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I sit with a cup of coffee and my eyes half open while the sun, its soft light, continues to seize all of this town and its torpor. I hesitate to begin the day. There is a limbo between when I wake up and before I become a real, moving part of the world. I find myself there often, and mostly, it is the only place I find myself at home. I rarely want to leave it; I am cooped up cosily there.

For all my readiness, I rarely am ready. For all my presence, I am almost always aloof. Every day I live is in resistance to my nature. Maybe, that is the problem with making things look easy. As time passes, people forget it was ever hard, ourselves included. I sit here, and I do nothing. I am not ready to be a person yet, I tell myself. Let me finish my coffee and get back to you in about ten minutes. With all that haggling done, I lean into the chair, let my shoulders down, and look out the window at nothing.

The morning I wrote the above passage was two mornings ago. Now, it is almost midnight two nights later, and I sit here, my shirt unbuttoned and a glass of wine on the table. For all its tribulations, this life I live is a good one. This is not washed over me, but a man forgets now and then. Guilty as charged, I accept that this realisation has come too late this year. I seem to have had my head in the sand for so long; it’s June already!

A tardy spring and gratefulness are how I will remember this year. While walking on the sidewalk last evening, I noticed the bougainvillaea had gone out of its way to cover it. I was too tall for it now, and my hair kept brushing against it. It was then, perhaps, that it must have hit me, or maybe, at some party, or while I laughed about some things I have no control over. I do not know where my disposition went or why the world’s heaviness crushed my shoulders for so long, but it was there. Now, it seems to have taken its bow, made its exit, and given way to an excess of daisies, which seem to have begun a conquest on the pots in the garden below this apartment complex.

I said this year was slow. Perhaps, it is right on time. After all, now that I say it out loud, I wonder, who am I to decide?

Making coffee this morning, I did not know what I would do for the day. I had a general idea like how we have a general idea about how our friends spend their days, but if I were asked to describe either in excruciating detail, counting the unforgiving minutiae, I would be both an unkempt person and a terrible friend. But since no one has such questions, I am spared. I envy those who know what they want in life. I map out every corner of my day on most days because I wander aimlessly. For all checklists I scratch off every day, if someone asked me where I was going, I would not have an answer. Honestly, I would not know where to begin. My dreams change like the weather in this city, which graced us with the sun for precisely one and a half days before sweeping up a gust out of the blue and deciding it would be a storm again. I resemble this sky more than I do any picture anyone has made of me in their mind. For all their surety, I am filled with doubts. I often tell people I do not know how this story ends, that I will be fine with whatever ending I get. The ending is not my concern.

But every so often, I wish it were. I wish I cared about the times I live in, not the centuries that have long passed and the decades I will never get to see. I wish I cared enough to be bothered by this vagueness. But I do not. I do not care about where things go as long as they keep heading somewhere. I believe movement is enough. When things stop moving is when I will be concerned. I know it was not this way earlier. Somewhere below all this, I remember knowing where things were going, steering the course, and not giving in to the forces of time and fate. But like someone who wakes up on an island, having fought unbelievably well against nemeses they can never defeat, I, too, have no intention of setting sail again. I, too, am grateful that I can still walk, that things still move and that everything is in the right place. There is no greater blessing than braving the storm and coming out unscathed, for whatever it is worth.

But somewhere deep down, a voice has started to emerge. I can hear it sometimes, inciting rebellion within me. Its whispers have gotten louder.

Perhaps out of general exhaustion and lack of acknowledgement on any given day, or maybe, out of randomness, I let myself slither into the more selfish parts of who I am this morning. Since then, it has been a day immersed in the sad thanklessness of what I call life. They teach us never to expect credit, that it is perverse and immoral, but why should someone do anything then?

There are times when you do the work, and if all goes correctly, I wager there is a moment of celebration or acknowledgement. A farmer toils for harvest. There is no other reason for his work. Bushels of grain and fruit is why he bears the sun, day after day, over and over. And if they are empty season after season? I reckon he will find another line of work. But what of all we do for the world we live in, for the corner we call our life? Do you ever get a chance to reap something out of it? Part of me knows this lacklustre feeling of being overlooked is but exhaustion, but on some days, we can throw a tantrum and bitch about the parts of our lives we don’t quite like.

I detest this part: for all my motivation to do good work, to do good, in general, to do the right thing whenever I can, I barely garner claps or a note of thanks. Often this does not bother me at all. Then, there are days when I wake up, and my first thought is the pointlessness of my actions. Even these words that I write day after day are acknowledged sparingly, if at all, and if they are, it is by those who already know about them.

For the better part of a decade, I have been fighting uphill for everything, to live a righteous and better life, not to waste most of it, and if I stumble or err, to do better. I have beaten myself up to an alienation I cannot explain. Ultimately, all my noble habits are for nought, all my words remain hidden, and I go unnoticed no matter where I am. This feeling has engulfed me today, like this quiet, purple June sky has engulfed the city. Perhaps, there is nothing else left to do today but to take a walk and sleep. It is a thankless existence for most of us. No snare drums thump for our arrival. We move silently from one place to another, busy living as they taught us to.

I almost always skip breakfast, and sometimes, by the time I pour milk over some cereal, it is already past noon. And I believe people have all sorts of things to say about it, but then, they have all kinds of things to say about everything. I don’t pay much heed to what people have to say, and I have people to thank for that. When they tell me I behave like a child if I make a pun too many, or drink myself out at a party as if it was my first, or continue to carry with me the interests I had as a little boy, I do not care for it, not anymore.

Perhaps, it is because they are correct. After all, only a child is bold in the most harmless, softest of ways. A pun does not hurt anyone; it only makes them feel the envy of never being able to let go of their adult pride to say something ridiculous and mildly funny, and the other things have similar results. Whenever someone calls you a child for doing something, they secretly wish they dared to do whatever it is, too, and when they realise they have been living wrong all this time, they have no choice but to paint it wrong, but it is not so; it is only different.

There are parts of me that do not fit well with most of what we call the world, and it is none of my concern. All trees are the same to us, but to all trees, every tree may be different in ways we do not understand, even beyond the superficial turning of their branches or the colours of their leaves—things that we do notice if we have it in ourselves to look up on any given day, which rare for most people, but it does happen.

Of course, as is with all things, this is a game of balance. For every bill you struggle and pay, you must climb a wall for no other reason but to check if you can do so. For every difficult conversation you have, you must splash on a puddle to wash the dirt of age. And for every impossible situation you face, you must make a harmless pun that makes them roll their eyes. Where do you get all these terrible jokes, they ask me? It is an urge I cannot resist, I tell them. It comes to me, and I must say it out loud.

Between you and me, if I don’t, I might grow old like all of them. Now who wants that, I wonder.

Didn’t write for what—how many days? Three or four or maybe more; did not keep track, of course, was too busy living. Made several notes here and there and forgot about them until I sat at the desk.

The process is easy. I refuse to believe it begins somewhere or ends somewhere. It starts when you feel something enough to put it down and ends when you write the last word, but when would I ever write it? There is always something more to write after you are done writing. There are more pieces I have not written than the ones I finish, and many I have left midway kept like dough kept in the corner to ferment and rest. I think every person must live first before they tell a story. Living always comes first—documenting it, sharing it comes later. Many befuddle it and have it the other way around. I pity them.

Yesterday, I took a nap on the plane because the sky was too bright, the clouds too white, and I was too tired to look out and bear it all, and a sentence came to me: no matter who you are and where you come from, there will be some struggle, and in the end, only you will know it. It will be your weight to lift, your cross to bear, and as much as telling others is an option, you will never find the words or the opportunity—which is often more critical. If you have ever tried confessing your unending love for someone, you know the struggle of finding them at the right moment and by themselves, which is, again, more important. People are rarely alone anyway. Their thoughts, regrets, and other badges and patches of time and worry travel with them. But that is not the topic at hand; my digressive roundabout ways of saying things get on my nerves as much as they do others, sometimes. The case is that no matter who you are, you will struggle with something. This is, of course, an obvious realisation about yourself. Ask anyone on the street if they have ever struggled, and they will tell you: naturally.

But this is not as obvious when you think of others, and it is the more difficult thing to admit: as much as I have struggled, others have, too, in things they don’t tell me, especially in them, like all I refuse to mention even when given a chance, or a thousand.

I’ve thought about time. It does not surprise me, nor was I able to make any major or new observations. But it does not mean I didn’t think about it. Most thought is routine; you do it like the dishes or cooking the few things you know how to cook well. That is to say: you do it without volition and almost robotically. It would happen even if you weren’t thinking about it, and it would happen precisely as it would if you had your mind set on it. That is how I think about time. It occurs independently, and I don’t have to move a muscle to trigger the thought. I reckon there are topics like this for all people. For me, it is time, its passage, its importance, its monotony and its omnipresence.

I sit on this bus, as I have done many times before. Like the dishes, like writing, like everything else that I do over and over again, it has all melded into one another. There is no particular memory I have of travelling in an overnight bus. I just have a general idea of how it goes and what happened when I was on a bus once, but separating it all and sifting through it is impossible. Time has cast a patina on it all. It’s all safe and protected and forever hidden from even myself. But most of all, like all things with a little burnish on them, it is colourful and vibrant.

I reckon, in the end, it all becomes this: a collection of general ideas. I will never befriend someone new like the first few times, and indeed, I will not fall in love and know about it. It will happen and get melded with the many times I’ve experienced it before. There is nothing new to feel anymore. All the new gets sorted into a label before it even happens, and why does it happen? Time, of course; why else? It is time that blunts the effect of novelty.

Many people would think ill of this idea, and immediately, conditioned as they are to say the right thing, even when no such thing exists, they will retort by saying something that has been rinsed and repeated a million times by all sorts of people. There is always something new that can happen; they might say, not knowing that their mindless regurgitation of the idea defeats their defense on its own.

All day, every day, I sit and work and go through meetings through a screen, and I send other people messages and work some more, all the while looking outside the window and thinking whether I could stop all that and write. I have done that before, however; I tried that life. Now, if I meet someone who wants to write, and if they think of quitting their job or business or whatever else puts food on the table and keeps the lights on, I tell them it won’t work that way, no.

First of all, a writer does not need any time to write. They do, however, need time to read. Then, they need to eat, to splurge on whatever their choice of beverage—or poison—is, and to live in a place—which could be a home, a hostel or whatever puts a roof over their head. For all of that, they need something to pay the bills with, and that sometimes is the first thing that often gets the axe. I know now: if you’re going to be a writer, you’re going to have to write, but if you’re going to always be a writer, you’re going to need a job, and yes, I am playing fast and loose with the word, and all I mean is you’re going to need something that brings the money in. Only then can you write without worry when the refrigerator is stocked, and there are snacks on the shelf, and when you write without worry, you write well. The words flow carelessly—that is how you want them to flow.

And if you don’t have time to write now and then, fret not, don’t worry about it; this is a marathon, and most die running before they reach the finish line. Be blessed; every moment you get when you are not writing is a moment you can later write about. That is the trick of the trade. When a writer sits at a desk to write, he writes, but usually, it takes time to reach the desk. Sometimes it takes a few hours, sometimes, it takes days, but often, it takes a good night’s sleep, and, which is more, all of that time eventually ends up on the page. Nothing is ever wasted. The whole profession is built on the backs of the scrappiest of scoundrels, splurging seconds like sultans.

Dark clouds loom over town as if something is about to go wrong. It makes me curious how we suspend disbelief in ordinary things in the name of art. Clouds are ominous in narrative. But when it rains, it just rains. We know this all too well, but when we read a poem or watch a film, we doubtlessly think them harbingers of something awful. But it is not awful—it is the most usual thing. More storms are swept daily than we can count. Far worse things happen, and we never bat an eye.

I sit at my desk, and the burst of light from the window has dwindled in lieu of this weather, but push has still not come to shove—I have not gotten up to turn the lights on, and now, only this corner I sit in beside the glass door of the balcony has any light on it. The rest is engulfed in the soft shadow of the evening already. I am lazy in this regard. Most of what I do—daily and in life—is rarely ahead of time. It is always in the nick of it that I do whatever I expect of myself, and what of the expectations of others? I do not care much about it.

I have learned there is only one promise to keep in this life: to do what you told yourself you would do—whether it comes of your own volition or from a request is a different thing. But we must never succumb to expectations. People expect the most from others and the least from themselves. My expectations of myself are humongous; it leaves no time and space to think of what others expect of me. There has always been one rule: to do what I said I would do, and I have made myself proud, and I have let myself down enough to know not all of us can win all the time, but we all can win sometimes.

I was talking to someone about the reluctance to improve in the average person a few days ago, and it occurred to me that the only thing the average person has to do is be a smidge better, and what average means changes on its own. But I did not say it on the off chance that they considered themselves average. You do not want to offend anyone, not until you intend to. It is like spilling something on the floor. You never want it to happen, and it does happen now and then, and when it does, you spend hours wiping it off.

The events of my days are wrapped into cardboard boxes and kept in the corner of my mind. The dates scribbled haphazardly as if I had no time to hide them. Of course, I did not have any time! Before they even happened, people asked you how things went. There wasn’t a moment to spare. You had to be nimble and preserve things before they even had a chance to ask anything and ruin them. My need to protect all I can from this life, for not sharing anything besides the bare minimum and the irrelevant but comical or jocular, has had an overgrowth. Now, all my life hides obscured by grass no one has mowed in years, intentionally. The best way to protect things from people is in plain sight, right in front of their eyes, and under their noses.

You tell them all your days look the same, but no two days are truly alike; there are subtle differences, but you do not reveal them. You omit them like a letter hidden between the neatly folded handkerchiefs in the almirah drawer. You tell them nothing worth telling has happened lately, even if a lot has happened lately. You only tell them it is nothing worth telling. It has already happened, and all you feel about it has been felt. Why open it to scrutiny or, worse, misunderstanding? Ever so often, excitement transforms into confusion when someone completely misses the point. People come with their ideas, opinions or whatever else they come with; it is better to tell them a joke than tell them things. You laugh and have a good time. No harm is done, and you still like them when they leave. And sure, this may incur some loss. There are always those who want to listen and celebrate or mourn with you, whatever goes, but their numbers dwindle as you move forward in life. No one needs to be privy to your life. At best, they deserve your disposition, which you can keep cheery by looking at the world often.

The rest goes as it does. Years pass, and no one knows the battles you fight or your greatest victories; it is all kept close to your heart, safe and unadulterated. You can remember things and feel exactly how you felt when they first happened. You look at the view from your balcony; you don’t miss a thing.

I woke up at an hour I dare not say. I had been tired to the last cell in my body, and I did open my eyes now and then all morning. Then, I pulled the blanket over myself and slept again. To be out in the world meant that you had to be ready for it, and to be ready for the world was not something you could take lightly. I was not ready the first, second or third time I woke up, but I was ready when the doorbell rang with a parcel.

It always came in the nick of time. You could spend your whole life preparing for a moment but only feel ready at the precipice of it. You could wait years to confess something and miss every opportunity, but only when your heart was thumping harder than the pistons on the engine of a train and only when your voice shivered as if you were standing knee-deep in snow on new year’s eve, did you find that you were ready. Every moment before the second you would utter the words would convince you there was still time, but only when you finally say what you had to say would you learn how tardy you had been.

This was true for all things. There was a trick to it: you let life decide. You let the moment push you to the edge. There was no such thing as being ready in my experience. I was nineteen years old when the beats of my life changed overnight. When I woke up, I had no choice but to learn to dance.

How it changed is irrelevant. They say details make things intimate and vulnerable; I say they are alienating. If I tell you about a cafe without telling you the street it is on, you will see the cafe you frequent in my words. If I tell you its name, it will go in one of two ways. If you are familiar with it, your concern will turn to the veracity. And if you don’t know it, you will think of it as some mythical place in an itinerary you might never fulfil.

Life thrust me into readiness that morning all those years ago, as I am sure it has pushed all of us at some point. But it was not immediate. Funnily enough, it was precisely like today. My phone chimed, and I somehow knew why and how life would never be the same. So, I did the reasonable thing: I pulled the blanket over myself and slept, but when it chimed again, I was sure I was ready.

I walked to the cafe this evening. I had not done this in days because they had been long, and when not that, they had been stormy. I crossed the patio and pushed the glass door, which was locked. The lights were still on, so I stood beside some girls who, I realised, were waiting. But I had not yet decided to wait, and then, I decided it was not worth it, that the walk to the coffee shop was the change of pace I needed in the first place. The coffee is but a dog ear in the corner of that chapter.

I walked away, but as I walked over the grass and out the gates, I could not help but think of how everything was topsy-turvy this year. I had noticed the blossoming sidewalk on my way, with bougainvillaea and other flowers I do not know the name of yet. I whiffed their aroma as I spontaneously bent and manoeuvred my way from under them, and I remembered June was about to begin. It was a tardy year, and in some way, it was the first time the world emulated my disposition.

Then, I thought of the arbitrariness that surrounded me, of how we rarely ever knew what we would do or say until we did those things. It’s all in the capricious decisions based on the most flimsy rationale that life happens, justified only by the person making them. The rest is but entanglement, how paths intertwine and how each decision affects the other, and often, we remain entirely unaware of our impact in changing the tempo of someone’s life. It was the most obvious observation made nonchalantly on an unremarkable evening. For a second, I thought about all the people I had crossed paths with, how we had gone our separate ways without realising what the last word was, and that is what had all my attention for the rest of the evening—of how little it all had mattered, how little I had thought about it, and how we often only collide like molecules in a room.

I reckon if I made small talk with those waiting alongside me outside the locked glass door, I would know a few more people in the city, but then, eventually, it would all come down to not knowing each other. I would move someplace else, or they would stop coming to the coffee shop, and we would not realise a thing like no one never does.

To whom it may concern,

I leave this hastily written letter and all my words in hands I trust.

I began writing this barrage of prose on a whim, like how I do everything. When it is the end of the day, when the work is slowly subsiding to the edge of my mind, a parallel to the setting sun outside, I often decide to take a walk. Now, I do not plan to go to the coffee shop on most days, and often, I stand outside the gates to the patio and decide whether I should stop for a cup of coffee or let it be. On most days, I stop for coffee. In many ways, these words have been like any of those walks; like most of them, there is now a decision to make. Before I pass the building by, and it is too late to go back, I must make a stop. I must leave things as they are, and I must get a bit of rest. That is what I plan to do for some time—to lay under the sun, to live a life, and to let time happen to me in its own way. I seem to have said all I have to say for now, at least how I tend to say it.

Now, I must wait for either of them to change. It is an age-old adage, after all, that change is good. We must reinvent ourselves now and then, lest it all get a bit stale. It seems I have found my proverbial coffee shop, and I must stop for a moment and take stock of where I am and where I want to go—which is always more important. I shall sip my days away and not have a word to say about them. At least, for a little while, I hope. Breaks are awfully scary, after all. You think you will take a week or two; before you know it, a decade has passed.

But then, for how long can a writer live without writing? Not long, I reckon. Not long at all.

For now, however, I must live this wonderful, beautiful life I have built.

I have sat here for three hours now, wondering why no word seems to click and no sentence begins to form. First, I thought that I had lost the nerve, that I had drunk the last drop from the well, and maybe, the pond was dried up. But then, I realised that a thought had been stuck for a while now, and the gears had finally come to a halt. Now, I have to dislodge it somehow, and I do not know where to begin. A few days ago, in a conversation about nothing in particular, I told a friend that strong emotion is what we need to write. Anger, grief and love are the usual suspects, and I seem to have none. I seem to have lost all my anger, for I realised it was grief, and all that grief in the past has made me too cautious about love.

All in all, mellow emotion can only take me so far, and it is not for the lack of trying. I try to open my heart, but it is futile; the key is lost, and I do not know where to begin my search. I have retraced all my steps, and I cannot find it. How easy it is to write about someone you love! Like magic, the words flow out of you. It has been a while since I experienced this, and it was not a problem until I did not say it aloud. Now, I have; it has but paralysed me. All my emotion is mellow, like this ever-present cup of coffee on this table. Nothing has ripped my heart to shreds recently—no love and surely, no grief. And while the world has plenty of reasons ready to fuel my rage, my patience makes it impossible for me to feel any flavour of it. In the end, these words suffer for all of it.

How long can one write about the seasons, their changing, and about people they do not know? How long can we talk of the world that does not know of us, that thinks of us like a statistic, a number among many? How long can we speak of joy without being able to share it outside our words? I see a sort of indifference growing within me. I do not know if I can write much longer if things continue this way. For the first time in my life, I am unsure. Perhaps, all things reach the end of the line one way or the other or, often, for reasons beyond our control.

More than the struggles of right and wrong, more than adventure and novelty, my life will be filled with the struggles of the mundane. Most choices will barely matter when day after day, I will face the dastardly deplorable decision to lie down in bed under the warm blanket for a minute or so. Often, this, too, will be like playing with fire. On many occasions, I will be unable to douse the flames in time, lose control of things, and inevitably fall asleep. Then, in some dream, someone I have never met will come across and ask me for the time, and the mild realisation will open my eyes and drag me out of the dream and out of bed in one fell swoop.

I am always at battle with myself, pushing to go a little further, just a smidge, just a bit, with no consideration for the state of things. There are worlds inside me; I have little else to think about. I often stay occupied with this dilemma of resting or working, these inner struggles of the daily to the point of aloofness in the real world. Sometimes, I feel as if I only pretend to be a person, but, in fact, I am a more simplistic experiment. I look around my life as we often look at a landscape from far away, knowing we are not in it but that we are here to watch it unfold, that without the narrator, there is no story, and no moment is true without someone experiencing it. My days appear to me like a field of flowers, verdant and lush, spanning acres, and then, they feel like a gaping gorge to cross, an incredible leap. But mostly, they feel like a sort of grey, flavourless cafe, with a simplistic table and run-of-the-mill decor. Most of my days meld into one another because of how similar they appear from afar.

Should I have a cup of coffee or slash and burn my entire life? These are the kind of questions I ask myself on most days. I never have an answer, so I live again through the day, and then, when I do the dishes, and there is still time before the clock hits midnight, I look at the bed and enticed, I overestimate my ability to lie down only for a second, only for a minute, only enough to not lose myself in my dreams. Then, I wake up in the middle of the night with shame, get to the desk and get to work.

Earlier this afternoon, I had the time and inclination to write the right words. Why did I not sit and write then? Well, because there were obligations to complete and meetings to attend. I believe most writers, including me, prefer writing in the morning or as soon as they wake up because there is little to no noise in your mind. There are no troubles, and reality is often masked by the world of your dreams. If you let the day get on too far, it becomes harder to find the words. They are often quieted by the echo of the people in your life, the jokes and banter from a television show, the calls from your account manager at some bank, or the plethora of emails and messages, all of them asking for your attention, a piece of your mind. I missed the opportunity to write with a cleaner mind once again. It does not mean I cannot write to the best of my ability, but the writing of the morning and the writing after you have lived through a day are different. You can read any work—a poem, a few sentences of prose, or a novel—and know precisely when it was written during the day. It gets glaringly obvious once you notice it.

I will not go into the differences or give you a rubric on judging which is which, for that is not my job. As is evident, I barely have my own life in order as far as the knowing of things is concerned. In many ways, my life is not some chic, snobby orchestra that I like to pretend it is; on most days, it is messy jazz playing in a small, cramped pub that smells of booze spilt on its sticky floors. I believe most lives are like this in the end. We try our best to do it all, to live like we have any control over anything, but ultimately, we are all just building it as we go. It is a creaky tenement in need of repair at all times, always. It is a project that never sees its end. It is a garden that always needs weeding. Some days are straightforward, some are topsy-turvy, and an artist must sit and work on all of them.

A lofty goal; if only I could talk to someone about it all. But then, they would only tell me “there is always tomorrow” and to let it go, that this obsession is pointless. I reckon it is called a lonely profession for a reason.

I have little to say about where my life is going, but I know that when I was done unpacking and cleaning some of the apartment last night and when I was done doing the dishes, which were not as many since I had only come back earlier in the evening, I went to close the curtain on the window. Before I dragged the grey curtain, I noticed this white cloud—a streak across the hills. Almost opaque, it seemed to have wrapped around the mountains like we do a scarf around our neck. We do it until we are sure it is spring. I cannot tell you where my life is going, but I am still curious; I still look around and doubt myself. If all those are true, it will be okay eventually. Wherever I end up, I will have made the correct decisions to get there, so I will have little to complain about. A simple cloud can make me feel incredible joy. What else is there? What else, indeed.

When they ask me: what did you do with your life? I will tell them I worked hard. Yes, I worked hard like my father, my mother, and their parents before them, but I stopped to look at the birds when I could. I will have that to my credit. It will have happened. I will have stopped a thousand—no, a million—times before to look at it all, to look at the big, bright world outside. I do not need a hut in the hills or a shack on the beach. I have no need to reject all we know.

Talking to a friend about art at a late hour when there was little else to do but talk about what we spent all of ourselves doing, I was asked to describe all my work in a single sentence. Of course, I could not do it. “But what will someone get out of your words?” He asked. “They will have read,” I said.

We talked more after that, but today I remembered that moment again. I know the answer to his question, too, and it is precisely how I have lived my life so far. I have done things for the sole purpose of doing them. The parts of my life reflect its whole and where it is going. Like how I write or how I love, it will have been lived for the act of living.

I will have lived and died; along the way, I will have stopped to look at the sky. What else is there? What else, indeed.

Enough days without a goal in sight, enough sitting around idly, enough chatting about nothing with everyone I meet. I must begin my life again tomorrow—the time for vacation is over. For a good reason, too. A life that is always on holiday is no life at all. Everything must ebb and flow like waves under the red sun in the evening. Stability is a myth, and to lie down and do nothing each day is as terrible as never stopping at all. All extremes burn those who reach them; to stay in the middle is a careful balancing act. It is also a virtue to cultivate. The good news is that we get to try every day.

At the end of the day, I sit here, still baffled by the fact—as I have been for years now—that we can be in one place when we begin a day and entirely another by the time it ends. It may seem simple, of course, given that the plane was brimming today, as they always are, but it is still a marvel and one that is not as old as one might think. It is a novelty in the history of this species to have the dust from two places with hundreds of miles between them gather on the same shoe in the span of one day. But all this is possible because the world works. Despite all its problems and errors, it works. For all the issues we have yet to solve, we have solved twice as many, and it was only possible because some people did balance it out: to work and to wonder in equal parts.

A puppy sleeps about twenty hours daily and runs and pants for four. A person has no such liberty. We must find something we are good at or at least can do and then do it, so the world works. Most people I meet see this as some sort of burden. I see it as a privilege. All our contribution is a walk on the tightrope we must learn to do daily. Most of it is some sort of work; the rest is, well, rest.

A peculiarity I have noticed in these past years, building a life in a place and tearing it down to go somewhere else, is our tendency to get used to things. It is almost laughable how I, like most other people, think there is any sort of definition to myself when all it takes for me to get used to a different self is a few days. It is funny how quickly we learn our way around new streets, how fast we learn the language and the slang, how parts of ourselves change completely, or how a place we vacation tends to hold us as tightly as where we came from, so long as we choose to stay.

It baffles me because of how strict we are with our preferences, when in the end, if you only try to jump ship and live somewhere else, it would all fit eventually, after some mild discomfort. Our preferences do not matter as much as our circumstances at first, and mostly, it is what happens to us rather than what we choose that determines how our days are going to be, where we will live and how we will sound. All that is true until we choose.

It tears me up when I look around at other people, at this world we have built. Nothing matters; nothing should exist, yet all of it is here and fights back every day. I have so much love for this attempt, for it all, of how we continue seeking. There is little that amazes me more than this tenacity to keep going, this urge in all of us to keep moving. Last evening, as I sat watching the waves ripple over one another, folding like the hands of lovers, intertwined, unsure of who held first and who held tighter, it all occurred to me in one fell swoop: this life, the things that have occurred in it is all one massive coincidence, but now that it has happened, I must take charge.

That is how the story of humanity goes, after all: one day, a group of people began walking away from the middle of nowhere because something in them chose to do so, and in their footsteps, they wrote the story of all of us. Humanity is a story of call and response. Till there are people, there will always be the great attempt. As long as things happen to us, we will continue to happen to them.

The taxi drives by the sea, and the breeze makes me smile, almost spontaneously, on an otherwise muggy day. It has been a calm afternoon, filled with walking under bougainvillaea trees blossoming with white, magenta and pink flowers. They say a good bouquet has no wasted elements in it. It fills me with certainty that I, too, belong. In all these little realisations, my doubt has slowly dissipated into thin air over the years.

Cities have memories, too, and this city has made me remember several things I had forgotten once. The many neighbourhoods I walked through all those years ago have said their hellos and greeted me like an old friend. The one you forget but who remembers you and comes to you after looking at you from afar and says, “Do you remember me?” You pause, look at them, and quickly search the archives of your memory. “Of course!” You say, “of course, I remember you!” The days I’ve spent lately have been like that, only there are no familiar faces here to remind me of things, but there are places.

I thought of love—on second thought, that is untrue. To say you thought of something suggests you were not thinking of it before, but for all my misfortune with it, I am always thinking of love. I did not think of love, no. I only cupped it with my hand like how we do water when we drink from a stream—interrupting it, taking some of it for ourselves. Perhaps, this is also how we love others. Now, after all these years, the limitless love I held for someone has slowly reworked itself into love for this scenic world, like a parting gift never given ends up on the shelf.

I am deeply in love with the people and the world around me. I seem to have forgotten how to pick the crowd apart to find someone in it. Just the other night, as I looked at the water, sitting amidst thousands of others, I could not even find myself in the crowd, let alone someone else. All my want to stand out has disappeared like faint remembrance.

One might say I am lost, but “no,” I would argue, “now, I am found.”

I sit at the table in the corner of this coffee shop, fighting my sleep. I can only think of one thing in the pockets of my wakefulness: that there are people in my life, and I do not know who put them there. They seem to have appeared out of nowhere, like a patch of flowers in the early days of spring, and now that they are here, I must do my best to be around them. Some people I recall entering my life like a guest who knocked on the wrong door, but the others, I can’t much place. One day I woke up, and they were in my life, and now, our paths are intertwined. Now that they are here, I am a part of their stories, albeit little, and now that it is this way, they are a part of this story, too.

Behind the music in my ears, a private concert we take for granted, I listen to the murmuration of the crowd. I am shocked at how many people exist together and how we meet each other. “Can you help me move about this life—all of it seems a little too much to go through alone?” We ask each other this when we smile, make eye contact, and talk more than necessary with a stranger as we both procrastinate at the same table, tired and bored. But it is all too cliche to talk about. It is like breathing. Talking about it does little than make it appear harder than it is.

I walk around a city like I waltz around in life—with a sense of security even though I do not know my way as much as I like to believe. It is the people, the people around me, that make it possible. The privilege of being able to meet others and the joy of having some of them stay for years makes me glad. Sitting here, I can almost see myself from after. Call it a trance of exhaustion. I can see this entire cafe, like how we often observe a colony of ants, seeing everything all at the same time. I see myself, one of many people, living. I see all the people here as dots in Brownian motion, some moving towards each other with stupendous force, bound to cross paths. Perhaps, that is how it plays out on most days. It is only that we are too occupied and distracted, but sometimes, if the day is bright enough, we can see it for what it is and always has been: a collision course.