Life ebbed and flowed between pockets of happiness and phases of devastating sadness. Like most people, I’ve had my share of both. I’ve smiled for hours staring at the cityscape, coffee and conversation serving as proper footnotes to these bookmarks in my memory. I’ve stood on ledges to see sunsets for what seemed to be the last time, broken and distraught. I’ve loved and hated the cold showers in June in different years. I still refuse to carry an umbrella, learning nothing from every single time I’ve come home drenched. The human soul was oddly stubborn. There was inertia in emotion, or at least, how we perceived it.
I’ve held onto happiness hard enough to be the one squeezing it out of my life as if I were squeezing some ketchup out of a bottle. I’ve built homes in despair, taking into account the one semester I spent at architecture school. Of course, the houses were flimsy. I did not know much about building them; I built them in people. Everything I’ve felt has always been enveloped by my state of mind. Sunrises have saved me from myself; crowds have made me feel a belonging like none other. Everything in my life has been romanticised to the point of annoyance. But now, I am neither happy nor depressed. I can see everything for what it is.
It is a good change of pace for someone who has scoured for meaning all his life. Without the lens of what I feel, I see a cup of coffee for what it is, I see people for who they are, and my days are just days, one after the other, all of them a combination of everything I have felt before in different measures. The sunsets are sunsets; you could never guess the palette for the day. The rain is now water and nothing else. The fluttering leaves, masking the sun in a game of peekaboo, are just the leaves. Conversation is conversation, nothing more, nothing less.
All my days are still as they were, as they always have been, and all of life is still incredibly beautiful, abundant, and infinite. I believe the one thing that’s changed is my desire for meaning from it all. An unbiased audience, I see it with an unmatched clarity now. Beauty never needed a reason to exist. It was only here to be looked at, calmly.