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August: the jealous son of July; the undoing of all we build. Everything that begins, no matter when it does, tends to end in August. Stop running, sit down and breathe a little. It is but the second day. We must sit and wonder how yet another year is closer to its end than its beginning. We must sit and wonder if we still have time, and then we must come to the inevitable conclusion we arrive at year after year: there is always time. If it feels like there isn’t any, one might find it is the easiest thing to make, easier than a cup of coffee, a doomed promise or an ill-timed joke.

The year has gone by in a laugh. It seems time moves faster in happiness. Perhaps, this August will be kind, and it will let me pass through unscathed, unaffected, and with the same zeal I have carried myself through this year. I deserve this much, I thought. It is but the second day; it occurred to me again. I must not make pointless dreams; I must make some coffee, and some time, and begin writing. Just this much has pushed me through till here, and just this much will push me through the rest. The days, months and years will pass me by as they do, and I will sit here and write. It is a simple plan, but as most have realised often through history, a simple one will do.

That is all I wish for August, a simple month. A tiny bug walks over the glass window, which shifts my gaze outside at the sky. It is pale, but it has stopped raining after three days of continual deluge. Perhaps, it is not as outlandish an expectation. But then, all expectations are outlandish, and so are all dreams. Yet, we continue to dream, and yet we continue to expect. The human soul is cursed to fail. Everything that is built will someday fall apart. But today is not that day. Today is the beginning of yet another month, and with it, a chance for it to change its ways.

I often tap the keys of the keyboard softly, not pressing them enough to add another letter on the page, just a touch, a tactile response to the irritation of not knowing what to put down. It is an exercise in restraint. All writers have their ticks. This is mine. I do it when I am blocked, but mostly, I do it when a thought feels too real. I must stop and tap, tap, tap on whatever key has the misfortune of being under my forefinger. In those few seconds, every word I can ever write and have ever written is suspended all around me. Then, my hands do the work.

The writing happens as soon as the first key clacks. All I can do is watch, almost as if I were not even doing it, as if it was all coming to me by divine intervention. But the exhaustion when the hands stop and the keys stop clicking tells me it was nothing but hard work. Most work does not feel like so when you’re absolutely into it, deep into the trenches when time runs by as if the concept was never invented. When you’re done, you cannot be sure if it has been just a little while or if an entire year has passed.

It is, perhaps, a gift—this continual flame of innate motivation that does not seem to flicker. They often ask me what makes me go. I wish I had an answer for them, but it came to me like breathing. The body never asks what it is breathing for. We understand how it happens, but the body does not ask. It begins on the day we are born. Then, it keeps going as far as it can, as far as the lungs can hold air, as far as the heart keeps pumping blood. My resolve came to me like air.

This inclination to keep at things, to keep working, was as natural to me as laughter. I could not, for the life of me, give a procedural reply for something I did not make an effort towards. I can tell you how to make a good cup of coffee, for I make it on my own, but I can not tell you how I brew motivation. I do not know where this will bring me years from now. But like how when time runs out, no one asks how much air they used in all their days, I shall not ask what it was all for. All I have for anyone on this matter is silence.

Or on most days, an absurd joke: some of us have drudgery in our blood.

I come from a line of cautious, careful people. When we print our paperwork, we print a single copy of everything but two of all the forms. We know we make mistakes, which is okay, but thinking ahead helps, and mistakes don’t mean retracing our steps. My father taught us this, and I believe his father taught him this, but I am never too sure about the latter. There is little I truly know about things. We also come from a line of people who keep to themselves, and to talk, only share nuggets here and there, and like solid raconteurs, only tell you the best parts. The rest is all stored in glass bottles, kept on the window sills of a nursery of memories in our heads. They grow into their own, branching in all directions, vines intertwining—the foliage of confusion—and we only show people the flowers.

But as much as I know where I come from, I have opened all doors to everything, and if you do not fancy getting your feet dirty with all the mud, you can always look at it through the window, one word at a time. These words of mine are but glimpses of the real thing. You will never be able to make sense of it all with just a look, but if you so prefer it, then that shall be the case. Things rarely are as they appear until you trace every node to the beginning. You must run your finger softly lest you bruise the stem as you walk along with it. Surely, this will get your hands dirty. To get your hands dirty is the cost of truly knowing someone. You cannot wear gloves through it. For better or worse, much leaves a mark: some you can wash with soap, some with a drink, and some, you must leave in the hands of time.

But I am cautious and careful. I tend to learn too much from my mistakes, for I tend to retrace my steps anyway. And so, I left a pair of rubber gloves on the stool near the door. Not everyone who wants to take a closer look wants to get their hands dirty, and not everyone who gets their hands dirty is willing to truly know us. Perhaps, it was never about that.

It is ever only about who refuses the gloves.

While people bombard each other with them, words come difficult to us writers. It’s impossible to explain it to those not privy to the odds and ends of this discipline, this madness, but those who know, do. You sit down to pursue a thought, and it goes fine for a few sentences until you run headfirst into a wall. A dead end! Then, you begin again. They call it crazy to do the same thing repeatedly, expecting something else to happen, but that is what a writer does every day.

You sit, and you begin to put words on a paper, and you reject, and you reject until it sticks, until the stream does not stop, and then, you know. You know this is it. You chase it. Most of what a writer does is about unclogging the tapestry of pipes and valves until it all starts to flow.

No true sentence was ever thought of; an honest sentence is as much a surprise to the writer as it is to the reader. Writing is not painting a basket of flowers; it is about picking the flowers instinctively, arranging them in multitudes of orders until it makes sense. They will want you to go to grammar school to learn the best way to write a metaphor and learn to avoid cliches. By all means, reject it. Sit down, string useless sentences, and out of juvenile spite, embrace cliches.

Now, you need to learn the basics, but anyone who thinks the basics to good writing lie in a book has never sat down to write or read. The greats did not have a primer to write the perfect sentence. They sat and worked every day. Writing was not about genius; it was about hard work. It was about learned wisdom acquired by making mistakes. You can have a science to it, but that would only make you as good as the writer who wrote a book about how to write. If you want your voice, a book written already is the last place to look.

Instruction manuals are for assembling furniture. If you want art, you must trust your gut and jump headfirst into a vat of gooey emotion, an emulsion of everything you have ever felt. Then, you must learn to swim as you struggle to breathe. Then, when they ask you how you do what you do, all you’ll do is smile, knowing all too well that this is the last question one needs to ask to get there.

Erratic days, torrential rains and turbulence are staples of a good life. It is never all sunshine, but what do you do when things seem out of place and off balance? Well, you do what people have done for thousands of years: make yourself a cup of tea or coffee or whatever warm drink you prefer, sit by the window, and wait. There is little to do during a downpour, but this is often an excuse to do the most important thing: take stock, rest, and reflect. Someone I once worked with told me the apparent end—the last hour of the day, the end of the week, or the month—is often an excellent moment to tally things up. It is auspicious for me that today is as close to all three of them as it can get, that today is erratic and the rain has not stopped since the morning, and what of the turbulence? Life is rarely a smooth sailing ship.

Here I sit, looking out at the rain, taking stock. I watch each drop falling on the sill of the balcony or the railing washed a thousand times over by the rain, only to destroy itself on impact. How fast time passes, and how little time we get to adjust lest we implode on our own when we land! Time has indeed passed, and as I sit here, I think about how everything is about time. Sometimes, time passes so quickly that we trick ourselves into believing we have adjusted well to all that has changed. But slowly, and with absolute certainty, the veil of delusion lifts, and we see how it will always be a chore, an exercise to do. No matter how well we think we know our time and how well we live our lives, there is always a moment that tells us there is more to learn than we think and that life can always be lived just a tad bit better.

Each drop is a visual echo starting from the light that enters my eyes, slowly turning into a jarring warning, creating a sort of siren in my head. Each drop says only one thing: there is more to do, more to learn, and more to understand. I listen ardently and take note. The day inches toward its end. The warning continues pattering outside.

I am the easiest person to find. I visit the same coffee shops like clockwork. I do the same things every day. Even my unhappiness, if there was any left, was a repetition, an aftershock of old heartache. All my novelty is kept close to the chest, kept to myself. For someone standing outside looking in, nothing ever changes. It is true, of course. There is an aspect of my life set in stone, unchanging. I do not mean this lightly.

We pause in one place because we’re often waiting for someone to come looking. A lot of this life was built that way, for better or worse, but just like the weather today has nothing to do with what was before, only what is now—even though what was before caused it—my life right now has nothing to do with what made it the way it is. If I ever look at this part, I see it only as a blessing. Time only goes forward, giving gifts to all of us; I was given the gift of patience. It has been a gift that keeps giving.

But why do I feel lost so often if I am so easy to find? All my life has been a path to finding myself, and it seems as easy as I am to find, I seem to have eluded all attempts I’ve made towards myself. For all my stability, I feel terribly uncertain about what will happen to me. For all my constant banality, I seem to have developed a penchant for finding myself in the most unique situations, none of which I intend on getting into, almost as if there is a certain reward for this steadfastness that is so far imbued into my heart and soul, I do not know who else to be and how else to live. If I do something, I do it for years. For all that I do not do, you could not make me do it even if I were strapped to a chair, and you were slowly breaking all my bones. I either walk too fast or not at all; I always look in the wrong place when I’m looking for myself.

Some part of me will permanently hide from myself. Some part of me will always wait for time to start going backwards, and so, I will never be able to find it. I have inadvertently left myself behind on a trail, and thus far, there is no reconciliation. I have not been able to catch up with myself, and at the same time, I do not have time to wait for what is left behind.

I only remember my life in empty cups of coffee or tea. No matter where I am or what year it is, I always have memories that end or begin with my gaze at an empty cup. It is how I travel through time—staring at these empty cups spread over the years in my head. It is the only way I know to remember and the only way I can possibly forget. To forget something, I must visit the same places, by choice or chance. Then, I must do the same things over and over again until whatever remains stuck in the crevices of my memory. I must walk the same places until whatever I cannot forget becomes a blur and sip with familiar scenery. I must do this till I cannot remember when the cup looked that way or where I saw it to be that way. I must do it until all I remember is a cup, and all else is smudged.

It is pretty simple: you confuse yourself enough so that all good things convalesce into a bubble you think of when you think of a year or some irrelevant corner in a city you haven’t visited much. My childhood is just a cup of tea; that is how I remember it on most days. It is oddly sweet; there’s too much of everything in it; there is not much to complain about, for the tea never runs out. Each memory has a cup in the background, around the corner, or sometimes, at the centre–a constant prop. And my early youth, which some would argue is still going on? It is like the cups of coffee made by the little sachets they have in hotel rooms, which never qualify for coffee in hindsight, but you tear them open regardless, hoping for something different.

As I sit and work in a hotel room in a city I have only skimmed through every time I have visited it, I try to remember how it was the last time I saw it. All I can remember as I stare out the dirty glass window is tea, coffee, and rain. The usual suspects and companions of my life are here today as they were half a decade ago. They are all here; everything else is a matter of preference. It is how you like them that keeps changing. That is how it occurs to you that time has passed.

I don’t take milk with my coffee anymore, you think. That was not the case when I last walked here. Now that I think of it, I did not like the rain, too.

Almost everything that seems to have slipped out of our fingers can be grabbed again—our days, our disposition, our hearts or our lives. It is all a question of how far you can reach, how tightly you can hold onto what you get a hold of, and more importantly, how quickly you can let go of what is dragging you into the dust. Most life is about shaking your head and doing what needs to be done. There are moments where you get to breathe for the sake of breathing. They are spread in between the constant pressure from all around. Don’t take them for granted; breathe deeply, fully, and without remorse. Do not waste what little you get of air that does not cost you anything, especially time. It will come in handy when you heave, struggle, and suffocate amidst all that plagues mice and men.

There is little respite in life, and all rest you get follows a reckoning, and that is the very nature of things, and rarely has anyone stood against it all. But the best course of action, perhaps, the only one, is through.

By saying all this, I do not mean to make you feel inadequate compared to life’s challenges, and by no means do I want to suggest you are not up to the task. On the contrary, I want to say all this because it is a truth as old as time: most who have struggled to live have lived on regardless. These little obstacles shape us, whatever they may be for me, and for you. It is when we are at our limits that we notice how limitless courage can be. The sheer tenacity of those who keep standing despite everything bombarding them is a testament to the will all of us are born with. To survive is an innate human instinct, and to keep going despite the exhaustion, the headwinds of fate, and everything that may push you back is the only way to honour the gods.

Why must Sisyphus keep pushing? Well, what else is there to do? So, if it feels as if you’re going against the current, by all means, keep swimming. There is shore in sight, even if you can’t see it. After all reckoning comes respite, and then it all unravels again. Almost everything that seems to have slipped out of our fingers can be grabbed again. It always has been a question of how far you can reach.

I have a habit of destroying myself in exchange for a handful of words and an ephemeral spark of inspiration. It is a terrible affliction, but it gets the job done. All this time, I have kneaded my heartache and loneliness into the plumpest dough of remarkable sentences. The dough, mixed with the padding of less noteworthy sentences, adds the required coherence and context. I have spent years suppressing screams and pushing them through my hands onto the screen or a piece of paper. But I do not scream anymore, and I do not writhe anymore. Lately, I have fought my tendency to pull my life apart like how we slice a freshly baked loaf of bread. I do not want to destroy this anymore, so I often wonder, what do I give up now? All my writing has been a trade, but I do not agree with the terms anymore.

If I have to kill myself, I will drown in my little joys instead. Sure, it is not natural, but what part of all this is natural? No human should have to write their mind away, but we do it regardless. I must remind myself, time and again, that this need for destruction has to be curbed, and this wanton desire for a momentary punch in my gut has to be reduced, if not cut out entirely. If there has to be a semblance of joy in my life, I must choose to look at the sun, but anyone who has looked at it too long will tell you that it, too, burns your eyes.

Perhaps, the answer is not in the constancy of pain or permanency of happiness but in flowing with it, letting the words flow as well. Perhaps, it is because of how people look at us. All writers are pushed to their extremes. The morose ones dig deeper into their dread. The happier ones go crazy with joy. That is all people think writers are good for: saving themselves the trouble of going too far.

We are proxies for what they wish they could do. They read our poems and prose about implosions within ourselves, the explosions of who we are, and they compare it to their pain floating at the surface, and some part of them is pleased they did not go that far. And what is worse, they look at us in a frenzy of joy and want us to shine brighter and brighter, not knowing the brightest stars are also the ones that burn the most.

Last evening, I felt frustration build up inside me. Unfounded, until I decided to walk to the coffee shop. I got there partially healed from whatever ailment I had. It began drizzling as I began, but I chose not to turn back to home, which added to the natural medicine. The sip of the hot americano and a bite into the chocolate macaron handled the rest. We ought to do things for the sake of doing things. All busy weeks remind me of this—to do things without an end goal. Life becomes flavourless otherwise.

But today, I took a nap in the evening for a reason. It was because I had not written in the morning. It has been the most recent discovery of mine that the words right after you wake up are the best words you can write all day. The words flow easily and are devoid of flaws that plague bad writing: most arise from a lack of honesty. So, done with everything and back home, I decided to sleep the evening away. At some point, it began to rain. I pulled the blanket over myself.

I woke up to a memory of last night. It was a golden hour at ten in the night. The straight line of light from the yellow neon sign outside the hotel made each drop glow. As I sat, sipping my coffee and relishing the macaron, cars, and with them, people in groups dressed for the weekend entered the driveway to the hotel. They were here for the restaurant for no one entered the cafe. I didn’t want to be bothered, but some people in the cafe always set the ambience right. Through the glass, I stared at the wet patio.

The truth shone in yellow. Most of my friends were busy, some of whom I had left behind in cities and years I had lost track of. I only knew people. I remembered their names and some odd outdated details, which they would correct if I ever ran into them. Perhaps, once, I had been friends with many people. Now, the list was attenuated by the day. We only think of each other in these blanks. On most busier days, life goes on, and we don’t blink twice at the memory of someone we used to know.

I sat there, sipping my coffee, and then, since it was raining, I took a cab back home. The frustration I had left home with had gone away, but we always exchanged a feeling for another.

I wake up late on a Saturday morning and head straight to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. I turn the kettle on. It begins to whistle and simmer. I turn and twist the portafilter out, rest it on the shelf and scoop out a heap of ground coffee to pour into it. It comes from some estate in the country, the name of which I cannot remember and, frankly, could not care about. This happens once you know the truth: coffee is coffee, and most things are most things. Labels do not add; they only take things away. The coffee machine puffs about, and the steam swishes until the shot of espresso starts to fall into the cup like a single stream of aromatic bliss. I wait for it to fill up.

I think of how I should’ve woken up much earlier had my doorbell not been rung by the waste collectors, who visit twice daily: morning and evening. As noble as I think the job is—for people like me, who sit and write, depend solely on those who run the world—it is still an aggravating routine. Every morning they ring the bell, and every morning I ask them, lost in my sleep, “if there was trash to give, wouldn’t a bag be right here, my dear friend, and if it is not here, why would you ring the bell?”. The boy always nods and says it’s his job, and he cannot help it. Sometimes, he mutters something, and so do I. A justifiable act. After this, I feel exhausted and sleep for another thirty minutes out of retaliation.

Today, I overslept solely because of this, and my plans to get an early weekend breakfast at some cafe were thwarted only by an absent bag of trash. Like every day, I had kept one outside in the evening. Like every morning, I regretted it. If it were a friend telling me this, I would ask them to not worry about trivial things. All annoyance feels ridiculous until it happens to us.

Even though my plans were decimated from the get-go, the coffee was still there. I could still sit down and write, and that was a plan as good as any. I pulled the curtains open. The light instantly filled the room, and I saw the blue skies. Perhaps, the day can still be saved, I thought. It was but a few hours of an uneventful morning—I have lost bigger things and lived to tell the tale.

To go forward is not to avoid looking backwards but to not be riled up when you do. Few take years to learn this, many take decades, and some never learn it. To look at something without it grabbing your living soul and dragging it out of your body is the strict definition of closure, but what is closed now was once open. It is okay if the latch is finicky and the lid leaves a gap when it closes. That is the thing about closing something; it can always be opened again. And sometimes, when you have walked far away and look back to see how far you’ve come, by some twisted trick of time, you will find you have not walked at all. It is okay if that happens; you turn back and continue walking. The human body was designed to walk long distances, and there is no road longer than the road of time.

There is a tiny jewelled box, one of a kind, with the most beautiful, masterful engraving on it resting over the cupboards in my heart. Lodged behind many cardboard boxes with labels and few without them, it lies wrapped under tarp and rags. It tends to be knocked over at the slightest nudge. Sometimes, it only peeks out of the pieces of cloth. Often, it falls down, and the lock is so broken that everything in it spills out, and I pick the trinkets up, lock it again and keep it in the farthest corner, away from where I can see it.

As it is with things that are important to us, we cannot truly forget them. And so, the box will fall now and then, and in routine, fastidious as I am, I will tidy up and tuck it back where it fell from, and over and over this will happen. Only it will not sink my heart anymore. Closure is not the closing of things once and for all. It is the opening and closing of boxes over and over again.

Everything that was once opened and stitched close can now be opened up again. It does not matter if it is an old bag, a cardboard box or your heart where it bled. Everything open can always be closed up again.

What is life but the constant opening of boxes, jewelled or otherwise, telling yourself: do you remember this day? Closure is saying this without your world tearing at its seams. But it must be opened and closed again; memories gather dust quickly.

Little is required for a good life—only a few tenets to follow, and all shall fall into place. There is little need for elaborate principles and odd philosophies. You must be as kind as you can be, and you must revel in the little things, and in the end, you must learn that most of life is chock-full of little things. There is plenty to celebrate if you are of the mind to celebrate in the first place.

If it is problems you seek, then you must only seek to solve them. No one who is drowning wants someone to point this out. They are well aware. They want someone to jump into the water and drag them out; if jumping is not possible, they must call someone else who can solve this predicament. No one who is drowning once asked: what is happening to me? And so, if you seek problems, and if you come across any, you must solve them or find someone who does. All else is vanity at the expense of other people.

You must do good work. It is the tenet above all. Everything that is done should be done with all your mind, body and soul. A half-hearted effort gives way to an inadequate result, leaving us an incomplete world brimming with gaps and mishaps. To do good work is to give something all you have, regardless of what you stand to gain from the results. Good work demands to be done. Those who do it will find themselves engulfed in happiness despite their reluctance to accept it, despite all their efforts to stay miserable.

Most people are noble and good. If they were not, we would not have a world with such intricacies. If you ever stand at the corner of a street and take it all in—the motion, the taxis, the buses, the stores and the establishments—this great collaboration happening time after time in all cities and towns of the world. Those who jump into the water head-on and those who do good work, knowing all too well or not at all how it makes the world go round, are the inheritors of all good things.

They are the only ones who deserve them.

I make a piping hot cup of coffee to start the day. The first sip burns my tongue. I do not mind. The pleasures of living with the heart open at its widest were too many to count, but the start of each day, the same repetitive brewing of coffee and the routine burning of your tongue, was always a crucial detail, protruding and noticeable. The storms and the mugginess of July, the memory of deluges past, have not managed to shake my ground. My heart is open to all possibilities: if it must rain, who am I to have an opinion about it?

With July, hope comes over and over, storm after storm. All our sorrows are washed away in the hope of something better. To have things to look forward to while having your feet rooted in the present was the only way to live. No longer am I lost in the imagination of the future; the future is here, and I am on the periphery of it. All my stories have faded; if there ever was a time to write new ones, to blaze new trails and find new paths to everything that is yet to happen, it is now. The rains of July have shrouded everything that has happened before. I can see little when I look behind; the future seems like a medley of colours.

More of what will be crucial to me is yet to arrive than what has already. Most of what will happen to me is yet to happen. But most importantly, most good I am yet to do is still in my hands. If the year was a coffee shop and the months tables, July reminds me of my favourite table in another city a long time ago. July is the table hidden behind the pillar. It is the quiet corner in plain sight. In July, we rewrite. Beneath the unexpected showers, a quiescent corner of comfort says:

Rest a little; you have walked too far and braved the tenacious tempests of time, and what a splendid job you have done with all you could do. Come the last legs of the year, you will need new stories; July is when you begin writing them.

Every ounce in me wishes I could tell you where it all began, where this story of me starting my life anew begins, and in many ways, I know the defining moments of this tale. When we think we know something, it isn’t until someone asks us to put it down into words that we see gaps, glaring omissions, and an astonishing lack of detail for things never recorded or even noticed. As much as I pay attention to things, I have not noted what has led me here—this moment, this apartment, the storm raging outside and me, writing. We do not quite know our moment when it happens, and I am equally unaware. Still, something tells me this will be the most crucial moment in my life.

Like most answers in life, you often do not know the question, only that there is an answer. We rarely understand why the storm brings us comfort. The storm is an answer to a question as old as time, but we know it is an answer. We feel it in our bones. Through that gut feeling, I know this is an answer to a question I do not want to ask, and so, because of that reason, I cannot tell you where it all began, just that it did.

Things happen, and we learn to find some sort of peace in it. We learn to find peace in walking about in the city park, and if it is alone that we must do this, then alone we walk. All life is an exercise in adapting. A person’s mettle is not in what they do but how much they can accommodate. Do not tell me what you can bear; show me what you can find your way around. The answers are always in the omissions and the gaps; it is in what we work our way around. There will always be misery, and the storm will occasionally bring the sky down to the ground, but we must find a way around it.

Most life really is quite like an evening stroll. When you walk about the city, occasionally, something blocks your path. Since you’re walking, you do not stop, and since you’re walking ahead, you do not turn around. You simply find a way around whatever it is that halts you. You keep going, step following after step, never stopping, never ceasing.

And that is just about all I can tell you about how I got here, for that is just about all I know.

I woke up early to the rain today. There is no better feeling. To wake up and hear the rain’s pitapat and lie in bed and think about being alive. You just lay and tell yourself, “I am alive,” repeatedly. We are much too forgetful. We should repeat things more often. The tiny fleck of pale light peered from behind the curtains and made silhouettes out of everything in the room. I lay still, watching the curtain move back and forth softly for a while. There are moments in between busy weeks where all things halt. It was a moment just like that: everything lay still, and so did I.

A shiver spread through the air, telling me the rain grew ferocious outside. I got up and out of bed and pulled the curtains wide open. “I am alive,” I whispered. Smiling, I decided to start the day with the highest of spirits. I thought of the rains from last year; I thought of you, but then, I scoffed at how little I have thought of you these past months. And not to cause a scene in this quiescent air, I discarded your name like old, tattered clothes.

I do not wear your name like a badge anymore. I am not sorry about this; if anything, I am proud of managing to dig myself out of an early grave. When love asks you to dig a hole, you break the ground and dig it with an incomparable measure of detail. When it is finished, and they ask you to jump into it and lie there forever, you quietly comply. “It is love that asks for this,” you tell yourself, “there may be a reason after all.”

It was a day like this one, for I remember rain washing the dirt away: I managed to get out. At that moment, I realised I couldn’t let my love for you suffocate me. I was surrounded by fresh air, but I was still gasping. I walked out of the makeshift grave of my own design. I was alive, and there was still time. Of time, there is plenty, even in weeks as busy as these.

There is time to walk and to laugh. There is time to work and to write and to read. There is time to do everything I want and then some more. As long as we are alive, there is always time.

If there’s one thing I know, if there’s anything I know at all, it’s this:

I am alive.

Did Van Gogh want to be called a post-impressionist, or was he just trying to paint? I think about the Lost Generation. I wonder what came first. Was the remark why they became legends, or were they simply remarkable enough to warrant being called something? To me, it is the latter, but I often ask what makes us, then? And who would decide what to call this generation, and which is more important, which remark would stick long enough to define those like me? I know there are others like me, even if I have come across only a couple of them.

I wonder what we have to say, or perhaps, in our case, what we must omit. We are a generation gliding across the line that separates distraction and focus. Our art is to omit a plethora of information at our fingertips. Years from now, if these bits of data remain and stand the test of time, a historian and part-time connoisseur of art and literature with tenure at a cushy university will call us something. Until then, we must take this noise and turn all eyes away from it. I know there are others who wish for a simpler world and, when they can’t find it, turn to the blank canvas or a page. It pains me to admit how I have rarely come across artists I have natural, genuine respect for, for no one does it for the sole purpose of doing it, no one indulges in it, no one obsesses over it. It does not matter when I write; I am thinking about it for the entire day.

I went for coffee with someone a while ago, and when I told them I was a writer, they told me they also liked to write in their free time. From that point on, I did not listen to a single word they had to say, for that told me enough about what they were not, and it told me all I needed to know about how much, or in this case, how little, they would understand me, and which is more important, how I live. I do not yet know what will become of me or these words, but some moments are filled with sheer disappointment of not being born a while later or, in this case, much earlier.

To be out of synch with your own times—a terrible ailment. I wonder how many writers felt it. I wonder if they found a way around it. It gets terribly lonely much too often than it should.

Everything that once seems impossible to forget can very well be forgotten. It is not a thorn to remove but a mist that fades, giving way to a clearer landscape. You do not simply dislodge an unpleasant moment or a sour event in life. You let it fade away as more things come into the picture—more detail and colour. And how do you forget something that never happened? Something you only imagined into reality? You wait. That is what you must do. You must wait for time to pass. The fog always clears, and the view after is always one to look at. You must bear with it and wait for the haze to dissipate. Heaven awaits beyond the veil of all that you must let pass. There is impermanence in all things. Nothing is for certain; no moment is final. As long as you’re breathing, there will always be a natural succession to every moment. Every second follows another.

Life is but a series of veils, lifting over and over to reveal something else beneath, like a painting within a painting, like Matryoshka dolls; there is always something within, and slowly, it makes itself known. As the veil of the past lifts, joy engulfs everything else, and this too is a veil. It will lift to reveal what it reveals. What is it? I do not know. To worry about things before they arrive ensures twofold regret. Imagination can never truly predict what comes our way; to imagine the future is to stop looking at the present. Worry ensures the loss of both what is here and what shall come. Why put yourself through all that misery? A city is as beautiful cloudy, and misty as it is under the warm summer sun. To prefer one over the other does nothing but limit the human experience.

If this joy passes, I shall wait ardently for what it reveals, of what lies ahead of it. If it is misery? Then misery it shall be. I cannot lose out on the sun out of some unfounded fear of the rain. If it has to pour, I better get drenched while remembering the sun’s warmth than nothing. If you have seen the light once, you have seen the light forever. If you have felt joy once, you never forget how it feels. The rest is the fog clearing so you can see what is in front of you. The fog always clears.

I do not worry about what my life will amount to now. I am sure it will amount to what it shall amount to, and it will be as fitting as it would be, and there is not a single thing I would be able to do about it. The only thing I can do today is to accept it all with my arms wide open and my heart open just a tad bit wider than my arms, and I must invite it all—the possibility of what may or may not happen and what I may or may not become. I only have my little corner, my little piece of nothing in the world, and I adore it like nothing else. This peace, this calm, I must drown in it like how we sometimes dive underwater to check how far it can take us, how long before we need to come up. I must drown in all that is around me, and when it is time for me to come out of it, life—staying true to its very nature—will urge me out of it all. But for now, this water looks tranquil enough, and for now, I lay submerged in these days, amounting to nothing but a satisfaction I cannot put into words. In moments like these, we wish we had someone who understood not our words but more: someone who understood the pause, for this is a pause like no other. For better or for worse, I only have people who understand my words. My silences are my own; I do not intend on trading them.

Perhaps, it is not a fight we can win—the battle for a softer, tender, slower world—but it is the only one we must keep fighting. It is the only drum we must march to and continue, by all means necessary, no matter the cost. It is the responsibility of those who can imagine it—the intuitive, the dreamers, the idiots—to keep sounding the battle cry now and then. What is the cry, you ask? It is a different cry, fitting to a different sort of fight. We don’t fight in loud proclamations; we rally with afternoon naps, coffeehouse music, and soft laughter shared on a bright sunny day. And so, in this exhausting air of another clear, hot Saturday, I must lay down, read, and slowly drift off into sleep. It is the only true mission if there ever was one.

It baffles me how casually we perceive time, even though we know it is the only thing that makes life go round. It may be make-believe, but so is most of what we do. Time passes, for better or for worse. Fortunately for me, it has passed for the better, and I could not have asked for more. But I must not take this casually for whether I prefer it or not; the clocks will tick, the calendars will change, the months will roll, and the years will go by, and I must learn to adapt when it happens. I must not watch it carelessly. This moment, there will be no moment like this one. I must preserve it all in memory. If possible, I must make an inferior copy in these words.

The coffee will never taste the way it does right now. The sky will never look the way it does right now. Three birds sit on the sill of my balcony, engaged in perhaps a conversation of the highest importance. The sheets of grass are still wet from the rains over these past few days—an odd sort of comfort when I walk about on the balcony. We have been blessed with a brighter day today; with it, the sky has changed to the bluest of blues and responded in kind. The white clouds slowly sail over the blue like ships on the sea, and the hills have never looked greener—islands, interrupting the blue, cutting it short at the horizon. The trees stand tall in the orchard after a bountiful season. The sun shines on us graciously today. A quiet expression of joy is spread on everything as if this landscape understands the flow of time and how it must savour it in its way. What a day to be alive! What a day to experience everything. For all my loss and all my gain, I would not have it any other way; I would want everything to stay the same.

At about one in the afternoon, I come back inside to start working on this and that to pay for odds and ends. The room smells of burnt coffee. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast lays half-read, calling to me, carefully covering the Book of Disquiet. My gaze moves to the plants, which have turned towards the window light as they have grown. I have turned toward it, too, in my own way. All it took was time. There is nothing casual about it.

A lot can happen between two monsoons.