The Before

I was walking on the road. When I walk, I usually listen to some music. What else could you do on the street in the constant cacophony in this country? Even in the city where nothing ever happens, the chances of some vehicle, person or disappointment crashing into you are far from unlikely.

Putting your earphones in, however, puts you in even greater danger, as one might imagine. Yet, if I had to choose between the two, I think I’d go for the music. You could die with or without the music; the music probably only made it easier. Yet, as young as I am, I find myself looking over my shoulder after every ten steps or so, hoping I can avoid sudden death.

They were about six steps ahead of me: the old couple. While I walk fast, I wanted to stay six steps behind them. Perhaps, it was in the way they walked. They weren’t slow or tedious. They walked in a comfort I haven’t had the privilege to experience yet. Even looking at them was peaceful. I wonder what they must’ve felt for each other to look so calm walking together. I wonder if that’s love. I haven’t had the luck to experience it yet.

It was apparent that the man had some issues with his hearing, possibly due to his age. I wonder if he, too, suffered temporary damage to his ears when he was young. I wonder if his ears rang now and then, or were they just silent or muffled? In any case, it was clear he couldn’t hear the oncoming vehicles. Whenever he strayed towards the middle of the road, I saw the woman pulled him towards herself in almost a reflex.

I think that is why I kept walking behind them. It was probably nothing else at all. Maybe they weren’t as tranquil, and maybe they had an argument once they reached home, and perhaps it wasn’t a love as happy as it sounded in my head. I think it was the fact that he didn’t have to look over his shoulder continually despite not hearing the traffic. That is why I didn’t want to walk ahead of them.

They were about six steps ahead of me. Yet, it felt like it was longer. From where I stood, listening to my music by myself, continually looking over my shoulder, they felt a lifetime away. Six steps never felt longer.

I couldn’t walk ahead of them.

I remember us sitting in the balcony of this shack-like store, sipping tea and staring at the city where nothing ever happens. I remember you keeping your cup on the railing. I remember me keeping my cup in my hands, far away from the ledge. You asked me why I didn’t keep it on the railing, and I told you that I couldn’t trust the railing or anything that wasn’t in my control.

I could trust myself. I’ve always been like that. I never trust the odds or the uncertain. You’ve always been like you too. You’ve never not trusted them. So, you took my hand, the cup in it, and gently helped me place the cup on the railing and said: let go. The cup did not fall that evening. That was the first time you made me let go.

It’s been more than a couple of years since that nameless evening. I remember a few songs from it. Those, the cup and you telling me to let go. It’s been years and I am still the same person. I’ve changed in all ways but not in trusting my own hands more than anything else. So, when I found myself talking to the universe the other night, some weeks ago, I felt an intense betrayal because I was making a wish.

You know me better than me anyway so you know what that means for me, but I was tired. I looked at the starlit sky above the city where nothing ever happens, drunk at four in the morning, and I just stared for a moment. I didn’t utter a single word, not even subvocally. I knew, though, that I had wished for something. It was aggravating but I was exhausted and drunk. I broke my rule.

In my entire life, at least, from when I started to call it my own, this was perhaps, the first time I sent a wish into the void. I don’t believe in the universe or fate or any imaginary idea that people use to get through their days. I’ve always been in my own hands. Funnily enough, the wish came true.

Now, I laugh at the coincidence and how the game was all set. Maybe you set it up years ago by asking me to let go, and keep that cup on the railing. I kept the cup on the railing at four in the morning, love. The cup didn’t fall. I let go, for the first time in my life, and it worked. It would’ve been sadder, much sadder if it hadn’t.

Yet, it baffles me; who am I now?

In life, you’ll sometimes be devastated, either by virtue of happenstance or by an error you make. The loss will shake you up to your core. You’ll beg and claim as you talk to your friends, and sometimes yourself, that you’d trade anything for a second chance, for a do-over, just one more attempt, one more time.

Often, life being life, you’ll be pushed forward through the strings of time, and like a puppet, you’ll be pulled in and from all directions. You’ll realise that life demands you to stand upright, and so you’ll manage somehow. Often, you’ll sustain long-term damage from the constant pulling, like all before you and all after.

You’ll go forward though, and you’ll live again. While you’re at it, you’ll start to forget mentioning your request for a second chance. Of course, you’ll desperately cling to that possibility, and you’d still tell yourself you’d give anything you have for that one chance, but you’ll not say it.

As you go further, you’ll fall a lot, and be battered and punched and kicked for such is the nature of life. No one comes out pristine and without lasting damage. You’ll limp forwards, but you’ll keep going, and somewhere along the journey, you’ll forget your outrageous demand for a second chance for whatever it is you think you can change.

As memory fades, and as you get used to the gifts of time for there are always gifts of time, you’ll smile again. It won’t happen with a huge announcement or drumroll. One day, you’ll be walking down the street and see something as simple as a dog rolling in the mud, and suddenly, you’ll smile, and suddenly, life wouldn’t feel so hard again.

As you look around your life, you’ll realise you got your second chance a long time ago. You’ll smile and chuckle a bit and look up and around, and then, it’ll hit you again, harder, for you know what they say: all human beings learn every lesson twice.

Your second chance began the moment you fell from grace all those years ago, my little hero. You’ll accept that, and that’s when you’ll throw your old, wilted laurel wreath away. You’re no hero. You’re just breathing, but not only for yourself for the first time.

I don’t talk much about writing for I genuinely feel I don’t have much to say about it. However, the one thought that has reverberated for the past half-year or so is of legacy. I’ve thought a lot of the greats. The one thing I’ve learnt is that the act’s truth is in recording an experience as honestly and deliberately as you can.

You must carefully select to leave some details out and exaggerate some others to make your point. That is true, however, if and only if what it made you feel was good. If it were something otherwise, your first instinct would almost always be to share your pain with the world, but that is the easy way out. It takes strength to carve out beauty out of something that devastates you.

When an event akin to a knife twists in your gut, you must also look at the carvings on it, and wonder about the hands that could’ve made such intricate etchings, and to find joy that this particular knife was the one that was used. It takes real character and an insane effort to see that smidge of sunlight when all you can see is the gloom and darkness. That was the job.

It is your job as an artist, any art that may be, to make sure you see past the terrible, and somehow, manage to share what you need to. It is the easiest thing to bellow in pain. Since the human experience expects you to share it, your job is to make it better. If you don’t find light, make it. Make others feel the honesty of your hurt, but also the hope that you’ll make it out.

I’ve thought a lot about the greats, and I know that I’m not going to be a sad drunk or die blowing my last verse into a shotgun. Art, especially if you honestly pursue your own, can engulf you into what you feel. In my understanding, I’ve realised where most artists erred.

My writing was going to be about the every day. I didn’t want to change the world. I wanted to tell you that I, too, feel the same things as you. I wanted to tell you that if I can make it out, every day, so can you. It would be about this odd thing we called life. But, I would go a step further. I was going to find beauty and joy in everything, even the worst of them all, and I was going to write about it: one word at a time.

There are two things you should know about me if you have to know anything at all. The first is that I’ve always been scared of heights. When every kid jumped off platforms and bridges and trees, I sat there waiting for them to figure out a way to take me along. Often, they never came back. So, I learnt to leap with my eyes closed.

The second is that I’m a hopeless romantic. When I fell for someone, I fell fast, and I fell hard. I got my heart broken a lot, too. It would be a lie if I said I wasn’t the running joke because I always found my way to heartbreak. To me, love was about the attempt.

Love was in making time to squeeze an hour to see someone between your layover in the city of chaos, bumbling down the airport terminal not to lose a single second, only to realise you exited on the wrong side. It was looking at your watch whilst doing the mental gymnastics of time. Then rushing onto the traffic, screaming apologies and having profanities cried at you in return, leaping over the hedge towards the other side, dusting your only good shirt off, heaving.

Love was in telling someone you’ll be there, and making it, end of the world or otherwise. It was getting drenched in the city where it never stops raining and getting poked by a thousand umbrellas, trying to find someone sitting by the sea, looking at you and laughing. Love was in watching the sunset with them, knowing all too well that this would be the last sunset you’d watch together. Love was in countless last kisses, in infinite reassurances, in hoping.

Until, love became harder because no matter what I did, I found myself in the wrong time, around the wrong person, in the wrong situation, and in terrible ironies. So, I stopped believing. I called bullshit, and I folded my cards. It wasn’t until today that I remembered everything, and realised I’d do it all again in the blink of an eye. No questions asked. It was the best thing I did.

You see, love wasn’t about thinking, it was a leap of faith, and I had always been scared of heights, and that was a good thing. It meant, I knew what it meant to wait for someone who never came, and that when push came to shove, I always leapt with my eyes closed.

At some point in my early twenties, I figured out the answer to the question of happiness, but I can’t tell you the exact moment it came to me.

Perhaps, it was while I was running in the airport terminal with coffee stains all over my colourless clothes, and then pausing midway to embrace the sun outside. Maybe, it was on a table filled with what I was searching for, as people I held dear called me names and made jokes, the beer and the laughter spilling in perfect coordination.

I’d like to think it was a moment of epiphany like that, but I couldn’t be too sure. I don’t remember it. The secret to happiness was in the lie of warmth.

Happiness was a fleeting feeling, and it left faster than it arrived, and then when you least expected it, it arrived again. I had observed this happen over and over and over until one day, I realised, it was a tug-of-war between the lie that’s in your head and the lie you can tell yourself. To keep the feeling intact, you had to learn the lie of warmth.

Often that meant coaxing yourself to sit in the sun for hours, a cup of coffee in front of you, and then continuing to sit there until the only thing you can feel is the warmth on your face, and the yellow in your eyes, and the coffee on your tongue, and nothing else at all. If you could manage that, you’d realise that warmth wasn’t about you. That was the lie of warmth. To feel it, you needed to not make it about you for a change.

You’d start to feel it around you, in that unclear mumble of the ambient noise, in the people, in the dogs on the street, in the tiny hello to strangers, in the laughter surrounding you, in that perfect song that just happened to play, in the man who grooved to it thinking no one saw it, in the group of friends giggling on some inside joke; it was in everything but yourself.

So, stop at the sunset, buster, and take that sun in before it fades away. Happiness was in the attempt to not make it about you, and suddenly, the feeling didn’t feel as fleeting as you once thought.

In my experience, the one thing that one must learn before anything else at all is to love without wanting. To look at a flower blooming from within the cracks of broken cement while you take your evening stroll down a familiar street, but resist the urge to pluck it. To watch an ember sunset, streaked with all hues of red and orange and pink as if spatters on a canvas, and not try to capture it for once.

To enjoy a piece of music whilst sitting in a café in the middle of winter as it snows outside, and to not ask anyone what it is called, and to promise to never search for it. To find an animal grazing and playing in a field, but to curb the spontaneous want of putting it on a leash to bring it home, expecting it to play with you as it was in the field it called its own.

To find a friend and to not ask them to conform to a certain ideal or to act a certain way or to say a certain thing, but being a watchful and excited spectator to their spectacular journey filled with mountains and trenches. To run into another person by happenstance, someone so alluring and charming and calming to you that even a simple thought about them clears any wrinkles of worry that bother you, and to still not desire them as your own.

When you loved something without wanting, you went beyond desiring a masterpiece for your hall, you went beyond an arrangement in your vase, and you went beyond a record playing endlessly. You learnt experiencing something so enthralling, you realised you didn’t deserve, by any rights, to own it, whatever it may be, and that it was a blessing in disguise, friend of mine.

Countless have lost themselves trying to capture infinities. You wouldn’t be the first, and you wouldn’t be the last, and trust me, you would fail, like all before you, and all after.

Hey, kid. I don’t know who you are or what you look like, but if you’re reading this, then you probably know who I am, how I was, and have some clue about the details of my irrelevant life. I wanted to tell you something.

I wonder if you’ve ever been in a brawl with life, and ducked as it threw a punch at you, realising in the heat of the moment that you’ve miscalculated, being hit right in the face. I wonder if you’ve ever gotten up right after with a broken tooth.

I wonder if you’ve ever been pushed down the stairs or been sucker-punched so hard, you don’t forget it for decades to come. I wonder if you’ve ever answered a phone call whilst sitting on the floor, and gone through it reassuring the person on the other side that you got it.

I wonder if you’ve experienced the worst gut-wrenching in the personal history of you, and managed to make someone laugh regardless. I wonder if you’ve managed to write a piece on a terrible day, making someone feel at home as their eyes traversed your words, right after spilling some scorching coffee on yourself.

I wonder if you’ve felt so defeated yet so accomplished in one moment because you managed to help someone with directions on the road, and that was an achievement in itself. I wonder if you’ve talked someone down the ledge you came to jump off from. I wonder if you’ve ever been heartbroken, and made someone smile all within a minute.

I wonder if you’ve been so beaten up, in every sense of the word, and still managed to show up to that friend’s thingamajig, limping. I wonder if when asked whether you’re okay or not, you’ve tirelessly told people that you’re just tired and a little sleep should fix it. I wonder if you’ve always known that sleep does not fix it.

I wonder if you’ve told someone that you got them, and you’re in their corner, and scoffed at how ridiculous it might look if they had the full picture. I wonder if you’ve done all of that because I know that if you’re reading this, and if you know me, you have an odd tendency to do that and more.

I wanted you to know, I got you. I’ll be around. Tell me, if anything I wonder is real, and I promise you, I got you, kid.

I’m in your corner, and I got you.

Most people I knew were impatient. They called themselves things before they did them thoroughly or experienced them enough. Then, there was me, still thinking twice before I called myself a writer, still wondering what it meant to be a human being. They were impatient and a bit smarter than me, and I despised it.

It was all a farce and a game too obvious, but I refused to participate. They were all too proud. Proud of the first label they could put on themselves, proud of their hefty vocabularies, proud of long terms which meant nothing when you were walking on the road, and then there was me, proud of myself and nothing at all, simultaneously. I often wondered which was better, but I knew I wasn’t worse. I had nothing to blame on when I made a mistake.

I was deliberate, perhaps, too deliberate about calling myself anything because it was a huge responsibility, in my eyes. Once you called yourself something, anything, your entire life would by definition, have to revolve around that thing. Of course, others didn’t think this way. Hence, their ease at calling themselves anything

Me, well, I didn’t wish my life to revolve around anything. Often, I wished it didn’t revolve at all. In my opinion and experience, when you called yourself something, you ceased to exist, and you became muddled with everything that came before and everything that came after. You became a plural noun written somewhere in an essay or chronicle, and that didn’t sit right by me.

When you called yourself something, you also got full of yourself and a bit too proud and pompous and protective of the word. Although, I wonder how nice it might feel to belong for once, but I couldn’t bear the cost. The cost that came with calling myself something was too high. To lose myself to belong was too steep a price.

So, I spent every day saying “no” when someone called me something. It was a tedious day every day. I did many things, or so I liked to believe, but I couldn’t call it anything. I couldn’t call myself anything. If you called it something, you got full of yourself, and it ceased to exist.

You ceased to exist.

It never comes up as much as it I want it to, but I have an odd relationship with colour. The only time it comes up in conversation is a coy remark about how my clothes are incredibly similar or how everything I own is drab and dreary and without much personality. To be honest, there is some truth to it, but it’s not how it seems.

Before you learn of my relationship with colour, though, let me tell you about the story with grey. You see, growing up, I believed in binaries: blacks and whites. There was a right and a wrong. There were distinct dichotomies, and there was always a strict boundary separating them. Over time, life became muddled up, and the neat edges of right and wrong disappeared. I made mistakes. I realised life and the everyday were all about the greys.

You see, greys are essential, too. It’s funny, but we wouldn’t have many colours without the greys highlighting or shading the hues from behind. The colours were what you heard; the greys were the conductor and the orchestra. So, for my immense love for colours and all things beautiful in the world, the serendipity in the every day, and every higher value humans could strive for, I decided to embrace the grey.

I learnt that greys account for errors, for change, and for uncertainty. I realised the critical role people like me played, those who didn’t stand out by choice, those who were okay with blending within the crowd, those who weren’t out to own the world or anything, but only to understand it, and through that understanding make it better, if they could at all.

We were just around, offering a helping hand here and there, trying to be fine with what we had, while we worked towards becoming better, not more. We didn’t want to be right anymore because there were no rights and wrongs, only tones. I strive to be the undertone, and in my own way, I love colour as much as the regular Joe.

Just that, through my neutral choices in what I wear, what I own, and how I live, I let the colours take center stage.

The other day, I was walking back home, trying to untangle a knot of a thousand different thoughts. It occurred to me that I had never fallen in love in winter. It’s an odd thought, I know, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It is a strange thing even to occur, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.⁣
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The few times that I did find myself falling in love in this short life so far were in spring or summer. Summer love is passionate, and you move fast because everything is so peachy and lovely. It’s the love made of sunshine and rainbows and cotton candy and cups of iced americanos. It’s made of long walks, but only in the evening; the sun is out and shining during the day. Summer love fades fast, too, in my experience.⁣
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I’ve fallen in love on the onset of monsoon, too. The love of monsoon is well, wet. You’re always getting drenched and exchanging glances under a shared umbrella. Often, you’ll find yourself stuck in a bus stop or a car, and then, you’ll find yourself stealing a kiss here and there. Monsoon love has a sort of comfort when you walk together as it drizzles. It’s a love that’s fresh and a bit chilly but nothing that a hug or two can’t solve. It’s an odd sort of love with warmth sandwiched in between the cold.⁣
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The love of autumn is subtle, and that too, I have had the pleasure of experiencing. When you fall in love with someone in autumn, all you can do is walk around with cups of cocoa or cocoa cappuccinos in your hands, crushing dried leaves. It’s the love the smells of cinnamon and pumpkin spice. In saying that, it’s exciting and different and has all sorts of notes to its flavour.⁣
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As I thought of all of this, I realised I had never fallen in love in the dead cold of winter. I’ve only heard about it from friends, watched it in the movies, read about it in the books, but it’s something I’d never experienced. I wondered how that might feel as I entered my apartment, threw the scarf and the jacket on the couch, and started brewing coffee. I wondered how it might be different from all the others.⁣
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“Perhaps, it’s the one that stays,” I chuckled and turned some music on as the aroma wafted through the apartment.

Keep walking. If there’s anything I’ve learnt in the short time I’ve spent in my tiny corner of this forsaken planet, it’s this: keep walking. Nothing much matters, nothing else matters. There’s only you and the walk, and it’ll be tough, arduous even, and sometimes, downright impossible.

So, you learn to stop, and heave an enormous breath, and give your ankles some much-deserved rest, but then you get up again, and you walk again, and you go on and on. You’ll be aggravated, and you’ll hate yourself sometimes, and even one step would feel pointless; take that step, regardless.

There wasn’t much to life, and there wasn’t much to being. There was but the walk. Of course, you’ll find others who would wish you to stop, who wouldn’t understand why you’re walking, and why you won’t stop, and who’ll ask you to name destinations, and tell you it’s a dead-end there, wherever they think you’re going. Pay heed to their arguments. They will have merits of their own. So, always stop to consider, and once you’ve made up your mind, keep walking.

They don’t know what you do: there’s only the walk. In life, you don’t walk to go somewhere; you walk to walk. It’s a simple but difficult thing to digest. Once you understand that, everything gets easier. If you keep walking, provided you know when to pause not stop, and if you keep going, you’ll find something much more important along the way. You’ll find yourself. Once you do, you’ll stop to revel in it, and then you’ll walk again, further from it, until you find yourself again, and so on, and so forth.

You’ll go further than you could’ve ever been if you hadn’t kept walking in the first place. It was better than sitting, and it was better than asking others to stop, and it was the only thing life was about: the walk. You keep walking when nothing makes sense, and I promise you, everything will, eventually.

You have my word.

The wintry air at four in the morning whistled as I sat on a bench sipping from a bottle of beer. The entire world was asleep; it seemed. No sound beyond the wind, a few dogs barking about, and the music humming softly in my ears. I sat on the bench, my feet on the railing as if I owned everything before me.

For a second, I believed it too because no one was there to question me or contest my outrageous claim. I laughed. It was all mine at that hour—the city with its lights, the hills and the trees, the sky with the gazillion stars; all mine. I sipped again, and I stared. I stared at the view in front of me.

Everyone I knew was asleep up in the rooms. I was there alone. I sat there staring, expressionless, only to be interrupted by my audacious thought again. It was mine: the navy blue sky, the moon, the lamp in front of me, the bench. No one could contest for anything at that hour. I laughed again. No one could do anything at all. They were all asleep, warm and cosy, sleeping snug in their beds. I couldn’t sleep.

That is why I had come down to sit on the bench anyway. Why else would someone come down into the cold? The world belonged to those who couldn’t sleep, irrespective of their own, personal whys. I stayed there for a few songs and until the pint lasted. I was there until the pint lasted. The songs were an excuse.

I went upstairs. The last draft of wind sent a shiver down my spine as I closed the door. I stared at my city from the large glass window in our room. Then, I poured myself the last of the leftover rum in a glass that already had some coke in it. I sat on the chair near the window, and I watched my sky.

No one could take it from me at four in the morning. I was the only one up. Everyone else was asleep. It was a silent night, just me, unable to sleep, a few dogs barking about, unable to sit quietly, and the few gusts of wind, unable to pass on the opportunity to make someone cold.

At some point, I dozed off, and when I woke up, I owned nothing again.

I was often nostalgic for the times. I didn’t miss a person or a place; I missed this feeling of my entire existence in the past. I missed the times, you know? I often missed a different self which isn’t around anymore. I wasn’t melancholic over it, but there was a longing in me that was ever-present. It stirred inside me on its own, and then, it didn’t leave for hours.

I forget trivial details almost immediately. More often than not, I’ve shown to have terrible memory. Often, for the life of me, I fail to recall some event or person. Other times, I muddle the details up. And yet, when I look back at the times, the general days, of how things used to be, of what I believed in, of what I did every day, of how I did what I did, of what I said, of those I knew, of who I trusted, of what made me tick, and what made me laugh, I can always form a clear picture.

It could be a phase that was present a few years ago. It could be a version of me from a decade ago. I’d be laughing one minute or be absorbed into my work, and all of a sudden, I’d feel a knock from who I used to be, and I’d fade into this daze of the past. I wasn’t sad, no, just wistful.

No matter how many years would pass, I’d always miss the times. there were more than a couple, too! I’d miss all of them, now and then, and I’d smile at all that, eventually. It’s absurd, really. We are alive to sit here, to look back and remember who we used to be, and disagree with ourselves in our own heads, and laugh at our older selves, and miss people who were once important to us. No one in particular, just people.

Do you miss the times too? If you do, you’d know that often you didn’t miss anything in particular. It wasn’t a fancy aroma or a catchphrase or anything remotely as specific as you’d read in a book or see in a movie. It was just a feeling that a lot of time has passed since you took your first breath, and you’ve been so much since, and you’ll be so much now, and that you’re still going.

Perhaps, it was a reminder of precisely that; you’re still going.

I kept going back to that evening, you know? It was raining. We were in your car. I was listening to you talk, but my eyes were focused on the wiper moving back and forth on the windshield.

The wiper would clear the drops, and more would arrive, and it’d come back to clear them, and more would arrive. What a sad state of affairs, at first, and yet, that’s the one thing it was good at: wiping the drops.

I heard you say something confusing, some bullshit about the universe and how our lives aren’t just our own. “You’ll be the death of me if this keeps happening every year,” I chuckled.

You’ll be the death of me. What a sad thing to say to someone you love, at first, and yet, that’s the one thing you can muster out loud when you’re exhausted, when you’re tired of trying.

“It’s you who has to choose, love, the universe gives up too,” I said, and looked at you, helplessly, and saw all those years at once—coincidence upon coincidence, chance upon chance.

I saw us missing each other every single time. Sometimes, by just a day! Year by year, I saw you leave things in the hands of fate. What a sad thing to leave your life in the hands of, at first, and yet, it’s the only thing you have ever done.

I kept going back to it, you know? I kept going back to staring at that wiper on your fucking windshield, clearing the drops blindly, mechanically, fanatically. I heard you decide for the both of us—the decision being no decision at all.

I like to believe I never saw you after that night, even though I ran into you once. Perhaps, that was the last chance, but I never got up to talk to you. I haven’t decided how I feel about that yet. Maybe, it was a mistake?

I kept going back to that evening, though. I never saw you since. The windshield has popped into my head every single time it has poured since. Until I passed by that fork in the road the other day, and it started raining. It made me recall your bullshit of the universe. I stood there dolefully.

Then, I reckoned, the universe grew tired. I knew it would, at some point. I’m sure it had better things to do.

I smiled, realising: so did I.

“I’ll write a book about how much I love you,” I told you all those years ago. That was when you loved me, too. Years have gone by, and the more I think about it, the more I feel, I don’t want to write that book. I don’t want to write about us. There’s no story. At least, not something that wasn’t written countless times before we were even born.

Love was a trampled carpet, stamped over and over with shoes and feet of all shapes and sizes. We weren’t anything new or unique, as much as we would have believed at the time. Even in the ending of things, it turned out exactly like an old poem would, with an abrupt hyphen, and a last line that felt too short for something as important as the last word.

I wonder if I’ll ever write about you beyond these fragments straight out of my head, and booze or exhaustion. I wonder if you’ll ever read them. I’m not going to write that book, though. I’m sorry. I just wanted you and the world to know that. Love was a stale prompt, an over-celebrated festival that had lost its charm, a mediocre piece of fiction, at best. The only love that was worth writing about was the one that stuck, the one that stood the test of time and chaos, and I have none of it to talk about.

Even if I did, when you have a love like that, you barely have time to tell anyone about it. You’re too busy being in love, being giddy with the overwhelm of everything lovely in your life—squirrels surfing on rainbows and all. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all seen it. Some of us have felt it. Fewer have managed to keep it. I aimed to be in those few.

So, I won’t write about you or me or us or anything that happened simply because everyone knows this: love is silent and patient and kind, and love stays, and love tries; it is heartbreak that howls the loudest on a cold winter night. We were just wolves hungry for love, us writers, tired of leading the pack astray. We were fickle. We didn’t write about love when we truly loved someone. We kept it all to ourselves, for ourselves.

We knew we had howled long enough.

We do weird shit when we’re heartbroken, man. We get drunk. We end up in fights. No, not just with people. There was this one time I had an ongoing spat with a city. Can you believe it? An entire city, filled with hopes and dreams and people, and I hated it—all of it.

And then, another city, and then, this very town that I once called home. Then, a song I couldn’t bear. The more I look at it, the more I realise that I was fucked up, man. We all were, and we all are, and we’ll always be fucked up. That’s the deal.

This is the first time a species is doing this—thinking. No one before us has done this, so we’re bound to fuck up, and fight with pieces of music as if that makes any sense, but we do it. We do it all the time. We go out every day, finding things to live for—a job, a person, whatever—and all those dreams fail.

They fail, and then we try again. Maybe you will get what you want if you keep evolving, if you keep admitting that you are fucked up, and that you’ll be okay. They went hand-in-hand, man. You had to be both at the same time. That’s how it worked.

One day, as you come back home and turn the radio on, the song comes up. You pause for a second between plunging that french press, and you smile. You listen to that song. This is the first time you’ve done that. It’s the first time you’ve discovered this beautiful piece of music. It cannot just be about something as petty, you shrug. It transcends all that. So, you finish making your coffee, and you realise you’ve evolved.

You learn that you cannot not try again because of that one time. That one time that it didn’t work out, whatever it was that you wanted didn’t up and land in your lap. You can’t close yourself to the entire spectrum of human experience because of one time. Life is much bigger than one time.

One day and that might be today, you’ll be sitting and looking back. You’ll see these horrible, detestable events that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies, but you’d also smile. You’ll know you wouldn’t be there, having coffee, if all that didn’t happen.

You’ll be glad it happened. You wouldn’t have made it to the other side. You wouldn’t have evolved. You won’t have it any other way.

Why I do what I do? Well, the answer is hidden in why I walk, but to get there, you must walk with me. Ah, you’re here already. You know the first thing I do whenever I move somewhere is to walk in the neighbourhood—even when I’m travelling. It’s one of the best ways to understand a place. When you’re moving too fast, say, in a taxi, you often see people, but you miss their faces.

You see that old man there? He likes sitting at the bus stop every day at around six-thirty. I know he likes sitting there because he’s not in a hurry to catch the bus. Instead, he’s always sitting there with his legs folded. I wonder what he waits for, but I never ask him. I just nod. He nods back.

I look forward to seeing—careful! There’s no sign, but there’s a hole in the sidewalk. They never closed it. You wouldn’t know, you barely take any walks, especially in this part of town. That’s okay. It’s why I make sure I always tell people about the pit here.

Anyway, as I was saying, the first thing I do is take a walk in the neighbourhood. You make friends that way. There’s a group that loads their truck right down the block. One day, I stopped and offered to help them. I admit I wasn’t much help that day, but now we just all smile and nod at each other.

Around the corner, you’ll find a few cabbies who I’ll smile at when we cross the road. I often get a cab here when I don’t have the luxury to walk. Oh, yes, it is a luxury. It is a luxury to go somewhere in your own time. I’m not like a lot of other walkers. They only walk for leisure. To me, leisure is part of it, part of it is getting where you’re going. I believe, if you go too fast, you miss stuff.

I often help people with directions. I’ve realised they only stop to ask those who are walking fast, like us right now, because we know where we’re going. The café is just around the corner. You see, people need someone who knows where they’re going but not going there fast. That is, in fact, why I prefer walking. There has to be someone slow enough to help others with directions.

Ah, we’ve reached the coffee shop. It’s cold. Let’s go inside. Oh, you want to sit outside. Well, that works for me. We’ll sit outside.

They lay down in the grass as the pale, winter sun tried to reach their faces through the disparate leaves of the tree right above them. One of them, with his back clinging tightly to the tree, held a few blades of the grass between his fingers, turning them. The other was on the ground, one of his arms crossed below his head, and the other raised.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“What are you trying to do?” The first one asked, continuing to spin those blades of grass, now bruised with being turned continually.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“I’m trying to grab something,” the other answered.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“What?”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Life,” he said. Then, opened his palm and eclipsed the flare of the sun peeking through the countless leaves on that tree. He closed his palm, as if he were grabbing that flare, and made a fist.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Did you know, chimpanzees can’t climb branches?”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“What do you mean? Chimpanzees live in trees.”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Yeah, they do, but they can’t climb branches from the get-go. They try a lot, and most of them continually hit the forest floor. Then, they get up and try again. Some die, of course, or get injuries, but many persist and become the chimpanzees we know as chimpanzees. Adept. Dexterous. I want to be a chimpanzee, man. I mean, it is so easy, just so easy to say that the world is against me, that everything conspires to make sure I couldn’t get what I want. It was the easiest thing to fall down on the leaves, and blame the branch or the tree or even gravity. It was the easiest thing to do. It was so much harder, downright impossible even, to get up and climb that tree again, to believe that the world was working for me. To believe that I would make it, that I would climb my branch, whatever that may be, and that I’d swing from it and go to another. To believe that one day, I’d keep going on and on. It was hard to believe that, but it was worth it, man. I want to grab life by the throat, pull it close and whisper in its ear: I’m not afraid of falling.”⁣⁣
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“You’re weird, man. You know that, right?” ⁣⁣
⁣⁣
“Yes, I’m aware.”⁣⁣
⁣⁣
He kept looking up, trying to take his share of the sun after the countless leaves had taken their own.

“I think that’s a good thing”, he smiled.

Don’t fall in love with these words I write. I want to be honest, love, and tell you the truth. The truth is that these are average words. There are better ones out there, and trust me when I tell you, I’m an average bloke, with an average life, really. Nothing about me or my day is extraordinary, and I don’t intend to change that.

I wear the same clothes every day, do the same things every day, and I never get tired of it. The incredible sense of awe you spoke of after reading a piece I wrote was something you brought to it. I only write about the things I see, in words as plain as the paper I start writing them on. Then, I forget about them altogether.

I pay an extra ounce of attention to something, sometimes, and then come home and hack away at my desk for a while, until something resembling a paragraph pops out. When that happens, I go back to the typical day. I sip coffee by myself in a café at eleven in the night in the cold of winter because I’m used to it.

I’m used to being by myself. There’s nothing romantic or cinematic about it. It’s just how I do things, and trust me: you’ll get tired with how I do things. I’m either too caffeinated or too drunk all the time. I’ve much forgotten what I feel like when I’m neither. I don’t intend to find out anymore.

I oscillate between having so much to do that my head explodes and being so exhausted that I can barely get out of my bed. I’m no saint either. I lie, a lot, especially in these words. It’s not a lie per se. It’s either the exaggeration or the omission of some truth.

The “me” you’ll find when you spend time with me will be tedious and aggravating on most days. I’d ask you not to touch things in my apartment. I’d listen to the same music always. I’d run around the flat and the city, frantically, talking about some half-assed epiphany.

So, don’t fall in love with these words I write. I can be difficult; I’m sure you’re the same. I’m not a metaphor. I’m a guy in a sweatshirt sitting alone in a coffee shop. I’m sure you get it by now. Don’t fall in love with these words I write, love, the joke will be on you. Truth be told, the blame too.

You’ll expect the world of me, and I’ll expect nothing of you.