journal.coffee

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.

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.