air bubbles in the smog
I can’t stop reading Warda. I can’t stop reading the news – bearing witness with so many others across the world on the internet, for the little information that is tricking out from Gaza, those videos of screams and pleas and images of rubble and corpses.
There are so many voices out there exactly like mine – helpless and impotent. Amidst a Palestinian voice – don’t give up when we haven’t.
Hope is a discipline. I find myself slacking.
I feel moved to prayer, but I have forgotten how to.
I find myself back here again, after a self imposed exile (escape?) from the former blue bird place. Not that I ever left this place, but for the longest time I reconciled myself to the fact that this was a strange private voice, a diary of sorts available only for strangers and not friends. I understand the condition of those beginnings, but why am I still following this? I was supposed to have emerged into the world as an adult with agency, a coherent public and social self with varying grades of privacy to different circles of friends, colleagues and acquaintances – not a teenager still hiding her feelings in the internet.
A is front of me, working on an email draft – I suspect looking out for more opportunities, ie work, I am supposed to be working on a draft to ask for support. Basically I need money to get through the next 8 months – which I suspect is the time I need to find my ground and start ……….. I am just hiding in here. Because there is so much fear and shame at the thought of having to admit that here I am – 35 years old and a loser who has no savings to even support myself for 6 months, no partner, no kids, a 6 year old practice that I want no part of (being dramatic, but for parts of me this is true) and nothing but entusiasm and some rusty skill regarding the things that I want to be doing.
There are people who know their football and who have written better about this, but my heart breaks for Neymar – the true tragedy of modern football. Forever to be a what could have been, instead of a what was. I truly hopes he finds his redemption somewhere. I wish to find in his exit from football the kind of grace one found from Ozil and Henry.
Perioding heavily today, and finished Alison Slayer’s translation of Ernaux’s The Years yesterday in the train. Tried picking up Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies, but perhaps it is too early after Ernaux. Will pick up Mieville today and tomorrow, and maybe leave Sivanandan for the weekend. Monday, I get the Baltasar book, and I am truly looking forward to that. There is always Borges too.
They are all coming together whether I like it or not – the person I think I am, the person I would like to be but cannot, the person I would like to be but need to act on, the person I am becoming and the person I pretend to be. Something so joyful about watching Leo Messi in MLS – the ridiculousness of Busquets looking around before making a comfortable assist, the ease and acceptance with which he is embracing this non competitive exercise – such a step down from the rigour of his European career – like its ok to let go. I mean, yes, he has won everything he needed to win and I am sure that helps with being gracious – but I am finding a kind of permission in it for me to look forward to my next phase of life.
I dont feel the urgency I felt in my 20s and even my early 30s to make something of myself. I am content to work and make sense of the things I see and feel. To embrace them without manipulating or moulding them, comparing them with desires past and feeling their indequacy feels like a challenge and one worthy of rising to – but here I am. Doing what I need to do.
the line of young trees that my window overlooks; the ones that I am slowly learning to love despite them blocking the sea, are just tall enough for the new leaves to be at precisely my eye level when I look up from the desk. Looking up, in my idealised self, from all the deep writing and work that I do in this time and space I have set up for myself, but mostly from doomscrolling twitter over coffee on a good day, or reading from questionable fanfiction over coffee and cigarettes on a bad one.
im not entirely sure I can ever be the writer that shows rather than tells; my writing is mostly for myselves, and more often than not, an explanation or a narration on what the hell is going on. the central question of my mental health is who the hell is doing the narrating at any given point of time. the best narrator usually recedes, does the telling for whoever needs it far away from my consciousness . the worst one is a puppeteer, pulling the strings of my body to move and do the things I need to be doing, I ought to be doing and therefore I want to be doing.
responsible division is one of the methods I have had most success employing – like a mother allotting time for each child with that favourite doll or the grandmother dividing the limited amount of side dish to each of her children’s children. the longest vacation I have ever taken in the past five years was a successful lesson in letting go of the adult I had to perform – modelled on the bitter woman who failed in sensuality and domesticity and eccentricity and now has to make do with mediocrity. I have now come home to a simmering angry child, who needs to step away from all those suspect adults who have taught her to temper her wickedness, who transform her dreams into fantasy, and desire into impossibility. I keep her company these days as a priority, even as I continue to perform in the outside world.
Dont want to live like this.
On the 8:30 to Mylapore from Thiruvanmiyur, I snag the last seat in the compartment.
Teenage girls in blue polka dot uniforms. One call, the tallest one, in the middle, protecting a purple balloon signed witth some 40 odd names. Station arrives – the other girls shepard the balloon carrier. The always weary ladies of the compartment gently refrain from chasing the clock till gang passes.
regrets
shaped like daily walks
in unbroken ancient roads
along trees dear as friends
these maps show pasts trodded
and futures rejected
regrets
shaped like an old predator
feeding you old dreams
and feasting on your promise.
It feels as if we were already in Lockdown, and in many ways, I have been in Lockdown since last year. I am not like my mother, who perhaps left home exactly twice since February 2020. I went to work everyday since August, been shopping once with P., went to a restaurant twice, went to one engagement (an outdoor gathering), went to two dinners at home, hosted one for New Years Eve with two other friends.
When listed it seems more substantial than what it feels like in my head. And in many ways, it is. I can list this down and this list is it.
So here we are again. In many ways, this lockdown is for me a challenge to not repeat the spiral of last year. In some way, I am already spiralling more thoroughly, in all parts of my life – from yoga to smoking to cooking to taking the dogs for walks and bathing him. But I am hopeful that I let it all go in the knowledge that I will start gathering it all up again, and find my way back to myself.
Moon not full
the laburnum droops.
The road dark, a pack waits,
the mutt stalls.
Move toward the sea,
loud where the street is not.
Throat itch – heart race.
A pace away
the man finds his calm
a while after he breaks down.
The dog halts, I turn
Head burn, heart ache.
Our Daily Breath 