit here with the balcony door open, waiting. The apartment has gotten a chilly cold, and the breeze has rustled the trees, which seem like they have woken up from an early and incomplete slumber. They are angry and confused. They are flailing at whatever they can manage to grab. They remind me of the friend who sleeps like a dog and often wakes up at the softest of noises. I cannot wait to wake up in the morning to a damp city into a slow day. And what if it does not rain tonight or tomorrow? Well, I will wait for it still. It will come as it comes, and the day when it falls will be damp and slow and a soft nudge into a change of pace for the season. Sometimes, I wish this patience I covet now held my hand when I needed it the most, when my life quivered with uncertainty when I grabbed so tightly at any way I could weave the days into a coherent narrative, a complete story. But then, it came to me when it did. It was a little bit late, I reckon; I had lost much, and the direction of my life was forever altered, but that, too, has been a lesson.

I have barely thought about leaving this city, and the bells of opportunity have started to ring all around me. An email there, a phone call here, and so much to do. In mathematical terms, you would call the length of my stay here and my success an inversely proportional relationship. In simple chemical terms, you would classify this city as an inhibitor in the otherwise spontaneous reaction of my life. In the realm of physics, you would look to the coefficient of friction to explain the lack of activity. I may add that the idea is now colloquial anyway. We owe it to the gurus who peddle and pander the ideas of self-improvement as if it were not a deeply personal concept or a compound word, the first part of which told you clearly what it was supposed to be about. Coming back to my predicament: In computer science, I reckon you would call it the jargon-esque concept of What You See Is What You Get. And when I get comfortable in this life, I see little else, and so, I get little, too. This city traps you between the hills around it; its lush, natural boundary blocks all you can see. It is where all potential goes to rest. Ha! That is another term for you. I reckon physics is the most colloquial of the bunch.

(Of course, this is but preparation. Before we pack our bags, we must bolster our minds. Change is change, after all. It is impossible to exist in two places simultaneously, so we must choose and tell ourselves a story. To sit in one place forever, however, would also be a death, just a different, albeit understated one. For now, this is the story, and it serves its purpose. This city stops me from growing. The roots are curled too far beneath the ground. I could not pull them out even if I tried. So, I must leave with what I can carry and then come back once again when I am homesick. I reckon this is how it is with people like me, those with a place to call home but who do not quite feel at home there. We are fated to repeat an endless cycle of slash and burn. If this were a lesson in chemistry, they would claim my life was in a state of equilibrium. I do not know; I rarely feel as balanced. But I reckon that would be physics.)

When January rolls around, as it will before I can blink properly, it will have been two Januarys since I wrote a poem called “Waking up between seven and ten in the morning”, only to never publish it. It does strike me odd that for all the words I have written since then, it has stuck within my notes. A handful of words kept safe for two years, but now, it has become a monument of the peace I felt then. Not that the peace has dissipated, but time passes, and things change, and how we feel on a particular day twists and turns until it is a memory we hold fondly between our hands. And things have indeed changed. Of course, I will not put the poem here now. These sentences are no prelude. This passage leads to nothing.

Now, the poem is for my eyes only. I read it every week on days as useless as Tuesdays. We, artists, must reserve a few bits and pieces for ourselves. Not that it is a great poem by any measure. There is no meter nor any rhyme. It is the cardinal sin. We must only break the rules we know, and I know nothing about poetry. The free verse without knowing anything else is, after all, blasphemy. Just as it is to write with a flipped order of the clauses, but in my defence, I know my way around prose. I know I break the rules often, but I prefer to write how people talk, and if you ever listen to people, you, too, will notice the pauses, or the ands, and the ors, the perhapses and the maybes, and the sentences which never end. But are only interrupted. Often to take a breath or to sip some water.

People also often talk in hyperbole. Take me, for example. When January rolled into February two years ago, I believed I could spend my life in this city, and that I had found all the joy there was to find. Bold claims. Now, I know there is more, so much more to this life, and the poem, as I said, is a monument, and I reckon I built it too early, but not, I hope, to last. Until then, I shall look at it in passing as you often do at relics of the past.

They often instruct you to avoid cliches, to stay away from the pesky repetition of writers, of humanity, but how can you? In the end, people fall in love the same way, which is very similar to how they get drunk. You take it in cautiously, slowly, and then, you get impatient—nothing’s happening, of course. And then, you gulp it all down as if there was no tomorrow. But something was happening, and now it is all over the place. There you are, flailing, trotting, no sense of direction in your head. That is how it happens, I tell you. That is how people get intoxicated—the only difference is in the poison they choose.

But why am I blabbering about love when there is nothing but a lack of it in my life? How cautious have I become, after all, during all these years of finding myself!? Too cautious, sadly, too careful. But here I sit with my heart open still, and whatever is left is covered by the many glasses of wine. It is Friday, after all. And what about finding myself? Well, not for the lack of trying, but I have found nought. I have but confirmed the parts I knew were true; I have proved them over and over, like a scientist who conducts the same experiment out of self-doubt. So, why the blabbering? There is little else to do.

In hindsight, my life has been as cliche as the falling of rain. I have not avoided it. In fact, I have run headfirst into it. To sit here and argue for anything else would be lying, and I despise lying. Yet, I have to do it now and then, as we all do. I have to lie by omitting, the worst of the bunch. I often tell others when you lie by omission, you steal the right to find the truth, and that is the worst theft in the world. But I lie. I lie about how I feel all the time. I lie about the state of my heart. I lie about how there is more to this life. (There isn’t). And I do not speak of alternatives, no. I only keep it all to myself.

There are only cliches here, stacked like layers of a cake, topped with a cherry to call it complete. In the end, it is all garnish, though. There is nothing complete about any of this life. It is a hodgepodge of bits lifted from all around—from music, from films, from people, from stories, written and told.

I wish I could tell other people how I truly feel, but my memory tugs at my jumper and pulls me a step back, like the loyal friend who has seen you make a fool of yourself at the bar for enough years to stop you from ordering that last drink. It is funny, too, for it fails me when I need to remember crucial things, for I require a plethora of notes and lists to even pretend to be a person. But now, I often tell people what they want to hear, and my feelings seem to not fall under this label if I deem them unnecessary or irrelevant, and if I observe that my pouring my heart out may cause more harm than good, I keep them to myself. And then, they boil over for a little bit, and then they turn into regrets. I have a proverbial box chock-full of unsent letters, tightly sealed within dusty covers in some corner of my heart. And if you asked me where that corner was, that, too, I would not be able to answer.

My poor heart has been silent for so long I do not know what to tell it, but even now, the apologies echo. You see, it was not always this way. It was not always that I kept my thoughts to myself. I did not always regurgitate all I heard in one place into another. You see, my mouth was twice as open as my heart, which itself knew no restraint, and I blurted words at the first thought of them. I told people I loved them before I knew what it meant; to even begin to understand, it took me years of quiet. And now, I feel it. I feel it as deeply as my love for life itself, and I open my mouth to tell them, “I love you,” but all that comes out is an apology.

You see, I blurted things too often, and I blurted all things wrong, and when the words did not betray me, my tone did, and when the tone did not betray me, the moment did, and when that, too, was in my favour, fate intervened, and what can you tell fate but “sorry”.

“I am sorry, I am sorry,” the valves of my heart open and shut and all but apologies reverberate through them.

“I am sorry; I love you. I am sorry that I do.”

These threads of my life, and sometimes exaggerated fiction, are now woven into a narrative. I wonder if there is some benefit to this ordeal. It may be hubris, but sometimes, I think about how this is a golden volume of the quintessential experience of being a person in this day and age. And if it may not be everyone’s experience, I would still say some bits here are more pedestrian than others. When I say pedestrian, I do not mean it as some negative, run-of-the-mill quality but as common as the air we breathe, as regular as laughter, and as present as time itself.

But all that aside, it is an archive if it ends up being nothing else. If my life turns out so that I never write stories or books and maybe even wholly cease this practice as time treads on, I could still return to these words, and they would still remind me of things. And if I become someone celebrated for all the tales I lived to tell, these words would serve the same purpose still.

Often, conversation around a dinner table moves into my writing. “Are you not writing anymore?” Someone pops the question. “Oh, I am; every day, in fact, only I do not talk about it now,” I answer earnestly, trying my best to not sound pompous. Then, I sense it: the gasps and sighs, the rolling of the eyes. I sense it immediately and spontaneously, and I sense it all. Then, I remind myself of how those who want to read my work do so without a loaded question, and those who do not (and, perhaps, never do) find a way to tell me how I ought to find ways to get these words into more hands, how I ought to write more about things people often think of, how I ought to make it all approachable.

I do not know what people think about, but I reckon they think about their hearts here and there, and I feel they worry about others sometimes, and I am sure they struggle to find their place in the world. If my assumptions are valid, then these words are precisely what people think about, and the banality of my work is its appeal. But then, I wonder if facing what you think about often is even desirable. That could be the case. I, too, wish I could escape the unnecessary burden of being a living, thinking person now and then.

Although I am beginning this piece now, I am aware that all dressed up as I am, I would need to stop abruptly when I get a call, and so I must type quickly. The sentences can stay broken. I will fix them later. But it is crucial to get it into writing that weddings often make you think of love and that this does not help you, and neither does this harm you, but you think of it for a few moments, and then, I would bet, for a few days. And how you think about it changes based on whether you have someone you love at the moment or not. And how you think about it changes based on how sour or sweet love has been for you. And if it has been more sour than sweet, you may be someone who avoids attending these events of flair and fervour, and if, by the distance of your association with the people getting married, you cannot avoid them, you may find yourself in the quiet comfort of a drink too many at the open bar, or the rather noisy disquiet of dancing till your feet hurt, or sometimes, both of them.

I believe I would not be able to one-up the passage above today even if I tried, so I must stop here and force myself out of this room with a smile. After all, my friends wait for me at the bar, with varying proportions of how love has treated them sweet and sour, and so, we will all drink in those capacities tonight, and then, we will all get on the floor and dance our hearts out. There is little that can go wrong with a night like this, I reckon. The plan is set; the drinks are poured. Now, we go and celebrate the two others who have found one another with only one feeling in our hearts: not everything has to be about us. Tonight, we tuck all our sorrows, big and small, behind our Sunday bests. Tonight, we surrender all ourselves to them—the lucky ones.

There are many things to think about when you meet friends you have not met in a while. You notice the little shift in them and their mannerisms. The realisation that despite your apparent absence in their lives, their lives have moved forward, that we are only as crucial to a life as the amount of time we get to spend in it, starts to sink in slowly, at first, but then, abruptly and almost instantaneously. I have felt this many times before, and the last day has not been different either. But it always takes me by surprise; it almost sweeps the entirety of the Earth below my feet, and the last day has not been different either. But then, you cannot be in all lives at all times. We can only move in and out of them like characters in a stage play, doing the little we ought to do, talking just enough to push the story forward, not more, not less. So, now, after this wave of unimportance has lashed over me and washed me ashore, I can finally drink and have a merry time with people. Perhaps dance a bit if the opportunity allows.

It has come to my realisation that this slow dance with my thoughts, as I stare right through them, is something I end up doing each time. And no, I am not conceited enough to think that lives should pause till mine intersects with them. Even hinting at an idea like that would be a disservice to how much I adore people despite my nitpicks and never being able to meet them eye-to-eye on most things. In the end, there is no doubt in it—that I love all the people I have spent time with and ever broke bread with, that I sometimes feel uncomfortable that I was in their life till a particular year, a specific day, and that it has passed and I will only see them in passing, on events, in a chance encounter in another city.

But then, what can you do? You move forward with your life as people move with theirs. The cast changes, the story twists, but the heart remains, and the heart remembers. Perhaps there is some solace in this, then, that we can try and pick up where we left things off, only to get out of touch again. But then, there is solace in it, too, because then we can try again. At least, one could hope and try to see it this way.

I woke up about thirty minutes ago, and it is still early. I have enough time to do everything I wanted to before leaving. Looking in the mirror, I noticed how the number of greys on the sides of my head had grown rampantly. Nothing I can do about it, though, except accepting that I am getting older, and so are all my friends. Played a board game with my friend the other day, and talking during the game as you often do intermittently while talking about the game, he said he was considering treatment to get his hair fall under control. Of course, I encouraged him. When someone we know wishes for something, our sole duty as a person in their life is to encourage them. The caveat that the wish is not harmful to anyone else stands, of course. To live in a world where we have to spell this out each time, a world without nuance, breaks my heart. Then, there are those older than you who remind you that nuance left this world long before you were born. It is a gift not bestowed to all. In any case, I thought about how, all of a sudden, time passed so quickly that it zoomed right through all of us, causing a dramatic and unbridled ageing that had been absent until two or three years ago. The great greying, as I often dub it, has begun.

What can you do? Time passes regardless. I am sure those far older than me have more things to say about it than I can at the moment. All I know is that I have never felt more unprepared for life than I do lately. There was this steadfast certainty in my life that has dissipated like the early morning fog of November in front of the sun. It seems I have no plan whatsoever for the years to come. I have thoroughly internalised the presence of possibilities I struggled with a few years ago. Once a plague of indecision, it is now hope I feel, but then, it shakes me up that there is no way you can prepare for everything. I reckon I understood it all wrong all along. To be ready for everything is not about contingencies; it is only about being open to whatever time leaves on your doorstep before ringing the bell and running away.

I walk across the street that crosses into the main road. I notice the half-paved sidewalk. They seem to have covered more of it, but a few patches remain. Near them is a cairn of cement blocks stacked and balanced perfectly. A reminder of what this city was before and how it lived and died. Now, this city has changed, as have the people living in it, as have I. The fact remains, however, that change is good. They are making it better in every way, but the old bits have to come out, like weeds, like drywall, like the people we discard when we move onto better avenues, like how we, too, are left behind by others. To go forward and grow is a weird dilemma. There are parts you would want to retain, but keeping them would eventually remind you nothing has changed. It is not until you wipe the slate clean that you can chart a new course. But alas, the loss of leaving things behind is seldom talked about, yet it is still loss.

I reach the cafe, occupied morosely by this thought of change, of cutting out parts of the original like we do tumours, so I thought to call a friend, get my mind off things. The barista—who is new, too, and has replaced the old guys who I reckon have moved onto better things than making coffee for strangers and curating a wonderful list of tracks to play—brought me my coffee along with a sugar bowl to which I thanked her and said, “I would not need sugar,” something I have not had to say for years, not that I mind it but when you are lamenting over how things are changing, you might need your reminders spaced out by hours and not minutes. She smiled, and I nodded, and then she went back in. All said and done, I called my friend and asked how things were on his side of the country. We talked for a bit about this and that. Then, unprompted, he remarked about my willingness and receptiveness to change, of how effortless it was that I have always made decisions without regard to the comfort of familiarity. I chuckled.

I did not tell him that I was tired of fresh starts. I did not tell him how all this change around has discombobulated me. I did not tell him anything of this sort, but I did think of it.

I thought about it till the moment I slept.

The day has long since ended, but as long as I am awake, I can still write for today. For all intents and purposes, I am still thinking about the things that were on my mind until two hours ago when the clock struck midnight. What does the clock have on these words anyway? This is, after all, a deeply personal venture.

Earlier today, as I realised some irritation growing in me because of an impending trip, it was pointed out to me that my habitual unwillingness to visit other people, regardless of the reasons for their invitation, always falters in front of the fact that I go there anyway, but that I do not go there quietly. I throw a tantrum, and I bitch and moan about it. It is true, of course, and for good reason. The reason, as it always stands, is that my own life often gets derailed owing to an invitation. When I return and rest my bags on the floor, there is dust not just on the desk or covers but on the routine I so passionately adore. To make a life you enjoy waking up to is a never-ending exercise in consistency. It stands then that a trip I did not plan for would hinder the flow of my days, would spray water over the minute adjustments I have made in the days before the trip, which I will inevitably lose track of by the time I return.

But alas, I know myself too well. I will go there and have a merry time and come back and cry about it. This is a film I have watched enough times to know every frame of it by heart.

Creatures of habit do not pick and choose what they are bound to repeat. People like me—those who swear by their ability to repeat things—are no masters of their fate. We are but a set of instructions, like a script or a program. This, too, I am deeply aware of. I am bound to repeat all things major and minor. I make coffee a certain way no matter how much I try to change it, and I fall in love the same way, no matter how many times I try, too.

Continually, I find that people get on my nerves, and continually, I find it in me to get out and visit them still. Bound to go in circles, here I sit, writing two hours after midnight for a habit is a habit, and once you find yourself caught in it, there is little anyone can do to get you out.

Before I got a sense of myself, a measure of the minutiae of changes in me, the year ended. Now, December waits outside my balcony window. In a while, it will begin knocking. Perhaps I have taken things lightly. I have been wilfully aloof; now, I will bear the fruit of it or lack thereof. I should have been more strict with myself this year.

There is a specific brand of person, and I happen to be dead centre in it, who will do everything to fault themselves, and it has been this way for more years than I can consciously count. After all, until it hit me about twenty minutes ago, I thought November had just begun. I can keep track of time as deftly as I can find love in this life; the jury’s out on the latter, but the survey does not appear particularly gleeful or encouraging.

Major and minor disappointments have nothing on this night, which feels beautiful, energetic, almost impossibly larger than life. I feel this force surging through me. It tells me everything will fall into place. There is a calm touch to it, almost like a hug from a long-lost loved one, but there is also a fierce call to arms. At this moment, I feel I can do anything, yet I have made the conscious, somewhat pointless, decision to sit and write.

I feel my love for banality course through my veins again. How often we lose ourselves, I wonder, along streets and alleys of cities we may never visit again, in crowds of people who do not even know our name, in the dreams of others who rarely, if at all, give us a second thought? I reckon something like that must have happened to this little wayward soul of mine, wandering off into the strangest dangers like a toddler stumbling around in a new place.

Or perhaps it is the sun. Two afternoons in a row, I have stolen a moment to sit under the golden light sliding into my room and lay under it. Perhaps it is nothing but stolen warmth. I had nothing to do for an hour today, so I lay there, waiting. For what? Time to pass. Perhaps I had fewer of these moments this year. I ought to make time for this tête-à-tête with the sun more often.

Today, I could think of one thing and one thing only: how the world comes together every day. I walked down the street this evening and saw the grocer arrange the fruits in a particular pattern. Of course, he could chuck them in baskets, and they would sell still, but he takes his time, moment after moment, sale after sale, day after day, to find harmony in it. I do not know why he does this, and I would not presume to know why anyone does what they do. To fail to acknowledge it, though, would be a mistake more grave than presumption. And all I could think was the world at large, of how every life is infinitely more complex than I could imagine, that I could never get it right even if I tried my best to describe it. We can only observe parts and make sentences out of them. A life is larger than a few adjectives.

And today, all I could think about was these other lives: of how people who may not have done right by others still get favourable endings to their tables so long as they allow goodness in, of how random the lottery is to happiness, and how the train to joy is unpredictable, and how it makes stops you could not have known, and how often it breaks down in the middle, and yet, bills get paid and processed, tea and coffee continue to be served, the beer keeps pouring, shoes continue selling, offices fill with people and empty, computers and laptops are turned on, strangers working for each other for all time, always. The world, despite each one of its faults (of which there are many), is a beautiful experiment that continues to go on and on.

And today, all I could think about was how those whose tongues slither in shifty hyperbole sell us the snake oil of greater heights or larger purpose, but, I reckon, a cashier who sits day in and day out at a bank, regardless of why they do so, has more meaning than any guru telling you to unlock your potential, and there is no greater height you can reach than bending down to pick something up and hand it to the stranger who dropped it.

Today, I could think of one thing and one thing only: that the planet may spin on its own, but this grand collaboration makes the world go round.

Woke up completely out of sorts with myself and walked about the apartment like a man out of time, not knowing if it was the year on the calendar or the one I suddenly remembered. Stood on the balcony and tried to find parts of myself, personal effects of my soul, knick-knacks lost along the way. Walked back in empty-handed and kept waltzing into the same turmoil, running into the same wall over and over. It was not going to be an easy day but made it through. Won once again at the balancing act of being a person.

There is so much I do not share. I tell people the comings-and-goings of the day, the fluff and piffle, but the things that get me out of bed and going are reserved for myself and these words. That is what talking has devolved into. In many ways, one would call me a recluse, not because I live on a mountain like a hermit, but because of this public privacy I have in my life, this veil no one can lift from all of it, this invisible tarp that hides what is underneath it. And there is nothing nefarious, of course, but one does not need maleficence to be private, unlike what popular films have people believe. Sometimes, we are just tired, but often, habitual.

I could swear it is not for the lack of trying either. I begin conversation, and then, I find all my faculties sink into the background. If a thought arises, it is too far from my mouth for me to vocalise it. There was a time when I would talk about my greatest dreams and fears. Now, I tell people I do not have them. But I do. They keep me company in simple moments. Today, my fears woke me up—well, fears and failures. They told me things I do not wish to hear anymore. And then, they coloured my day as they preferred. There are days like this in all lives, I reckon. To be a person is to sign right above the line under a long agreement without reading the fine print, which often says there will be days like this, too.

“It’s nothing,” I have said so many times I do not need to think of it to verbalise it anymore. It camps at the tip of my tongue through days and nights, waiting to flood the conversation, inundate it completely with banal balderdash, in case I dare to open my mouth.

To make a decision, to decide on anything at all, even remotely, is to set things in motion, things we may not want to happen by the time they have snowballed into something we could not have known. This is what life is about. There are moments when we must decide something, and there are times we must bear whatever they brought forth. But between them are days, which often stretch to absurdly long stretches of years and decades, where we can only sit and watch things unfold, when we simply have to adjust day after day to the sinuous meanders made by the river of time, to the many blockades made by the boulders of circumstance, to the debilitating exhaustion of existence.

Sometimes, you are propelled early into a decision; you jump the gun as if running a sprint as the people watching, in the stands of your life, snicker at you. You reach it before your time, like the friend who persistently arrives an hour before everyone else. It is impatience, not punctuality, that causes this, and while it is as absent in my life as dew on grass on a scorching hot afternoon, there once was enough impatience in me that it trickled down into everyone. Haste was all I knew, and panic was all I could induce in others. Now, it is different, of course. A few decisions led me here, but I did not know that was the reward at the end of the tunnel. A reward may be hyperbole, of course, because as consequences often tend to be, the ones I faced were heavy and ponderous, and, fittingly, they taught me there is no place for haste when the road is long and dark. All of that is in the past, of course, and is now but a reminder of all the platitudes I have about patience, the importance of taking a breath now and then, the significance of stopping, of where I got them from.

And now, I have made a few decisions, too. What they are is irrelevant, but I know I have set things in motion again. It scares me a little, but there is no other way. I must live through the in-between again before seeing what has become of them. But the pebble has begun rolling downhill. That much, I am certain of.

I wonder what portrait these words will paint of me when they are read in one go, considering that it spans several years from the first piece to wherever I stop (if I stop). And this is not some want for assurance. There is no fallow, no dearth of assurance in my life. I am as steadfast, as surefooted as they come. At least, when it comes to knowing myself; it is other people and their intentions I doubt at all times, always—not to say I have gross mistrust for the world, only that I am cautious as one should be. To look at the world and see its potential is noble, but to see the world as it appears is correct. In my experience, for how things transpire, it pays far more to be correct than to be noble. Noble expectations only make your heart writhe in pain because they are rarely delivered on. To be clear, however, this is not an argument to not have them, only to temper them. We must all look at the world with the same measure of potential a devoted parent sees in their child as they take their first step. But we must also be wary, as the parent is, that the child may stumble still. But to return to what began this thought, which seems to have lost its way like a puppy who does not recognise its home yet: what picture do these pieces—all eight hundred or so—paint? I could never answer it, but I hope they paint a colourful one. The mood it invokes is not up to me, but I hope it is brilliant, vivid, and bleeds of colour. I hope that is the case.

The other day, I bought a red jumper to the shock and awe of most people I know or, at least, who happened to see me in it. This sudden onset monsoon of colour has trickled into my life and has not gone unnoticed. But when they ask me for a reason for this change, I tell them their guess is as good as mine. I wonder if this has caused my inquiry into what these words represent. Perhaps the answer for why I change when I do or what I become will be apparent when someone reads them in their entirety. That even if I cease to change, this chronicle of an irrelevant life will remain—I hope.

Maybe they will laugh because it would be as obvious as the sun in the sky. And through space and through time, they will let me know.