journal.coffee

I often stand on the balcony for a good hour in the morning, and I do not say a word. I sip my coffee and stare at the hills coloured by the dreamy atmosphere of the early hour. Then, I finally break the silence of my thought and think: people are waking up and beginning their days, and here I am, putting mine off. For all that I get done in a day, I am awfully good at procrastinating. Of course, it is an empty thought, for it is taken over by another, more pressing issue on my mind. They meet me and, often, only meet me for one purpose—they need a piece of advice. And I offer it like you offer a cup of coffee and a slice of cake to an unexpected guest. When they tell you it is delicious and soft, and when they ask you why aren’t you having any, you tell them you’re not in the mood for cake, that you had a slice yourself just before they arrived, but the truth is it is the last slice, and mother always told you to offer first, if anyone showed up without notice, and to have enough for others.

All my patience and my kindness are given to other people. I have little left for myself. It does not bother me until when I sit and ask for advice, for we all need it at some point, and they tell me I should be patient and kind with myself, and I look at them and think about the specific cruelty and omnipresence of irony. I make a little joke to myself, and then I tell them I will try my best. That is the only time I prefer lying to people. There is little you can do in situations like this, but then, I believe all liars have made that excuse at some point in their life. It rarely cuts the lie; like a cocktail mix, all it does is make the liquor easier to swallow.

There is still time. I know I managed to let myself be on more than a few occasions this year—I can count those days. I am slowly learning this mathematics, this rationing of life.

Perhaps, in the coming year, I will have lost count.

I have more notes than the words I have written and shared with the world, and I go through them with an air of regret and an ache in my heart. “Who wrote you?” I ask when I look at an old passage I don’t recall. I do not remember writing these words and do not know what to do with them. The writer’s notebook is a graveyard—ideas go to die there, and sometimes, they come back to life. Like how at a ripe old age, someone comes across an old trinket, and finding it not only brings back the apparent wave of nostalgia but the dream, the youth itself, and then, inspired, they set out to complete the unfinished business, just like that, a note must strike the same chord from when it was first scribbled in a frenzy. But that seldom happens; most notes fall on deaf ears as the months and years pass. We must only write of happiness when we are happy, of love when we are in love, and of heartache when our heart is shattered. All else fails.

The writing is never good if you lie to yourself or do not feel the words. If I don’t believe my words, how will someone else? This is what honesty in writing means. If it is honest, you know how it feels to you and how it is crucial to your very being in that very moment. But all notes, whether they are short or long, whether they have the correct punctuation or not, or if it has been weeks, months, or years since they were written, can be used. That much is true. It is only about the correct moment; when the iron of feeling has a fiery glow to it, and the anvil of your soul is ready and stable, that is when you must strike it. The raw words become prose instantaneously. It seems magical at that moment, and yes, there is some magic to most things, but it is mostly hard work with a great deal of precision. You must know when, you must know how, and you must know what before the note is struck. You must know all that, and you must also know yourself. The last bit is often the most difficult thing to do.

Writing is about using a hammer to make an intricate sculpture and, as impossible as it sounds, coming through. And then, it is about doing it day after day. But people have done it before and have come through; there is hope in that.

I woke up today and brewed a rather strong cup of coffee, only to get nothing done. I got back in bed under the warm quilt and read a few pages from the book beside my pillow. A blade of sunlight suddenly appeared over the wooden floor, and I noticed it was not the usual bright yellow splat. It was amber—as if someone had tinted the sky red, and it remained this way for the remainder of the afternoon. I spent the day as one should spend a free day. That is to say: I did little; I talked to friends over the phone, vacuumed and dusted the apartment, and hung some art on my bedroom wall. When the sun began to set, the city unfurled a reddish-orange quilt over the otherwise cold evening. I met someone for coffee and talked about the things you talk about when you meet someone for coffee for the first time. Then, I walked home and ended the day with an uneventful dinner.

This day has felt like a surprisingly good glass of rosé. You know what to expect, but it still manages to make its mark and makes you pause and comment on it. As if by some magic, or maybe through my negligible but valiant attempt to get my days in order, I seem to have gathered my spirits back. I walked back home with a smile on my face today, and if someone had stopped me and asked me why I was smiling, I would’ve simply told them to look around at the golden glow of the vermillion sun. Is there any other reason to be happy? I looked around as I walked back home. There were trees in the neighbourhood still. I lost sight of them for a bit, as one often does when one is not looking up as often, but we must all look up. I would have asked the stranger who stopped me, if they had, to look up as well. There is so much we miss when we are always looking down on things. There is little else to say, for not much happened. It was all as it was intended.

For the last three afternoons, and yes, I keep count, the sun has stayed golden and warm. It has arrived like a stranger who does not know the language but is kind enough to stop and help regardless. All three days, the sun has come out, and all three days, I have thought, “winter is finally here”, for it is not just about the cold; it is about the respite from it, which comes in a variety of ways—a warm blanket, a scalding cup of coffee, and the afternoon sun. It is what makes the cold nights feel worthwhile. The desperation of going for a walk on a cold day and stopping near a little urban campfire some strangers sit around makes you realise how cold things are, but as you stand and warm your hands, making small talk with them, you learn nothing brings out the humanity in us like a winter evening. “Get your warmth now,” the world says, “you won’t get another chance till tomorrow.”

This winter has suddenly started to feel colder than I remembered winter to be. At first, I wondered what had happened. Was it that most people I knew and loved were either too long ago or too far away, that the gaping hole of lost touch was getting larger and soon, I would simply call it what most people call it: getting older? Or was it the paperwork on the table that I had delayed without trying and the art I had yet to put on the wall? Should I worry for my life, or should I make a cup of coffee and clean this apartment, or prune the dying leaves of several plants, all of which seem to have had a varied reaction to the shift of seasons, my dwindling mood and tardiness?

Perhaps, this was it. When I should have lived my days like they were mere specks in the grand scheme of things, I asked “why” once again, and before I knew it, nothing here made sense. Now, the damage is done, and a week has been lost, but nothing is truly out of our hands. The sun will be out soon, and I must read this afternoon. I must do it for no other reason except that nothing in this world has any meaning; that is why we must choose continually. I must make a choice. When I choose, I look fate in the face, and I ask it to move aside, for I have a floor to mop and a shelf to clean.

Since I was seventeen, I have lived with an urgency in my mind, and for a good reason; it occurred to me at a young age that this was all a fleeting affair, and life is only several weeks you could count. I also knew most of it was already over and that things would only end faster from that point on. Even with all this urgency in me, I was tardy. A part of me still is, and even with all my early awareness of the nature of time, I seem to have forgotten most days I have been here. I know I was in them, immersed completely, surrounded by nothing but the passing seconds, but then, you think you are at a table with your friends laughing, and you blink, and that table seems like it was a lifetime ago. The greasy restaurant has shut down, and there is a new joint in its place. Most things change hands as the years pass—eateries, bars and friendships. That is how things happen, and there comes a point you understand what they meant when they said, “I did not know what happened; I reckon we all got busy with life.”

Before you know it, you sit by yourself, lamenting and reminiscing. I would have looked at us, at the moment diligently had I known, you say. I would have recorded every detail had I known we would never be there, as we were, again, and I would have remembered the food on our regular table at the commonplace cafe, the lights and the crowds, and the name of the server who was there every day, the spilt beer, the coffee and the laughter. I would have remembered everything in between; I would have remembered the joke because I remember there was one—I just don’t know why we were cracking up.

No matter how hard we look, regardless of how many notes we make, we will miss something, and we will forget a joke. No matter how hard you try, you will lose people in years and on tables that do not exist anymore. And if things are particularly unlucky, they will stand right in front of you, and you will have lost them still. You will look at them and not recognise them. “You look and sound exactly like someone I knew once,” you’ll tell them, “but I knew them a long time ago, and I do not know who you are.”

Woke up today and knocked over a plant while making my bed. I thought, surely, there is no worse way to start a day. I thought of the aesthetics of my life, of how important it is for me to have everything in the right place. I gathered the mud, which had managed to reach the farthest crevices and corners in the nanosecond that the pot had hit the floor and burst open from the bottom. Slightly frustrated but still mending my disposition, for it was still the morning and what I thought now would dictate my day, as it often happens, I quietly cleaned the floor, set the pot right, and vacuumed the spot. It occurred to me that all aesthetics comes at a cost, that things are beautiful because someone makes sure they are. Naturally, this cost is unknown to the beholder. To them, it has always been this way, and it will always be this way, and any beauty a fastidiously arranged array of plants invokes is ever-present and unwavering. But all aesthetics come at a price, too, and someone has to pay it in the form of time. And I realised this is how it will happen to me; this is how my years will pass. I will always remain balancing the scales of ethics and aesthetics, and both will seem easy to those who look at my life from afar. Only I will know the inherent cost of the just and the beautiful.

Recently, through things that have happened here and there, as things often happen, I have learned that we must feign action, even when it does not contribute much to anything. If things remain the same for too long, even when they are sailing smoothly, they call it stagnation. We must flail and moan about things not going well, even when they are on their way. Most people want to witness only this: motion. I reckon this is why the world is such a hot mess. There will always be someone who mistakes smooth motion for still waters.

But it takes a competent crew to know that the seas are seldom still and that there are waves even if the passengers cannot feel them; there are bumps in all roads, after all. But people rarely know this because an easygoing life looks easy. I could do that too, they say, unaware that they could not even clean the floor if they knocked a pot down.

In about four to six weeks, it will be one year since I purchased this desk. I often get the dates mixed up. The absurdity of remembering the day you bought a desk is not lost on me. But you could not know what is essential to someone without being that person, and I think this run-of-the-mill purchase was the most important thing I have bought in my life. It will also be one full year of this practice of doing it every day. I reckon it would have been an exceptional year, even if nothing good had happened to me besides this: I have written more than before. As it turns out, however, things have indeed happened, and I could not have been more glad. What a wonderful thing it is to be alive, to have things happen to us!

The other day, I sat on a table far from the public eye in a very public cafe and quietly sipped my coffee through the sunny winter afternoon. The warmth was more than welcome as I ripped through Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. As I read that remarkable piece of work, I wondered if I could ever be that good. Then, my unfounded confidence interrupted me and said: why not?

To think—and of course, I can only imagine this—that O’Hara may have sat in a cafe one day, too. He would have thought the same things reading those who came before him, and from what I can make out of his writing, he, too, would have asked, “why not?” To think there may be a time when these bookmarks, these words are read, too, by someone not quite unlike myself, and to think their first immediate response to them would be that they, too, could write them someday. To imagine all this makes me incredibly ecstatic!

There is time yet; it has only been a decade or so since I first thought: I should write. There is a future and in it lies my prime; there is a magnum opus on some desk, waiting to be written. All in its own time, of course. All good things take time. There is a future ahead, a promising future, and all this, all these days of pointless rambling, and living, yes, living, will make sense. There is hope as long as things keep happening; slowly but surely, things are indeed happening.

I woke up today, and I thought I would write about love, and honestly, I sat seven and a half times throughout the day to write about it, but I did not know where to begin, and it all fizzled out. Even now, as I sit here, erasing paragraphs and unkempt sentences, I have only one question: what is it? I am baffled at this heart in me; so forgetful, so naive. I seem to remember the daze, the craze of love like a faint memory from years you did not really live and only glossed over. You know they happened to you, you know time passed, and things were a certain way, but then, on an uneventful morning, you sit and try to remember, but nothing comes to mind. There are years like this in all lives, but that is not how I ever wanted to remember love. I know it has happened to me, but now that I sit here and another year has passed, I do not know what it feels like. I will not go into the depth of my seven and a half attempts today simply because they only reminded me of how little I remember and, which is more, made for terrible writing.

The grey, overcast tarp of the cold sky outside has done nothing to jog my memory. So, I have sat hour after hour and tried to write about it, and hour after hour, I have failed and resumed my duties to be a regular person. There was even some temptation to read an old piece I wrote when I was grieving the last heartache, thinking maybe it would be like an old photograph that reminds me of years I forgot simply because the mind can only remember so much and between the taxes, and the bills, and the stocks, it is almost always going to be the smaller moments, the laughter filled afternoons and the casual evening bicycle rides that get the short end of the stick. I almost read an old piece, thinking it would jog my memory and jump-start my heart, but it felt like cheating.

In the end, at this last half-attempt, I conclude that I do not know what love is anymore, for it has been a long time since I felt it, and all love is different from one another anyway. This is the truth, and this is why I sat seven and half times to write about love on this remarkably typical day, and seven and a half times I failed.

As the last few months have gotten on, as the year has trotted towards its inevitable end, and as the winter haze has settled, rendering everything invisible until it rains, I have found my need to talk to people diminish. I feel this is a need to preserve the good, acting most frustratingly, but it is a noble need. It is words that ruin good things, and there is a lot that can be ruined currently. So, I have been incognito, walking towards the end of the year with my head down, like how you walk through a strange alley you have never visited—longer steps, shifting faster with a blank face that only says one thing: I do not want any trouble; let me pass, let me pass.

Conversation for me is, frankly, exhausting. It is not because I do not want to talk to people but because most people have nothing to talk about. When you meet someone after a long time or even a week or two, and the early dance of repeating their woes with work and life is done, it stalls and then falls flat. So, taking the onus and the charge yourself, you ask them if they saw something memorable or read something that shook them or perhaps, changed how they thought of things, but most people consume to pass the time, and they live that way, too, and so, even then, they have little to share. Their dreams are copied, and their ideas come from the first video they watched when they woke up that day. It is all absurd, but mostly, it is depressing simply because no one brings anything to the table. Often, you sit there babbling, imagining a world where the dead could talk only because you feel those alive have nothing to say. They live their lives without any motivation behind them, and if there is a speck of it, it is laden with shallow selfishness. Of course, good conversation happens, too, but it is far between, and those who carry it are few.

And in the end, when you get up and get the check, they say something that makes half sense but takes all the joy out of your world. Suddenly, you’re returning home thinking how terrible everything is and how you have wasted so much time. I would much rather go outside and read a book, unbothered.

At least, for now. At least, for December.

When you grow up without money, you grow up with opinions. The rich don’t need to think as much; the world agrees with them already. It is those of us who are poor, or at least who begin that way, who need to sit and understand how the world works—simply to live in it. It is we who fight the proverbial battles of right and wrong since we cannot afford the tariff to cross the bridge separating the two as often. Most can only afford to make a one-sided trip.

To put it differently, all cynics and romantics come from the same place, and all opinions begin as a way to understand the world, again, to only live in it. Ideology can be bought in a bookstore and then worn like a mask. It is opinions that say one of the most important words to have ever existed: but. It is opinions that doubt and split ideology apart and add the most crucial ingredient: nuance; this is how things are, but this is how things could also be. This sentence has all the truth in the world. It almost innocently makes two truths exist simultaneously, but it needs either the cynic or the romantic to use it and break ideology apart.

Of course, poverty is seldom of one type, and so if you remove the word money from the above passage and instead of it use the word privilege, things would still stand. I may be poor because I do not have money, and someone else may think they do not have a voice, and they, too, are poor. It is those who are rich, in any measure, who preach absolutes. And it is the job of the cynics and the romantics to say the most important word when someone suggests there is only one truth.

“Your absolute may be true,” they say, “but so is my doubt.”

Often when people get drunk together, as drunks often do, someone says something nobody wants to hear or, worse, admit. They say it simply because it is true, and all true things should be said. Most brawls are started by honest men, and most fires are fuelled by a need for warmth. By saying all that, I only mean to suggest that all good intentions are just that, intentions. They have no say over the outcome, and if you are like me, and if you try to be honest and have a penchant for getting drunk, you will find yourself in situations where you have said the wrong thing, which really is the honest thing. You will learn that most camaraderie falls apart on the first honest word. So, if you cannot moderate the liquor, you must, by all means, stay your word. Of course, it is easier said than done; live even one-fourth of life, and you will see that most worthwhile things share that tendency.

Now, I do not mean for you to lie. No one who wishes any good upon someone should ever expect them to lie. If anyone has ever given you a word of advice which enables your dishonesty, firstly, you must not feel bad at being enticed by it as all people have a liar in them, and secondly, you must understand that the person is no friend. No friend should ever ask a friend to lie, and given you have read this till here, I believe you and I are friends. Perhaps, we will meet someday, or maybe, I am long gone, and you have stumbled upon what remains of these words. Whatever it may be, you must listen very carefully to what I am about to tell you.

When I say you must stay your word, I only mean that most people who get offended by the honest word will not have in them the stomach to hold their booze or their emotions, and while people like this deserve to be offended, you, on the other hand, do not deserve their vulgarity and unseemly attitude. In the end, you will feel worse, and all that alcohol will have been wasted, for you will have sobered up immediately.

If you are like me, which I believe you are, you will know how terrible the waste of a good bottle is. This, and only this, is my drinking advice to anyone.

On this foggy winter night in the first few days of December, I stand on the balcony, wondering about the ephemeral nature of things. Everything begins, and everything ends. This slow burn of time happens each year. No matter where you go, you will always land in December. Our lives fade away like the wick of an old oil lamp, flickering as if it would turn off at any instance. Then comes this wintry, blue month, and somehow, it brings with it the hope of a rewrite, the hope that we can begin this exercise of living again. I think of this, and I stare ahead at all that is waiting to happen to me, and I hope, with all my heart, that they are good. When all things end, and right before all things begin, we always wait for goodness. The coldness of December warms my heart. Life is, after all, an absurd irony.

We have made it, I proclaim silently, almost in a whisper—not all proclamations are loud. Some happen in the softest questions, some in the laughter over dinner, and some happen without words. As I sit here and take stock, I notice nothing but hope and happiness in my heart. Where did all the pain go? I wonder, and I do not have an answer, and that is why we must let time pass. We misplace things in months as they pass us by. I left it somewhere in January, but I could not remember it. So much can happen in a single year, and so much has indeed happened; who can keep track of the what and when, and why must we? The only thing I know as I stand here is this: there is a lot of life in me, in all of us. There is time just yet. We are still writing our stories.

It’s almost as if a breeze has blown by and carried me from my morbid beginnings in January to this utterly fulfilled December. I believe I now understand what they say when they say there is always a second wind.

You know winter is here when you start to see loneliness creep up on you as you sit on the couch watching TV or on a corner of the street as you walk and hear someone call out your name. Of course, no one has called out your name, and it is an illusion, as all things are; you only hear it because you wish it. However, writing about it puts you in a position that can only be best described as a misunderstanding that knows no solution.

All the people around you, since there are so many, ask you, “how is it that you’re feeling this when we are here?” Logical as you are, pragmatic as you pretend to be, you try to think of an answer, but you draw blanks, and no words seem right. Lost in this unprompted battle of wits, you tell them they’re right, but they’re not even close. It is entirely possible to feel belonging and loneliness at the same time. It is only slightly difficult to explain to those who have never felt it, like how the importance of knowing a dog growing up can only be shared by those who already know it. There is no way you can put it into words for those who have not felt it. Everyone else can feign understanding and pretend empathy, but they rarely understand it unless they’ve felt it themselves; if they have, you will not need words.

This state of mind is, by no means, debilitating and has no cause for urgency. Seasons come and go, and with them, so does what you feel in them. If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that when I tell someone so much time has passed and I do not know how I got here, I rarely mean it as morbidly as they assume it to be. For what it’s worth, I am glad that the time has passed, that life has gone on, and that seasons have changed, and I’ve felt so much. In the same way, this outpour of seasonal loneliness has nothing to do with how I feel about it.

Before a shower, we often take the temperature of the water with our bare hands to ensure we can bear it, and only then do we jump in. It is but just that. In fact, if it makes any difference, I am far too aware I can write much better when there is a smidge of turmoil in my heart. It is a beautiful gift, and like I am for all things, for this, too, I am grateful.

As the day got on today, I felt this sublime happiness cover me like a warm memory engulfs us when we catch an old song riffing through the glass door of a store or like a soft, velvety evening you spend with someone you meet for the first time. It was freeing and open, like our hearts are when we see something we have never seen before. Despite my sneezing’s persistent interruption, I could feel a joy I hadn’t felt in a bit. It could be that I was growing older and becoming whoever I was meant to be, or as it often is, it could simply be a peek into what is right and what is true. But as I sat there, working, I realised that I only felt joy when I was useful. I could experience a whole plethora of things, and that, too, has its place, but my happiness is my usefulness. There is no alternative for me, and I can keep running from it, but I will never outrun it truly, and one day, even if I run for many, I will sit and work, and it will make me realise, once again, that honest, unbiased work is where my contentment will always sit.

I write these words, and I ask: are they helpful? And sometimes, very rarely, I hear a whisper that says: yes. But then, if I do not write them, I would never know, so I must write, regardless of their usefulness. All honest work is useless right till it moves the world. All good work eventually moves the world. As for anything else that I do, my obsession stands. It is either helpful, or I cease doing it.

I am not here to only breathe and live shallow truths. I must use this time as if I am getting it again, by some magic or phenomenon I cannot explain. We are always careful with our second chances; that is how I live my life: in pretence. I shall use it to make it stand for something. There is no greater glory than helping the world spin; it takes many of us to nudge it a little. But the world does move, and the people do have a say in this. Yes, even if a little bit, they do have a say in this. Sometimes, a bit is all it takes to push something into perpetual motion.

Today, I am in bed under a warm quilt, and these words come from a cup of chamomile with honey. We must shuffle things now and then. The person I am when I sit at the desk is not the person I am when I lie in bed, cosy and tired. The person I am here in this city—the one that seems to never let go of me—is not the person I am where I was for the last three days. We are what we are around. Of course, some parts are non-negotiable, but the rest, we must disturb now and then. We must rock the boat, not to drown ourselves, but to check whether we have not died already. The simplest clinging to life, the panicked grip on the invisible gunnels of the proverbial boat, means you are still alive. The desire for your regular days, when you are entirely out of them, suggests there is a life to return to—a well-made one. Now, I am here, and I am exhausted, but you have to do what you must do, so I must sit and write, no matter how long it takes me. The trick to building a life you crave is to go out of your way to demand what it needs you to do. They have enough parables and maxims about still water already, and for me to add one more to the kitty would not make a difference. You know how they are, and you know how things go. You do not need me.

Just as I thought of the water, a cold draft seems to have blown from nowhere since all the doors and windows are shut tight, as they should be towards the end of November. But the draft is there, for I have felt it. Life is seldom the physical truth; it is often our experience. I know the yellow lamp, glowing so far away on the bookshelf, does not make the room warmer, but my mind tells me otherwise when it sees it. This is how we live—in our own fictions and stories, and that is what it is to create a life you enjoy living: to write a story. You write it one day at a time, and you write the best story you know. The rest falls into place eventually.

I woke up this morning still dazed by night; the aftertaste of everything that happened the day before was still on my tongue. It all began as if it had not ended at all, and this happens now and then. Joy is sticky like the candies from summers before work and worry when everything was much simpler. I wanted to wrap myself into the sheet and not start the day, but then, we must all get out of bed eventually, and so I did. Half the day is gone now, the daylight is still going strong, and the coffee has finally started to do its job. It is a day when nothing will happen—I know it. It is a day with simple laughter shared between friends over meals, games, and whatever you do to pass the time on days like this, which you often do not have a word for. And when a day like this is over, they ask you what you did all day, and you laugh, and you tell them “nothing” as if it is not a valid answer. I sit here, writing as we all talk about our plans for what is left of the day and our lives.

The goodness of this life makes me feel a soft fondness for all that has happened and all that is yet to come. Maybe, if I were to live this life again, it would not be as bad as it seemed once. There will always be a day like this, with open backpacks and suitcases lying all over the floor and clothes spilling out of them like the truth that needs no hiding. I think I would be fine. Perhaps, it would all be okay. This is the middle, after all. A lot has happened already, and a lot awaits, and here we sit talking about nothing.

Before you know it, you’ll have lived some parts of life over and over again. You’ll have moments that look and feel the same, and at first, it will feel like it is all life has to offer. But then, as all things do, your cynicism will temper, too. Soon, it is all you will look forward to: repetition. The repetition of passive conversation as you sit in a sunlit room surrounded by the people you love will make you feel alive. And you will meet people for the first time again, and see things for the first time again, and the repetition you despised will become what you crave. You will want more of it because you know things don’t last as often, and if they do, it is never as long as you think they will.

I, too, was aloof about this until right about a few hours ago when I first thought, “I’ve been here before, in this exact moment.” Then, as I closed my eyes and let everything around me engulf me, it occurred to me that it was supposed to be this way. There are many things we learn through a soft suggestion of fate, and the specifics of what made what happen are rarely anyone’s concern. The important thing is that things do happen, and we do learn things now and then, and today, I learned that the nature of life is repetition. The trick, probably, is to not fight this but let it all happen and, if possible, find what’s new in it.

Things repeat simply so we can watch them again, watch them closely and pick them apart. And as it has been in my case, and in my experience, sometimes the only thing to do is accept the repetition. The scrutiny mostly happens itself.

When you return to a place after a long time, you feel this sense of belonged alienation. You see, the place has gone on without you, and there is little you could have done about it, for you have gone without it too. We are so much of where we live, and we seldom give credit to the towns and cities that shape us. Things happen, whether you exist or not, and that is something you learn over and over when you revisit places. I remember a street as I do; I know where all the places are, I know the directions, and I know the cost to travel around the neighbourhood, but it feels like all that I know and all that I think about it is now a relic of the past, even if things have changed little from when I last saw it.

We make an agreement when we leave: I will return someday, and when I do, things will be the same, but I will have lost my right to claim anything only because I left. To revisit a place is to be like a stranger to a friend, unintentionally and only by virtue of lost time. I wonder if the birds feel this, too, when it is winter and they come back home.

What happened to you since I left? We ask our cities and those we leave behind as if the answer is ever as easy as a list. Where do I begin? They reply in earnest, but they do begin and tell you stories. Before you know it, it is three in the morning, and you are talking about how different things would be if some things happened differently. You nod in agreement and say, perhaps, I would not have even left. But then, you know you would have because you know that is all you know to do: to leave things behind. And then, return and feign nostalgia as if you were not the one who chose to leave after all. To be a person is to lie, especially to yourself. There is no shame in it. It is how the world has worked for all these years, people have left, and places have gone forward without them.

I stood in the concessionaire queue at the airport. We must try and get a cup of coffee or tea when travelling, not for the caffeine but because they devour the urge to eat, which is always good when dealing with food around airports. The queue did not budge at all, however, and I started seeking ways to distract myself. I started looking around and did not have to look far to find something interesting. The man who stood and waited ahead of me had a wilted flower jammed right where the straps go in. It seemed like a rose, but it was difficult to tell. The man seemed old and tired; the grey hair indicated a life lived. I could not judge whether it was lived well or otherwise, so I moved to a different inquiry. I wondered who the flower could have been from that he kept it even after it had been reduced to a dry and dead version of its glorious colour.

As we do for things we don’t know anything about, I started making up stories about it. I hoped it was from a kid who waited for father back home and told myself things were seldom as simple. Before my cynicism entirely took hold of me, I realised one can hope. One can hope for things to be good and for them to be simple. If we hope strongly enough, things often turn out to be that way. I also thought maybe he simply forgot about it, as most people forget things, and that the flower was but a glaring display of his aloofness.

All of this was, of course, selfish of me. I only wanted to be distracted. These observations happened all day long because there was always a queue and people were always around. It was incredible just how many people were around me. When I finally got my coffee and found a seat, I decided to look at the sheer plethora of it all. I reckon there is so much at stake every second of every day. Children give their fathers a flower and wait for them to return home. Fathers often keep the flowers long after they have withered, and this happens regardless of whether we notice it or not. Most life in this world happens despite us. When I thought of this, it made me dejected for a minute, but then, like all thoughts that shake your soul, it soon gave me this incredible sense of being alive.

After days of being out of sorts, as one tends to be now and then, I woke up today with a relaxed heart. I made coffee, returned to bed and sat in it for a good hour, doing nothing. It is winter, after all, and this ritualistic slowness is part of the package you get with the slower months. Over the years, I have learned that I must keep going until I reach the moment when my body, not my mind, wants rest; the mind gives up faster than the body does on most days. We can work our way around a rebellious mind, but we cannot talk an uncooperative body into action. We must lay down our figurative swords on its first suggestion, and then, as it suggests, we must rest. To begin the day, once and for all, I got out of bed and sipped the coffee, now lukewarm. Oh, the sinful pleasure of intentional tardiness. As I sipped the coffee, the world echoed: there is still time; I believed every word.

And if for some reason, you want me to inquire about what happened, it is too late for that. We can never know what truly happens when we lose our spirits. The soul is surrounded by shaky scaffolding. It is there, in all its glory, and it is also continually being built. And a lot can happen when things are being built: a can of paint falls now and then, a ladder slips sometimes, and some ropes come loose here and there. It says little about what is being built, which is what happened here too. I could not be too sure what it was, but we should try not to worry about it. Time is an astute sculptor. We must let it do its work and shake things off when chaos arises.

“Nothing happened”, we should announce, “nothing at all. Let us resume our duties. There is a life to build.”