The other night, I stood on the balcony and stared at the hills. It is what most people who live in a valley do. I believe it is a global way to watch time pass us by—to stare at whatever is larger than ourselves, lost in awe. Some people stare at the sea, some at the mountains, and some at other people. In that moment, the hills sufficed for me, and as there is no set order in how thoughts creep up on you, a thought, perhaps carried along with the breeze, slid over my nape. I could not be sure if it was the cold or the severity of the thought, but there were goosebumps when the breeze stopped blowing. I thought of how all writers—whose job is to describe others and the world around them—crave the opposite. I thought of how I stood there, and no one would ever know of this, and how beautiful it was if I, too, was described in the way I described others. Most writers crave only this—they seldom admit it, and if they do, they do it in a moment where no one but the November breeze can hear them. I would much rather be described than be the one describing, but that is not how it has turned out, and no one who describes me will do so in the way I do for other things, and in the end, it will be as it is with most things in life: unexpected and insipid.
There is little else I can say about this; even if there was, it has been a day of much talking. I seem to have lost a part of what brings words to the page. The more I talk during the day, the less I can write about it. All writers crave a moment on the balcony at night. The breeze and the thought I talked of just now happened a few days ago. Perhaps, another quiet moment is in order. It has been a long week—and while colloquially, long means terrible, it is not how I mean it. I mean, it has been long as in how sometimes the night seems long simply because you overslept and woke up rested, and how a soft kiss that lasts only a few seconds seems long enough that you remember it for years, and how a week feels long simply because there was a lot in it worth celebrating—big and small.
That is all I mean when I say it has been a long week, and now, I must move into a quiet Saturday. There always is much to write about.