This piece is from an archive of sorts, written but forgotten in a folder somewhere I would not have looked had I not been inspired to write again, and longer than a day. That is the thing about inspiration, I wager: it strikes once, but often it does not hold, and then, it strikes again. Here is the lost bookmark, the last of its kind, the end of a proverbial era.
I have deliberated about it over and over—sitting alone at a chic, intentionally rustic cafe in a beachside town halfway around the world, on aeroplanes and at airports, in hotels and conference halls, in places both regular and absurd, in days I thought I would never have, the ones I wish I never woke up to live through, and all of the grey, pointless, colourless ones in between. I have thought about, to begin again, and to do it right, to “reinvent” as they call it, and after laying all that to waste, after idle days of pointless movement, unnecessary activity and rushing and rushing to reach nowhere, I have found that I am forever bound to be a creature of habit, and that there is little else I can do but write, and there will be little variety in it, and if there is any, it will be like how you have a million different flavours of coffee in the same mug over the years.
And what I mean by all of that is that I am back where I began, and the books stay unwritten, not for long, I hope. But until then, I must write, and if I must write, I must start where I know, and this is all I know, for better or worse. And so, this begins again, anew, like a weed that grows in your garden perpetually, in the same spot, in the same way, and each time you pull it out and think you have bested it, it returns in all its fervour and glory, until one day you decide it may as well be considered a part of the garden. That is what these vignettes have become for my life. And that is how I shall look at it for the near future.
Perhaps that is what we can say about it all and move along. Perhaps we can be on our merry way and carry on like nothing has changed. “There were words here once, and there are words here now, and let us leave the in-between to the in-between, and let us pretend like old friends often do that not an ounce of anything has changed.” Perhaps you could look at it like this, and I could look at it like that, too, and perhaps this error can be swiped by the simple act of putting one’s head in the ground—like most things in life.