journal.coffee

Lost all the joy I had on me and did not realise it. It fell right out of my pocket like how when you’re taking something out of it, and something else crawls out, but you never realise it. I reckon it was something like that. It’s a good thing then that you can make more of it, or find it lying where other people left it, or find it in some inconspicuous spot on an old street you remember like the back of your hand, which you flip through as if it were a journal you found in the attic or a trunk. “It truly was a different time,” you tell yourself as you see a spectre of the original thing. Memory is a fickle thing—it makes and breaks a moment all on its own. Today, I found my bearings and my general disposition on the hanger behind the door. Dusty as it was, I wore it when I left to meet a friend at the bistro in the evening.

Made the impossible demand that everyone understand every ounce of myself at all times. It’s a tall order, and even if there were a person like this, I am not sure I would want them to perceive every corner as it seems. I believe this is the perpetual state of inconsistency I have called home for many years now. All people are inconsistent, of course. It is the mark of a liar—a constant state of being. I am only able to call my bluff when I see it. Then, I own it like a scar. If it is there, you cannot do much about it. So, the only thing you can do is own it. Perhaps, this consistent brokenness of my narrative of myself is, in itself, a blessing. It keeps these vignettes fresh. There is no plot to this absurd life, and as I have admitted before, I am okay with any ending. But even then, even with all these things in place, a reader may need some sense of conflict. Well, here it is, in all its glory: I was lost for a little while, and now I am found, and I will be lost again.

Oh, what reader, you ask? I wonder, too. I wonder about that all the time. Maybe, some things are still being written. It is much, much earlier than I like to admit. We’re only at the first third, by all estimates.

Connection is all I crave. I go out of my way to understand everyone else; why, then, am I denied the same privilege? I do not know. I am too tired to ask. All my days end the same way—the bitterness of never being understood, its sick aftertaste causes a lump in my throat, and I am unable to form a question, or a sentence, or even a word. There goes my heart along the pitter-patter of the rain. I do not know what else is there—to do everything right and still fail to be read without bias. I’m listened to like a song whose lyrics are never paid attention to. Often, when I notice someone has not grasped what I meant to say in the least, when I see they are entirely off the mark, I get this impossible wish never to speak to anyone again. There is so much love and admiration I hold for this world; why, then, do I not get this in return, not once, not enough?

I am exhausted, but not in body or mind. There’s a third way. I do not know what to call it. So many people around. All of them look at me. Why, then, do I not feel seen? I see where everyone comes from. Why then do they not bother to take a step back, out of their own heads, out of their own stories, out of their own little world to see there can be one more, another world which is as much about them as theirs is about mine, which is to say it is not about them at all? If I can do this—look past myself in conversations, in places where I am asked for advice, over and over, day after day. Why, then, has my life begun to feel like a solo performance, an orchestra of one, where the conductor is absent, and I am left to fend for myself in front of an audience I can never please? So many questions, barely any answers. And now, I see the day is already over. What to do? Go to sleep and hope for another day, and if nothing else, for the tenacity to be solid enough to bolster through all that and, since the world is ever-so-relentlessly blind and dense, through a little bit more.

Twice this week, under the slight inebriation of beer, the first and only thought on my mind was how there is nothing I would not mind trading to be completely, fully understood for but a fleeting moment in this long life. I believe most people we know, those we find in life, and those we lose, understand us in parts, in slices and tokens of the entire thing. At least, that is how I have felt all my life—misunderstood on most days and barely understood on others. If I mention this want in front of others, in an overt display of irony, they fail to understand even this and hand me their golden nugget of advice: that my wish is unrealistic, that I should temper my expectations to about seventy per cent, that it is more achievable. I do not blame them, of course, but only out of a habit of shrugging misunderstandings off. A part of me remains furious at how blockheaded people can be at times. But then, there is little you can do. So, I do what anyone would do: take another sip from the pint, shut my trap, and then let the conversation slide into whatever people do understand.

I believe I am partly to blame, after all, for I am never truly myself when I am with other people. It is only when I spend time as I did today as I cleaned the house, managed to finish chores, and stood with my arms on the balcony slab, staring at the sunny day, that I am truly myself. The rest often involves me playing some part of what other people want me to be—little tricks and adjustments I have learned in all these years to get through my days with minimal conflict. Naturally, I feel inadequately understood because the bridge goes both ways. There is nothing I can do with this, of course. I believe I can follow the advice of tempering my expectations after all, but that does not change the fact that I would trade all things I have, and if not all, then most things, to feel a slight second, even in error, of being wholly understood—a pipe dream, wishful thinking, of course. But then again, most wishes seem abstract until they somehow come true, do they not?

I only dream of the present. Over and over, I find myself asleep with my eyes wide open, dreaming of nothing but the days I waste so nonchalantly. My days begin at this desk; my dreams end on it—one ends where the other begins. As if I were lost at a crossroads, tracing my steps repeatedly, forgetting where I came from and where to go, I lose track of this too. Now, the present is all I see in its exhausting beauty, its painful helplessness, the phalanx of days that all look the same, feel the same, begin the same and end the same. There is so much here, and I love it with all my heart.

I do not know where this absurd longing, this complicated love for the mundane began, but when I meet someone disappointed with life because it is unchanging, I often ask what else they were expecting. And then, I hear what most people would upon asking a question like this: excitement. But then, how long does excitement stay exciting, I wonder, before it, too, starts to feel like a chore, before one has to tape their smile to their cheeks?

In my experience, nothing poisons the well of society worse than those who feign joy and excitement. But it is not their fault; they are prisoners in labyrinths they built. If only they stopped to dive headfirst into tedium, if only they accepted that most ambition goes nowhere, and most hope is just something we cling to so we manage to end our days, which all still look the same. And no, this does not mean we should let go of ambition or hope, but it is why we could hold onto them tighter than we ever imagined: when we know them for what they are and not what we want them to be.

For now, this is all I know: I have fully surrendered to whatever happens in this life on a given day. The exciting bits come and go, but I always end up here, at this desk, with some work, some idea I wish to see through, or these words. But it all does end, and that is why I remain watchful and aware, curiously waiting for the scenery to change, for when it does, I will know it is fleeting, that before I blink, I will be back home, going through the motions. My tedium opens the doors for me. Every journey is a trip back home—wherever that may be for someone.

People exhaust me. The more I hear from someone I haven’t heard from in a long time, the more I want to never talk to anyone again. And usually, they need something from you: an answer, a presence in some event to show others they know people, some favour or some money. As much of a believer I am in always using my words, the less I say here, the better.

One of the most artistically tone-deaf people I know asked me if I ever lose inspiration in this city, of how the life here is not as fast as one of the metropolitans where if the air gets slightly worse, they will choke on their breath. I asked them if they had ever watched clouds move over the sky in July. They said they don’t recall it. I stopped my inquiry there and let the conversation trickle into another topic.

It always amuses me how people with no acumen for anything artistic about life have the most inane questions to ask people like me. The malicious ignorance, the intentional incompetence of their very being, oozes out when they open their mouth to comment on art, the process, or whatever lies in between, making the whole world weep.

Now, some student writing a dissertation in college will want to raise their pitchfork, claiming that this gatekeeping of art is why the world has disintegrated into blocks of concrete where pencil pushers live their lives thinking they contribute to the world. When they make their accusation, I will agree with them so they shut up. I do not have the time for it. There is work to do, for I need to eat, and at some point in my life, I would want to stop paying rent, and when the work is done, and the dishes are done, too, there are words to write.

This is not a heroic tale. It is a life, and I am living mine. All people go through things, but when other people go through things, I’ve noticed they tell a heroic tale. I will make no such mistake. But it still makes me wonder: how would the world change if everyone said, “I am a person, like all of us, and things have happened to me”? What would happen if the world were as earnest? Would I be able to tolerate it, then? Would I not have to feign interest anymore?

A world existing only at face value—a thing like that!

I sit in a cafe, and I read a morbid poem about life. I lose myself in the chatter and murmur. Then, I try to order another cup of coffee. I wish, sometimes, that I could tell you how my life changed, of all the things that happened, of the joys and the perils which are part-and-parcel of living. But then, there are no conversations beyond the end of the line. It is a shame how easily we lose people to time, to our own shortcomings, to the toss of fate—even if I could not, for the life of me, think it had any say in things that happen to us. It’s been more than a minute, of course, and to think about things that happened all this time ago might look like some lingering doubt, but it is not. You miss every day of your life, whether it was sunny or even if it rained. When you reach a certain point, it all becomes about time passed, things felt, the sheer abundance of all that there is to remember, and the lack of time and mind to do it. Just then, the cup of coffee arrives, and I am deflected out of this reverie.

For all those I have crossed paths with and all who I am yet to meet, I wish nothing but goodness, beauty and magic. It is not in my heart to hate another, even if I hold my anger for a minute or two; it is not in my mind to not find some plausible reasoning for whatever does happen. I can convince myself of everything except this: to despise others. It is not in me to hold a grudge, and even if someone stabbed me in the back, if I manage to live somehow, and then if I see them on the street, and if they need a hand, I will be the first to extend it; if not the first, I will extend it nonetheless. There is still hope in this world, in me, yet. I look around the cafe, and I see only this: potential. From whoever I have ever wronged, even if in error, I ask forgiveness, and to every person who ever harmed me, even if they did intend it, I say, “It’s alright, have a drink and tell me what have you seen since we last met?”

The world is alright, if we talked a little, and then if we all talked a little bit more. But people seldom talk as much as they should. When they do, they talk about all the wrong things, and then they wonder where things went wrong.

I barely sat to write this past week and lost track of how many days it had been. There was so much to do, important things—some truly important and some only because everyone else deems them so, but to exist, we must abide. But this Sunday, I woke up in my own skin for a change and decided it was as good a time to write as any. Often when I talk to people about things, about religion or politics or society, in general, I softly realise that I am an outcast in more than one way, that I only manage to feign my belongingness in some sense, like a poor disguise, and that the people I meet can slide this veil off in variable amounts. But on more occasions than necessary, I feel out of place, or at least out of step with the world. Things that are apparent conclusions to me are absent from the view of others. I think it is my general competence to follow instructions when I choose to that lets me fit in with this world. If I were, by some odd curse, incompetent, I would have had a hard time building a life. But now that I can carry myself, I can enter the same places as the others even though we all know I should not be there.

Growing up, people often tell you some things that stick with you. One such memory is when someone told me I had raw ability, that it was a rare gift where all my measure of talent had no adjective around it, that I could truly do whatever I wanted to if I set my mind to it, and if I chose to, that it was all like clay waiting to be moulded. As the years have passed, I have seen exceptions to this and found things I could not learn for the life of me, a graveyard of attempts, but I have found that statement to hold its ground more times than I could discount it entirely. Perhaps, I can fit in as well as I do because of this, because of my ability to learn and be useful. It only helps that my only want from life is also this: to be useful. But if I were asked if there was a place I truly belonged in outside of my home, I would say the list is sparingly short, and even then, I would be giving some grace to some. But mostly, I am a part of myself when I am out in the world. I often knit my life across several parts of it to feel complete.

Another day spent sitting on this chair, facing one screen after the other. The immovable desk, the constant moment, the perpetual rains that have not paused for a second these past few days have remained. I have stayed in place, staring at the drops trickle and race each other over the glass panel around the balcony, measuring its length only to fall into a tiny puddle and disappear forever. In the morbid obsession of getting things done and finding solutions to problems I could not care about if I were not being paid for it, I made some comparison between all of us and the drops, but then, owing to it being cliche, I decided to let it all vanish, too. Dullness all around; why add more to the puddle?

I often end my days with disappointment that settles as comfortably as a guest who sits on your couch with a thump and sigh. The light frustration of not amounting to whatever I set out to be and then finding something else to find meaning in, as all of us do, makes its home in me, like how when you are out for breakfast with your friends, and you ask the server if they have orange juice, and when they tell you they don’t, it does not take you long to ask them what else is there. It does not matter what is there for as long as there is juice, and so, when they say watermelon, you don’t think twice before ordering it. When you are twenty-six, almost twenty-seven, a bit differently than you’d imagined, you don’t complain or flail and wail in agony. You turn the music on at the end of a day in a long series of days, and you take a swig of whatever sits at the desk—water, whiskey, tea, coffee; it does not matter, for nothing matters as long as there is something to drink. It is the sip that counts. All that matters is that something exists, that you are something, that there is something, whether it is one way or the other bears no meaning.

My optimism for anything grand to happen wanes like accidental sunlight on a moist day, realising all of a sudden that it does not matter whether it shows its face or not; the rain will carry on as it does, as it has, as it will.

The day is over. Neither the sun nor I have anything to show for it.

It tickles me curious how whether it rains in the first leg of the day or not sets up the tone for the rest of it. The large, zeppelin-like cloud has poured over the city like a generous bartender filling up drinks for the butterflies at a bar. The spills are too many, too copious, and all glasses are brimming. This has set the tone for the day. The week, already at its end, could not have had a better epilogue. The lychee tree beside the apartment complex shakes violently like a drenched dog as the rain begins to die down. It is already over, but it did what it had to do: reminded all of us to go gentle into the weekend. Now, I want to pick up a book as if I were fifteen and begin reading it during the day and continue until I reach the cover. The only challenge, like always, is other people. But to hell with them; I cannot waste such a good day. I shall keep appearances, but I will not worry about the rest.

This is a day that demands you lie down with a light blanket on top of you and read until your eyes feel heavy as you lose yourself in a nap. When you wake up, you look at the pale evening light sneaking in through the window and begin reading again in comfortable grogginess. The light shiver in the air, the soft rumbling in the distance, the birds taking shelter in your balcony—I can already feel it, as if the day has already happened and I have woken up from an unintentional nap into a moment of snug respite. I can only imagine how incredible the real thing will feel in a few hours.

All my life is a stolen moment. My joy is the few minutes I can take away from the world, sneakily and without a hint that I took them. This is true for most of my day. Sure, I play all the parts I’m given with unmatched accuracy, to the best of my ability—to be alive is to be held accountable for something—but if I were given a choice, I would choose to sit in the audience of one—a perpetual spectator, watching the wheels forever. To exist in a pocket of my own, experience the world, art, literature, a rainy day or two is all I want from my life. I will continue to engage in the rest, for I must, but I will continue to steal my precious seconds. That is my only compulsion.

Often, when you stand knee-deep in documents and worries and other little things that affect us all, someone comes along and asks, “Do you think this will matter if you died today?” And through this, they suggest letting loose about whatever troubles us. And when you answer, “No, it won’t,” they ask you in a tone that makes it seem rhetorical, “Then, why does it matter now?” But it is not rhetorical. There is no rhetoric there, just an empty strawman to give you a false sense of ease. It matters because I am not dead yet, because I am alive, and I live and breathe, and everything matters only because I am here to experience it.

The world will go as it goes even when I stop living in it, but if it is raining and if I am caught in the shower, I have every right to be ecstatic, if I have nothing to do and nowhere to be, and furious, if I have to be somewhere and my clothes are soiled. And if I see a sunset, it is only that I see it that matters as far as I am concerned. The sun would set without me, too, and it would not make a difference to me if I were not there. My presence in this world, that I can experience it in my own way, gives it meaning. Do landscapes exist until someone looks at them in awe and wonder?

All our frivolous trivialities matter only because we exist, so yes, the troubles matter, too. They count more than anything else in the world until I am here, and when I’m gone, they will be gone with me. The other evening, my mother and I talked about how even if you leave something undone and do not worry about it, on most days, it remains for you; you must come back and sort it out. This is a good thing. It is how things are. The problems I leave on the desk do not walk away. They wait for me patiently. Whatever we leave halfway waits for us to come back. So sure, look away from it all for a little bit, but know this: to have a life, to be able to breathe, begets responsibility. Whatever that means to any of us is what also has the power to bring so much joy.

My doctor has a habit of telling me, telling us, not to worry about things, that we stress a lot these days. What did people do before these days arrived? I often wonder when he says that.

I think the last thing I ever want is for someone to ask someone else about me and them being able to perfectly, in a few words, describe who I am. Such a tragedy that would be if someone could say a single word to catch everything a person is and everything they ever could be, as if casting a net over their entire being. Such a terrible thing it is to be labelled and defined. A friend remarked the other day about how I tend to contradict myself every half year or so, and I laughed about it and said something about how it wasn’t always like that, that there are things that change and things that stay, but then, I thought about it a lot, and they did make a valid observation. But then, I reckon it is all by design, and this need to reinvent who I am and what I do continually. It starts to suffocate me if time passes and I look in the mirror, and it is the same person I see, complete with the same vocation, fears or days. There is so much room to experiment in this life, and we must shuffle things up every two or three years to exercise this muscle of freedom in our minds. You conform too long to yourself and what everyone says about you, and then, you conform for a lifetime. At least, I think that is true, and so I tend to go out of my way to make sure there is some problem to solve, and as flawed as it may sound, make a problem if there isn’t any, but then, this is life, and there are always things to fix or make better. At least, I think that is true, but you could never be too sure about these things.

The whole day has passed since I wrote the above, and like an adept juggler or acrobat, I have balanced the requirements to be a person on my nose. Now, I sit at the cafe and bask in my glory. Another day has been conquered. Another battle has been won. No one will tell these tales. We begin and end with our banality. I take a sip of the coffee like it is some mead from the gods, given as a gift to exist, and I think of myself and all that I did today, and a part of me is happy for whoever I am right now, but a part of me has begun to ask: where to next? I do not have an answer. Not yet.

The fever passed, and with it passed hundreds of sentences I had thought of and not written down anywhere. A lot of inspiration comes from lying in bed under the blanket of boredom, and sickness is an excuse good as any to spend a few days thinking. Now that I am filled with caffeine and the other stuff the pills put into me, I have lost all the bits and pieces I had foraged from the many wealds of my fever dreams. Now, like usual, I am filled with the fears of deadlines, with the perils of never-ending paperwork. All so tiring, all so overwhelming, all so usual. It baffles me that we accept this as people, but I am just one person and don’t intend to cause a revolution. People cannot bother with where the world goes. It is only the concern of the few who take the positions and stature, whatever their motivations might be. Most of us only want to be able to have a good time for as long as we can do it and be done with this charade sooner than later.

I lost myself for a good chunk of this year, and now July is here. It is here with its whiteout of languid swelter. Despite countless warnings, it has barely rained in the city this year. It has been muggy and frustrating all around. But in this nothingness, I find it easier to retrace my steps to what began all this, these words, these slices of my life. My resolve beats inside my heart; I can hear its soft thumps again.

There is a reason for my days filled with the horrors of work, money, and other twaddle, but there is a better end to this bitter pursuit. I had gotten too caught up with the minutiae. You must always resist the call of a number; they always catch you with it: years of experience, monthly income, the next step of your career, what say you. So much of society is filled with these vacuous ideas in the name of progress, but is it progress if it leads nowhere? You might as well draw a circle in the sand and trace it with your steps for eternity. Now, I am reminded once again why I do what I do.

It has always been to be able to read a book in peace, and if I want to spend two days reading it, then taking two days. There has never been anything else, and I am getting there, both in mind and in means.

On a rather regular day with a rather regular sky, I had a rather regular realisation regarding the range of my reticence. How did it begin? It began with a friend saying something, and it sticking like a spot of ink accidentally sputtered onto a white wall—unintentional, sure, but permanent for all intents and purposes. What was said, what it meant is all irrelevant, for the inquiry has been made, and the thinking has been done: I have realised how much I have changed.

The world claims, as part of its peevish plethora of platitudes, that people can’t place much but remember how we made them feel. It’s a popular claim based on a popular quote, but like all things that are too simple as all popular things often are, it is as true as the time on a broken clock—which is to say it is mostly wrong. People only remember what they remember. On most days, they forget most about others and themselves. It’s a tall order for them to remember your continuity. Recency is all that is remembered, and it rewrites and resets the rest in its reflection. But why this sudden detour into what the world says about what people remember? Because of how we change.

We change slowly, in pieces and places no one—not even we—can notice. But then, the toll of remembering how and who we were falls only on ourselves. Nobody can remember this for us; we must do the heavy lifting. And how do we change?

Time passes, and something gets knocked down here and there. If we notice it, we replace it, but what if we don’t? If it is something small like a split of paint on the wall, or a screw that moves freely if you turn it too tight, or a table that wobbles a bit, what then? What if it is something we ignore? Then, we change as things change—without anyone knowing or, better, remembering.

Summer slowly swerves and swivels with the splashes of monsoon, and I sit at this cafe, tallying the little things I have ignored too long, of how they have changed who I am. But of course, there is no answer, no conclusion, and if you ask anyone else but myself, I assure you, there will be no memory. No one but we, ourselves, are the reliable narrators. We write about it if we can; otherwise, we write it off.

Woke up yesterday with a dream I could not make head or tail of, and it was not until the afternoon that I accepted it to be a fever dream. Since then, the juxtaposition of the city caught in the rain, with storm warnings issued yet again, and my body continuing to boil has had me cross-eyed and confused. My febrile and fatigued state has painted the last forty-eight hours in its own dull colours mixed in sweat and many hours of lying down or doing the little I can do. I’d say I was able to do something still, often owing to the faux vigour pumped in my veins through coffee or a tablet or two. But mostly, outside of the hours of work, the last two days have been watching TV and the rain, and at times, both of them together. How fast days pass when we’re sick, and yet, how long every second feels when everything in your being hurts to some degree—it makes me curious still, and here I sit staring at the clear night sky, washed anew by the rain this evening, a cup of chamomile on the sill, enjoying the breeze as it plucks the droplets of sweat stuck to my temples.

Before I moved inside and sat to write, I picked all the books lying on the desk and the rugs and put them back on the bookshelf. All the books I wanted to read, that I had begun reading ardently, have now disappeared into the pile of failed attempts. I must find something else to read when this ends—this fever, this annoyance. It always goes like this—when you find a good book and begin reading it and liking every second of your time spent with it, some barrier blocks it from being read further. It could be a sickness, a spell of busyness, a wedding or something you have no control and imagination for, and then you can never open it up and continue from that point on. You have to start reading it again someday, and until that day arrives, the book remains shamefully jailed amidst the towers of books you own.

Now, I wait patiently for everything to pass and to begin a new book, hoping nothing interrupts it, but seldom is it all so benevolent. Most life is interruption to things we thought we would do, and somehow, between all that, we end up doing something still.

The best kind of stories are where the elements of fantasy are used sparingly, and nothing is too out there, and when you experience it, you know it is a story, but you also know that it could very well be something that happened in the neighbourhood, and if it did, and if you heard it from someone, and if they had a habit of exaggeration, you would get a version of it almost precisely like the story you’ve just read or watched. And when people talk in those stories, they speak in such a way that if you replaced one of them and placed someone else, someone real in it, they would be able to carry the conversation forward, and no one would notice the replacement. I think those are the best stories. There is a place for all of it, of course, but if I were to choose to lose myself in an unbelievable world, I prefer to be lost with someone I would not mind talking to if I ever met them; quite possibly, I would not mind calling them a friend, either. For the sake of explicit clarity, since the preference for one thing is often interpreted as hatred for another today, I am a lover of all stories; only we all have our favourites in the things we love, too. That much, you’ll have to agree with.

Favourite seasons, favourite lovers, favourite cafes or favourite films do not tell you that they are loved more than the others, and I believe that is where people start to conflate things; they only tell you that when someone thinks about the thing, their favourite is what usually comes to mind. When I think of drinking, I think of an old fashioned. Does that mean I despise beer? No. On the contrary, when I think of summer, I cannot help but think of a warm day on a terrace patio and the cold pint of beer in my hands, every drop and bubble sparkling under the golden, royal sun. We all have our favourites. The trick, if there is any, is being open to them changing. There are no absolutes here. There can never be any. The human spirit tries to fill the days it is poured into. Often, it fills some days faster than others. That has nothing to say about its ability to adapt or change. All it says is there are parts of life we like, and there are some parts we like more than others.

A great sentence is not a great sentence in itself. It is lifted off the page by the padding around it, the context set by the paragraph it begins or ends, or if done correctly, lifts in turn. When you read a book, and suddenly, you reach a sentence that knocks the wind out of you, when you have to rest the book onto the couch or the lounger or wherever you are reading it, and when you have to stare off into space to realise what has just happened to you, it is not about the single sentence. It is about the buildup, the anticipation, the stage set until it makes its bold, grand entry. It is the effect of so many words, so much groundwork being laid for you. The sentence may be great in itself; sure, that could be true, too. But until you read it sandwiched between where it was meant to exist and not as a stray quote on some website or in some compilation by someone who only wished they could have written one of them, would you truly know the essence of it. There is nothing more essential than context.

And the context of a life is the most important thing. To assume we know things about others is a pit many fall into now and then. To believe we are even aware of the full context of our lives at all times is also an expectation that is seldom met. Take my days, for example: once again, the context of my days is that I seem to have gone out of my way and lived too much for others after a full year—maybe more—of keeping this affliction in check. I believe there are flaws we can never overcome, the fatal ones, and like my sentences, my life is, too, woven into that of others. But then, before this thought consumes me, I realise July is not here yet. It is still June, and i can still strike a balance. Half a year may have passed, but half remains still, and sure, even if I may have walked the tightrope of duty and desire for a while, all seems clearer once again.

I can still salvage this year; if I play my cards right, I can still salvage this life. Anything feels doomed when we realise time never stopped flowing; it also makes things saveable, that there is always more time.

There are many reasons you might hate a book, and let me tell you: it is perfectly fine to have it on your bookshelf still, like how you remember the birthday of an old friend you haven’t talked to in years, with unmatched familiarity.

You could hate a book because it is a terrible book, or that you never found the time to read it, and now it serves as a reminder of your procrastination, or you could hate it because the person who gave it to you is not in your life for reasons you do not want to dive into further, or because you once really enjoyed it but have now outgrown it like a pair of jeans from your adolescence—while it may not serve any purpose now, it was instrumental once. But perhaps, the most crucial kind of hate for a book you could have is when you fundamentally disagree with the author or find their existence infuriating but also carry a deep respect for the magnitude of their work.

All these are perfectly fine to have on your bookshelf, and it makes me wince in disgust when I enter someone’s home and see a bookshelf, but there are only books they agree with, or books that are popular to have, or those from only one era, or one author, or books that seemingly only talk about one thing. It’s ugly and perverse; worse, it tells no story. Having a bookshelf without a story is worse than having no bookshelf at all.

If at least a quarter of the books have not turned yellow on the sides, owing to the pastel touch of time, it is too recent a bookshelf, which means whoever owns it (provided they have kept the practice of reading for a while and not begun just now, where the latter has an exemption from this yardstick, and I wholeheartedly welcome them to the club) has actively discarded books out of it, which suggests that they do not care about the reading as much as they care about reading the right things where what defines the “right” is as arbitrary as any of society’s fickle whims.

I could not, in my right mind, ever trust someone who only lives this life of appearance. I would not trust them with dividing portions of food, giving friendly advice on a mundane problem, or speaking a simple smidge of truth even when there was no reason to lie.

Midnight was approaching; we were getting drunk. I had not planned on it, but who plans for it? The crowd was waning, and everyone was slowly getting home, partly because I assumed they had enough to drink, too, but mostly because it was about to rain. Just then, I stared at the night sky from the balcony of the bar we were in, and the static of rain had already begun to fill it quietly. I do not remember whoever said whatever from that point on. There was but the sky to watch in its soft light beauty, and to be honest, what do people say anyway? The server asked me if we had a last order since they were approaching closing time. I laughed and said I was expecting him, and we ordered an old fashioned each and some dessert which we ended up not eating, and I was glad for it. Stating it was “out of your way” and declining the invitation of being dropped home, I booked a ride and trotted towards the little booth where all the guards sat. I asked them if I could wait there. They did not mind.

I think it was then that I felt this extreme wave of loneliness crash over me. The cemented courtyard, usually brimming, was now as drenched and empty as I was. The neon lights from all around created a separate world in the reflections, one which I could not inhabit and which felt more real than the one I was living in. This heaviness in the drops that rapidly fell into the fountain pool right ahead of me like a barrage of shells fired into enemy lines took me by surprise, and it made me feel every sadness I had felt all at once. Then, the driver arrived, and I got in and apologised for getting the seats all wet. When we passed the clock tower, its chime echoed over the empty, slippery wet town, and I checked my watch; it was thirteen to midnight still.

“Why do you think it chimed early?” I asked the driver.

“I have no idea, but if it helps, I checked the time, too,” he said and laughed.

“It does help,” I laughed too, and we did not say anything till we reached.

I reached the apartment two minutes before midnight. I left the wet clothes by the door and slept within ten minutes of changing. When I woke up in the morning, though, the sadness had not left me still.