journal.coffee

The older I grow, the more I notice how most people don’t care about other people until their world is falling apart or in an hour of extreme boredom, both of which tend to arise with haste when you do not have others in your mind when you live. That, and art. Most people look for other people and art—an extension of other people—when they don’t have much else to hold on to. It is a sad state of affairs, and I can sit and lament over this and that is often the only course of action for things out of our hands. But not being able to do much for a thing does not make it untrue. It only means you cannot do anything about it. While this thought has overstayed its welcome, I will direct my attention elsewhere in the spirit of that last sentence, so I will think of this year and its beginning.

The beginning of this year has not been as smooth as I had imagined or what I had come to expect. Expectation—what a peril, what a pain, what a thorn in my foot. When I say not as smooth, there is a comparison in my mind. Like how they say that a solitary number means nothing unless you have another to compare it to, I have been ruthlessly comparing this year with the last. At least, I have played with this thought in my mind. Where last year began with a stupendous zeal to begin anew, this year has already started with an urge to protect, and with the idea of protection, comes the fear of failing at it. When I was younger, I read somewhere: when you have something, you have something to lose.

I believe this beginning in a January when it failed to rain in the city and snow in the hills for the better part of it, where things are precisely as they were in December by design, where like my apartment, everything is in its right place at all times, I feel a mild anxiety I had not felt in a long time.

In this beginning, I fear change. It has been years since I have felt this, but that is not what scares me. What scares me is that the tendency of life is to change. To know this and still want to protect what you have is a fallacy. This is a beginning of dissonance, but here, I sit outside my life, en garde.

Once again, my fallible humanity has gotten the better of me.

All told, there is little worry about in my life—my own life, which I treat with the same carelessness as how I handle the things I have owned for a long time, and which scares others. Do you not value this? They ask me as I waltz around casually. It does, of course, I tell them, but I tend to not worry about it anymore. But our life is seldom just our own, and all poems and platitudes have lied for a long time, so I worry. I worry about everyone else in my life. That is just how things are, and there is little I can do to help it. I own many things, some of which are expensive, and if one were to break tomorrow, I would wince, and it would pinch me for a day or two, but then, I would not have it in me to care. But if it were someone else’s possession, I would treat it better than I treat myself on a good day. I would keep it safe, sound and protected. I am this way with everything people possess—including their lives and disposition.

We can always trudge around with our sadness and our pain. We have known it for years, decades even, but it hurts when there is pain in the room, and it is not our own. This second-hand difficulty makes my heart sink and suffocate in the depths of the human experience. I read a long time ago that the origins of altruism have hints in our genetics. I do not know if that is true, and frankly, I do not care enough to look it up. All I know is that if I were bleeding profusely and had all my ribs broken, and if there was but a scratch on someone I know and care for, I would tend to them first. If there were time and patience, I would get to fix my own self, but first, I would ask them: are you okay?

I smile when a friend asks me why I worry so much when life seems more fecund than an apple tree in season. I wish I could tell them this, but if you tell people this, they begin to get worried for no reason in particular, and I know a thing or two about how that feels.

Now that I have done this for an entire year, there must be something that has changed. I have the same question as any person observing this needless pursuit. But nothing feels different. My imagination got the better of me, perhaps. It has been a year. I am still writing. Now, I finally sit and ask myself the question: why? I have no answer yet, so I assume I must write more to get there. A year has given me the courage to ask the question; another may bring the answer. It has been a year. There is little else to say.

Countless hours of devouring cups of coffee have amounted to about two hundred thousand words—the good ones. God knows how many have succumbed to the reject pile, how many have suffocated under the pressure of not being just right. I’ve wasted more sentences on this journey than I have ever uttered in my life. There is something in that. At least, I’d like to think so; else, this was all a futile mission doomed from its inception. Writers often waste more words than they use, and the threshold for this is different on a case-by-case basis. Some are precise writers—they know the correct words spontaneously and instantly. I am not like them. I often avoid reading these glimpses of my life because I know there is always a better word in hindsight—a better word, a better pursuit, a better decision.

It takes a smart man to know where he is going, but it takes an honest one to admit he has no clue, and I have forever been more honest than I have been smart. I wish there was a fitting conclusion. For all I know, I have but tested myself. It has been an exercise in patience. Looking back, all my life has been an exercise in patience. Of all the things I do well—a list on which writing these words rank much lower than one would expect—it is waiting and working aimlessly that I do best. Waiting and working is all I know. I reckon that is all this is: a test of how far I can go with it.

That, or the making of something greater than I can ever imagine. I would never know. I look around, and I see so many people; I may as well be the stranger I look at when I walk down the street—nameless for so many, faceless for others, existing, working and waiting.

I’ve walked through the bookstores year by year. Year by year, I have watched the Fiction section dwindle and die. From a whole store to an aisle or two, now a single shelf, if any. Where I come from, no one has time for fiction or a short poem, and surely, no time for whatever it is I do, lying neither here nor there. Where I come from, we are so desperate to use our time to make things happen, to get out of our neighbourhoods, our terrible influences and great troubles, that we do not have the time to read some words about the rain. We must feel as if something has happened when the words end. We must get an insight out of everything, and if not insight, then something we can project into the world. Oh, it would be a travesty if we did not make the most of our time, if we did not sit and let things happen, especially if that use of our time is with reading. At least, this is what everyone tells me.

But I look at them as if I have been betrayed. If this is how it is for everyone here, where then, did I come from? What happened to me, and more importantly, when did it happen? Why can I sit and think about a cup of coffee and not have it take anything away from me? Or should I reverse this interrogation, and would it make all the sense then?

Where I come from, we do not talk about this; instead, we simply say, “I do not like reading stories.” Where I come from, even those who believe in religion seldom read the books they quote so often, or worse, paint the town with in enamel or, sometimes, blood. Where I come from, people are too busy, so no one will read what I write, for this does not give them anything. At least, that is what I have been told time and again, but then, I think there is more to it than meets the eye. The words I write do give people something—they give them a moment of uncomfortable scrutiny and ask: why can I not celebrate this life, have a moment of respite? The answer is too difficult to face.

And where I come from, we do not face anything, especially our need to squeeze every second out. Here, we watch the Fiction section of a bookstore die, inch by inch, all the while asking: why does the world always feel like it is going to end?

I made my way outside the cafe and stepped down the staircase. The lights, lights all around. The lights made me jump in ecstatic happiness, and I could not see my face, but I knew I was gleaming, too. No flaw was visible. What a city, I thought. Almost as if the hour, the moment was as perfect as perfect can be. Everything is redeemable on a January evening, even this brimming, overflowing hot mess of a town. For reasons I could not finish listing, this city has my heart. No one can love it as much as I love it in the way I love it. It is the nature of expressed love. We claim, “many before may have loved like this perhaps, but not truly like this, not like I love.” All people think of it this way, and all of them are filled with hubris, but some illusions are worth the risk, and some falsehoods need not be interrupted by blunt truth.

Why do I feel this, though, when not a long time ago, all I felt was disgust for it?

I believe in most lives comes a moment, and it has no age, time, or season. In it, you must learn that no part of life matters more than the whole. You must learn this in your own way, and like expressed love, this will be yours and yours alone. Once you are through the turmoil, you will be armed with wisdom readily available at the newsstand on the street. However, most things cannot enter our minds without our permission.

There is so much joy and grace in expecting nothing from anything, but most people try to twist life into shape. This seldom goes unpunished, and so, along the way, you get the ever-churned, regurgitated idea of letting things happen.

This time is different; this time, it means something; this time, you fail to shrug it off as philosophy or hullabaloo.

Something about it suddenly starts to make sense. Perhaps, some things are often repeated because they are true, but we cannot know them until we see them happen on our own. Children often learn things by doing them in their own way, stumbling to a solution. Then, something changes along the way, and then, like an unexpected storm, comes the reminder. That is what happened to me, too.

The city is but a small part of it—I have not looked at anything the same way since.

Most writing is noticing, but all of us have days where we barely stop to look around. The result is a blank page which faces angry expressions and morbid looks, all for the fact that it exists and all for the folly of the writer. I feel pity for this page, but that does not change the fact that I have not stopped to notice the world around me today. From the last hour of the night yesterday to this moment right here, I have been occupied beyond belief. Today, at work, during a meeting, a colleague and I did not get to the agenda till the halfway mark of it. This would rile me up on most days, but today, it was a welcome blessing because we both needed the breather. I told him I barely had time for myself, and he told me he knew what I was talking about. Besides that one moment of sheer humanity, I recall no other time I stopped. Well, that, and laughing at a film with my brother.

I wonder if it happens to other people when you first watch a film, and while you like it and you rave about it, it is not until you watch it with someone you love that you really experience the joy. A good film becomes great in worthwhile company. This has been my experience for all these years. I have watched so many of them alone—in theatres, at home—but the whole thing seems different when you watch them with someone else. Imagine this, you know what will happen, but somehow, you look forward to it. Doing things with others and doing things on your own are two different experiences, despite of what the thing is and regardless of how many times you’ve done it.

I make a cup of coffee for myself every morning, but when a friend or a date or family is over, I remember every little detail. I remember the aroma, I remember twisting the portafilter and locking it into place, and I remember the trickle of the espresso in the mug.

When I live on my own, I push myself to live; when I live with others, I am alive.

The trappings of life will get you now and then. Sooner than later, the reminder that it is not a bed of roses you sleep on but a tableau of disproportionate difficulties will ring loud, and everything else will cease to matter. I wonder if the illusions you set your day around will be able to distract you long enough from the truth. For how long, do you reckon, will you be able to ignore where you started from? There is always that problem to solve. No amount of regurgitated inspirational crap will make it true that the playing field of life is seldom levelled, and what is a desperate attempt for many is simply a choice for some. Many people have no choice but to move with the one road they see ahead, and some choose dreams like they choose their clothes each morning, and they buy a new one now and then, and that’s that. Now, it could be said that life is hard for everyone despite where they start from, and that would be true. But it could also be said that although not always, the scale of difficulty starts to factor in eventually. Both of these can be true, and only the privileged will be the ones to challenge the veracity of one of them. We all know which one of them that is, and to be able to refute that and shrug it off is precisely what privilege entails. That is the reminder I leave for myself in the wake of a day that has felt like a potpourri of everything a human being can feel. There is no other thought but this reverberating rumination roaming in my head: I must not forget where I come from, I must not forget where I come from, I must not forget where I come from… else I won’t remember to work, else I won’t remember to leave.

I woke up ecstatic today only because it had rained for the entire night. I was sure of this because I slept late and woke up twice in the middle of the night, and it was still raining. For many months now, I have wanted this: to wake up to a rainy day or a day that has just had the brunt of a shower. It has happened, and I am happy. That is no reason to be happy, one might say, and I would coin them fools. There is no better moment for it to rain than the beginning of the night. There is no proper time for it to end than the early morning, albeit if it lingers for a little bit into the morning and overstays its welcome, that is okay, too. But my joy is only partly for the rain. My joy is based on the fact that it has happened. I waited and waited, and it happened. In the last few months, I had grown weary and tired of waiting. All my days were marred by this shadow. Months of waiting to witness this: to wake up to a day that is wholly washed over, when the grass on my balcony does not feel fraudulent, and when the sky looks a tad bit cleaner, and the sun shines a little brighter.

This sluicing of everything happening overnight as if it were a highway being constructed or a city street under repair, perhaps, where if you take a walk early in the morning, you can still see the workers going at it, close to its end. That is how I imagined it would feel, and I knew it would be like this, of course. All of us have had a day like this in our childhoods. If not all, then most of us. We must always be mindful that there is always a distribution at play. Someone will always come up and say, “but not me,” and we must be aware of it and prepare for them beforehand. The preparation can be done in a plethora of ways, but in this case, it is one of welcoming. Come, look around. It has rained.

The day is exactly as I had imagined. Now, my wait is over. There is only one reason for my happiness today, and I could not iterate it more. All my tasks and activities in these months have had a corner of my mind waiting. Now, everything is clearer. What a day to go out and about, to make a joke that makes little sense and then laugh a little. But first, I must make a cup of coffee.

A day is as important as it is irrelevant. I did not know much today, and I played most of the day by ear, but I did know I had to begin my piece with these words. A day is as important as it is irrelevant, and we must know our limits in swerving either way. On most days, this satisfies me: I complete all tasks I assign myself, and the little left undone is completed before I sleep, regardless of the time. Sometimes, like it is today, these words draw the shortest stick.

In the evening, I took a walk: a cunning theft on my part. I knew I had to take a cab and had an additional list of things to do in the city and many stops to make. Sly as I am, I stole a few minutes and a kilometre before I called a taxi and went on my way. When the cab arrived, I opened the door, and before I sat in it, I thought of the sentence. The day was as important as it was irrelevant. It was important in the sense that there were important things to celebrate. It was irrelevant because, eventually, I will forget most, barring two things from today. Most days are irrelevant that way, and most are equally important. We must recognise which part is the crucial bit. That is tricky, but with enough practice, spotting it is second nature.

What we remember, we remember of the people in our lives, of our time with them. What we forget is everything that seems urgent today. I will not remember the tasks I complete, but I will never forget going the extra mile, even if it is for myself, and especially if it is for someone else. So, that is what I will remember from today. I will remember my theft of finding time to walk and the time I spent with the family.

And the rest? What can I say about the rest? I forgot it as soon as the clock struck midnight.

There is an invisible wall around me, and I am often far too aware of it. I am aware of it because I am the one who built it. Why do I live with a threshold for everything? It’s because I understand my capacity for obsession, of how raw and innate it is if I let it loose. Most people have their obsessions dialled in for them. I have never experienced such a thing. If I put my mind to it, and it could be anything in the world, I become obsessed with it. I have lost myself in my mania for love, for a story it took two to write, and all they managed to do with it was give it an anticlimactic ending. My soul has an empty spot, as if a socket, where anything too precious to me fits and refuses to budge, like a ring that won’t come off. And so, by strategy, by design, I do not stand for anything. I know what it does to me. When I forget to keep myself in check, the reminder is not too far off.

Perhaps, that is why I can never meet people truly in the middle. There is always a smidge of an opening between us. And that is precisely why, as far as writing is concerned, I have stayed within the confines of these vignettes—but they are my weakness. I seem to get the closest to the inflexion point with them in how obsessive I am to writing them daily. Even if a day would have me move mountains, with calloused hands, I will write my words for the day. Just the other day, I began to work on an idea. It is far too irrelevant what the project was, but I could tell you that it was clear to me what path I was on in three days and three nights. I am a lump of clay; any belief that overstays its welcome consumes me. Any person, too.

I envy the entrepreneurs, the athletes, the composers, the madmen of the world, and history, simply because of this difference in us. Their fascination with one idea and, which is more, their relentless action towards its zenith is something I will never have because, without fail, I will stop myself from getting there.

But I have seen what happens; I have seen it all: the implosion, the loudness, the decimation. I could not wish that on my worst enemy. There is a limit to me, too. There is a line we draw, and then we swear to never cross it again.

They say you have to get to a place, a deeper place inside you, to create anything. I have my reservations towards it. I believe one needs to be lost, yes, but not in some hole within themselves; one needs to be lost in the banal. My work is a defence for the mundane. In a world that seems to get more exciting, everything I do—part of which is my writing—is a testimony in a case no one is ready to fight. As is fitting, there is little I can say than point towards the obvious.

All I can say is look at this foggy night and think not about yourself but about people. I cannot see much of the city, and the hills are surely out of the question, but I know that life unfolds underneath it all—palpitating with activity. The apartment above mine is playing some music five minutes before the clock has struck midnight, and I feel both mild aggravation at their churlishness and appreciation for their humanity, in equal parts, like how this night is equal parts chilly and cosy. And if that is not enough, I would ask you to take a walk, and I would tell you this repeatedly, piece after piece, word after word. There is not much you can say to people to get them to open their eyes. You can only repeat the same things hoping the message goes across.

There is an array of houses and buildings that glow like fireflies in all this haze, and in them, someone does the dishes, someone else ponders over a life-changing decision, and many others sleep snugly. I stand here drinking chamomile tea. It has been a long day, and it is now over. Another day full of the tedium of existing, another day of its joy. There is little to say after all. This city, this life, all of it is beyond my grandest imaginations. That is more than I can say about any of it.

We talk of the truth as if it is some absolute measurement, some sureshot yardstick, and yet, this world we live in, our truths were created not so long ago. In fact, the life we live today has only come into motion in the last decade. There is as much truth in the world as there is possibility, and possibility is up to the person who considers it. For some, it’s a dead end; for others, it’s infinite. This ever-connected world overwhelms me, and it also fills me with hope, and it does it altogether, simultaneously. We live in weird times; we walk on shaky ground. Possibility runs rampant in this age, and with it comes a plethora of truths. No matter how much you believe in things, no matter how much hope you have, you will, like all people, have a threshold for the truth. There are things we can digest, and there are pills we can’t swallow, and each person possesses a different taste for it, like they do for literature, for art, and for music. Truth then is preference, it is convenience, and it is bound by what you saw in your formative years.

I see this friction within me, too, and I ask those who came before: how have you watched the world change over and over and not thrown an outburst, a tantrum? And they tell me: why, we threw our fits when we did, when the world was too much for us; don’t you remember fighting us or have you forgotten your own rebellion?

It’s a conversation that never ends, and it is one each generation must have first when they set out in the world and then, when they are about to leave it, for those are the only two times we stop to think about the world after all.

The rest is just playing the hapless spectator, watching things happen on your way to work.

The other day I stood in the shower, and as one often tends to think of the most unrelated things as they stand under the water, I thought of my intrinsic urge to write, how the words have fallen out of my hands as the drops fell from above. I stood there engulfed in the water, drenched, as I had been by words for all these years.

Where there is a thought about my writing, there is always a minor disappointment wedged like in some corner you cannot clean too easily. Like how we often fail to mention things that are always there, even if they are out of place, I seldom say a word about this practice. The fact that we fail to mention the ever-present sky does not mean it is not there, and such is the regret of having to go at it on my own. Sure, there is a spray of appreciation here and there, but there is mostly a continual lull which makes me think of those writers who had a friend or two who read each word, not because they were fond of reading, but because they were written by someone they knew, and that was enough. It makes me think of them, and it sends a wave of envy over me, and soon, that splashes to become regret. Such is the nature of things we regret—we can seldom control what we brood over. So, I stood there and let everything wash over me. There was work to do and words to write.

My exhaustion reaches its tipping point, and then, the scales tip over, and slowly, like Sisyphus, I gather my wits, and I get on with it. All the while, my visage reflects that of the sea—both lying about the surging activity right underneath. Perhaps, one day, when many years have passed, and I am close to turning sixty like my father will in a few days, I will be asked whether it was difficult to write, and I will divulge all the gory details of muffled arguments with myself. And maybe then, maybe just then, I will not stay quiet like my father does when someone asks him if he is tired of life, and maybe just then, I will tell them: you should have asked a long time ago!

It is not the easiest thing: to write words. But then, you realise you have done it alone for so long, why not see it through? Time is my devoted cheerleader. On most days, it is also the only one.

If you take a walk and come home with one good sentence, the walk was worth it. And what if you don’t find it? Even then, you will have moved and been in the world which never goes to waste. On top of that, if you are keen to look around even a couple of times, you will learn that good, even great, sentences live everywhere. Some are on a street hawker’s cart, and there is one tucked in the moment when a child thumps on a metal staircase because they love the sound. I’d argue you’d find one in terrible service at a cafe, and then, you will find some in the trees around us.

To create anything in this world, we must be a part of it. We must learn to realise our place in the vast connections of life, and we must, sometimes, learn to navigate them. Good for us, there are streets and sidewalks. And a lot of us, not to our blame, start looking for things elsewhere. There is nothing here, in this town, in this city, so I must go to a beach far away, a distant hill, or a lonely island. But what you cannot see where you are will always be invisible irrespective of where you go. That is true, and poets have written ballads more harmonious than any sentence I can write about it today. I can only try to look around and find a sentence. When I think of my place here, that is what I think of, nothing else.

Just today, when I was walking down the street, a man stopped and asked me for directions. I named a popular place nearby, assuming he might know it and that may help him find where he is going. He told me it was his first month in the city and that he did not know the place yet. Then, he laughed and said, “Soon, I will know my way around these streets as long as I keep losing myself.” And that was when I knew the walk was worth it. I helped him with where he had to go, and then I went on my way, which was to nowhere in particular, of course. I was only searching to belong.

When you grow up reading books or digesting films into your very being, a lot of good comes out of it. One glaring issue remains, though: dialogue. You read books, and you think people talk like this, that most people will give you complete responses, that most conversations would be a delight simply because of how people express themselves. And then, you move into the world and realise how you set yourself up for failure. Inadequacies, directness, and an arrogant and proud ignorance of how to express oneself are rampant. Most people talk with such a lack of flair that talking to them seems like a pointless affair. There is little to no awareness, let alone acceptance, that even conversation is an art. You must know a little wordplay to make it enthusing, and more than that, you must know the value of timing. This is a privileged complaint, of course. Many do not have people to talk to, so it is in bad taste to have that and crib over it. But then, my dissatisfaction with most conversations I have is so perpetually large that it seems my entire life is slowly leaving something to be desired.

How beautiful it is that we have several languages, words that migrate from one to another, and expressions that know no home? Yet, most people gloss over all that and only talk of the brass tacks, and a large chunk of them even leave gaps between what is essential. People are messy and dirty, and their words reek of their insecurities. Friendships are based on a meagre list of topics; no one reads or thinks enough to break those barriers. It is a subliminal pain when you sit across a person and know the perfect way to phrase something they are sharing with you, and then they use a rather pedestrian way to say it! You sit there, screaming internally: the metaphor was right there. It was served to you five minutes ago. But most people seldom look around enough to know how to talk about what they want to talk about. Most, if not all, the world is at a severe lack of words, and some of us are so full of them that we’re bursting at our seams.

It is a painful life where only the characters talk like you’d expect people to talk; and when people talk, all you want to do is leave.

It is way past afternoon on a Friday, and I sit here with a bowl of cereal, yawning absurdly and intermittently. With two screens facing me and asking me, in their own regard, to get some work done, I feel terribly stretched and exhausted in advance. The day began a few hours ago, and I feel the sort of tired one tends to feel when the week is close to its inevitable end. Most weeks end with me being tired mentally, but there are rare weeks when I am tired physically. My threshold for exhaustion is large, owing to habits inculcated in me from the get-go or, perhaps, some genetic lottery. I reckon, large as it may be, I do reach it now and then. Today is one of those days when a cup of coffee has no benefit, and this cereal seems as useless as an umbrella on a pleasant spring day. And so, my goal for today is to do as much as I can, which I’ve come to realise is always a deviation from the standard, again, owing to the habits I picked up over the years, and then sleep early and sleep well. The jury is still out on whether that will actually happen, but I would be glad if I could manage to end the day on time.

This is by no means unfortunate or terrible. It is but a description of things. It does not have to stand for anything but that—a description. Most people immediately assign emotion to things. This is the Achilles heel of society and those who live in it. Most things are as they are, and what we feel about them adds nothing to the thing itself, its conversation, or its description. Most, not all, of course. That is always a nuance we must remember to consider. Some things warrant you to feel about them. They compel you to comment. If and only if that is the case, should we ever talk about them in the frame of our feelings. The rest, we should let slip like we let time slip, which is to say, we should let them slip without noticing or caring about them until it is much too late, if at all.

It is a foggy, almost opaque night, but things could not be clearer. I cannot see the nearest building, but a glimpse of everything that is important, that is crucial is not out of the question. When I came back to this city three years ago, which have but felt like three consecutive blinks overflowing with events big and small, I envisioned a life for myself. I realised today, with a faux display of a heavy heart, that I failed at building it. In truth, I could not be more glad that I was so off the mark in my planning that what is here today is a mirror image; my plans have been flipped a hundred and eighty degrees. There is no greater celebration I can have today than this: I have failed remarkably, and yet, I am more than glad for where I landed. It is the connotation that is the problem. Failed, in general, is a terrible word; even a soft mention of failure will make someone wince in remembrance of the last time they had overshot or undershot their mark. But the “what” of failure is crucial. What have I failed at? I have failed at creating a life I thought would make me happy, and through it, I have found a life I could not be more grateful for. My moment of clarity on this utterly nebulous day is a testament to what I have found on a road I stumbled and fell on.

In trying to become who I thought I was to become and failing to get even an inch close to it, I have somehow fooled everyone and managed to become something still. I would not be as perverse to have the audacity to suggest this is who I was meant to become. What is meant and what is not is none of my concern. All I know is that this life feels like a solid mistake, the one you’d want to make again and again when you know how things transpire eventually. Perhaps, this is too early to call it. But if someone asked me today what has changed, I would simply tell them that the crucial once is now mundane, and the mundane, the run-of-the-mill, the banal once could not be more crucial now. That is all the difference in the simplest words I can imagine.

I do the dishes with the cold water running over my latex gloves, and suddenly, my watch vibrates on my wrist. When I am finally done with this bookend of a chore, I check my watch. It tells me it is time to sleep. I chuckle at our dystopian existence, which I partake in equally as my aversion to it. Then, I say, “no, it is time to write” in the otherwise empty apartment, and my eyes catch my reflection on the balcony door. It stirs a feeling in me, which I would not chalk up to loneliness, but like how a single tree often sits atop a cliff in its solitary glory—akin to that. I came to the desk, and I started writing. There were words I had pondered over since this day was still full of light, but I had not taken anything down, but this thought seemed too good to pass on. It is a habit.

As meticulous as I am, and despite my fondness for lists and calendars, I have realised I am far too in the moment than most people I know. I am far too aware of where—and when, which is more important—I am than most people who talk of mindfulness like they talk of happiness, which is to say they talk a whole lot more than they experience it.

Habits die harder than most people who write books with bold typeface plastered over them would have you believe. Habits die much harder than most things do, and they are built with even more angst. A peddler of these ideas will never admit how difficult they can be for those who struggle, for there lies no gain in doing that. Habits die a stubborn death, like my habit of making others’ problems my own and loving them only because they offered me a puzzle to solve. It died much after the problems fizzled out themselves. It died much after most of those people had departed from my life. Years would pass with me sitting on the couch, thinking of answers to questions that didn’t exist anymore for people who didn’t need them. But it died, eventually.

Perhaps, that is why they peddle the snake oil of modern improvement. If your book stays on their shelf long enough for all entangled threads to come undone, you have a stake in the credit. How? Why now? They ask. And there is your book, eating dust on their shelf and serving you false glory.

As I walk about the city or move about in cabs or cars that belong to other people, I look around as one does with a sort of imagination that this life is a film we are watching in a theatre. There is a moment of positive detachment. The other day, the same thing happened, and then, the city whispered a secret in my ear, and for a second, I thought I heard the word “excitement”, but then, I could not be too sure. There were too many noises from all around for me to have been sure of it. But if I were to gamble, I’d say it was something to do with excitement, and I reckon the city was telling me to loosen up a little.

The city has grown as I have, and I think our intertwined stories, both of which are written with significant gaps in important events, left out like some sort of mystery, have the same moral: things change, and our best bet is to be excited for most of them. The rest happen as they do, but most things are worth being excited about.

This is the secret the streets whisper into my ear now and then. To be excited about things, in general. Why are you stoked about something as silly as this? They ask me. Why shouldn’t I be? There is so much here—a whole life built year by year. Just the other day, we were out for drinks. As we descended and exited the building, I ran into the baristas at my favourite cafe, who were on their way upstairs. We met with a smile and a camaraderie I do not have with the oldest of my friends. About an hour later, I met another face standing behind the counter at another cafe I frequent. These are little events, but they are essential.

Everyone needs roots, they say, but they fail to mention that if the tree is alive, and if it is thriving, or perhaps even growing in a measly manner, the roots keep growing too. And that is what the city reminded me of the other day. But I couldn’t be too sure, I swear. The music was loud, and we humans tend to tell ourselves things we wish to say to ourselves through proxy.

We are always looking for someone else to tell us what we want to tell ourselves.

The fact that I have written mainly about time for the latter part of last year, and not just about it but the passage of it, is not unfounded. I noticed this tendency a while back, and if you have read any of these bookmarks, these pieces, even with significant gaps between them, I reckon you would have noticed this, too.

Why did I not interrupt it if I were aware of this repetition? Because writing correctly about a subject is a game of practice. We must obsessively try our hand at it, over and over, and if we are lucky, and if we are good, only then do we get to capture it. What people call theme is simply a writer’s valiant attempts to write about something banal. Some spend their lives writing about the same thing, and then, someday, they write but a sentence, and it captures everything they have written about it before.

For now, in this fresh beginning where we all must make some changes, I believe I am tired of writing about time, and I shall slowly turn my eyes towards other things. The ticking of the clock is so well positioned in the middle of my head that even if I do nothing in a day, I feel time passing, and if a day is so full I barely get a chance to breathe, I feel it passing still. This awareness is not your run-of-the-mill inkling where someone knows that days get on, and so do lives. It is that of a librarian who keeps a meticulous record of where each book is kept. That is how I have kept my hours for all these months.

The other day, a friend told me they are trying something new as part of the annual mimetic shenanigans. Will you change something, then? They asked me once they walked me through their list of changes. I think I wish to spend a day without feeling time passing. I thought this, but I did not say anything. All I knew was that it was imperative I do this now. Sometimes, you just know.