journal.coffee

All art demands to be experienced, and all artists look for attention, even if they say they do not need any. I think of this more often than not: who am I writing for? And when “for myself” follows softly as the answer, I pose another question: but for how long? The silence takes centre stage, and no answer ever follows. I do not know where I will ever draw the line, but I would be obtrusively dishonest if I said I never thought of the futility of what I and many others do. In a world where there is no place and time for prose, we write, and we write, and we bare it all, only for a handful of people who read it and only for a couple who ever understand it. It is a lonely pursuit—the loneliest of all—but we seldom choose our inclinations. What comes naturally to us cannot be denied.

And yet, that does not mean there is no doubt or question. There always is space for it. I doubt all my years of writing which have passed and those yet to come. Then, I imagine whether there was a better use for my ability to conjure sentences, hack emotions and piggyback on pain. I wonder if I ever had a career in advertising, or perhaps, somewhere else failed writers go. Maybe, there could be a life where I taught creative writing to kids, helping them dream about writerly lives filled with prose and luncheons and walks.

Then, I remember the only writing advice I have ever received cordially like you receive a present you really want. It was at a conference over a decade ago. Now, I was not listening to the speeches intently. After some time, all boasting starts to meld into itself, but a man, whose achievement or name I do not recall, said something that echoed enough to reach me.

“Do not look to write creatively; avoid courses like the plague, and learn to simply write first. Write, write, write. The creative bit comes later. It comes when it comes. It comes when you are worthy of it. Live first; then, write about it. And live honestly without seeking anything. Then, write in the very same way. You will know it when it comes.”

I often wonder what happened to him.

I came home, did the dishes, and then debated whether to pour a drink or brew a cup of tea. On the one hand, the day had been long and confusing; on the other, November had just begun, and we drank tea in November. So, I turned the kettle on, but that did not change the fact that the day had befuddled me. As the kettle whistled and got louder, I thought of talking to the man who came to clean my apartment this morning. Sometimes, in life, you feel remorse for the general state of the world and how we live, how things are, and how no matter where you stand, life is difficult. But it occurs to you that you cannot do much about it but be kind, so you are kind.

Come night, you stand on the balcony, surrounded by the silence of a city that knows all too well that November has arrived. The days are cold and short, and even if they are like that, a lot still happens during the day. You stand thinking about everything—if there is more you can do about everything, sipping tea—and then, you go to sleep. When you wake up, the world spins madly on. The cleaner cleans another house, and you still remember your candid conversation with him as you go through your own day, cleaning your own little messes.

I watched something on the TV the other day. Some robots explored the remnants of a lost civilisation. Through their imagination, they explained what could have happened to the humans, who, in that narrative, were long gone. And at some point, they made the cliched argument of greed and the hubris of humankind, but only a robot can think of life in such absolutes. It is never that easy, and even if it could be that easy, it is never that simple, and those two are seldom the same.

The human experience is terribly unfair, and it is abysmally random. We do not have much, but we have integrity and kindness, but it cannot save anyone. It can only help us rationalise what we feel when we are out and about in the world. It does not change much else. And as I come to an end of my wits about this once again, I realise you cannot end this thought correctly because you never stop feeling it: to live is to continually feel the irony of your existence until you die.

I talk to people, and I understand their hopes, fears and dreams. I talk to them and they spill it all away, they spill their life into words, as if some dam has been broken. It occurs to me, and this happens quite often, that they, themselves, are the barrier they so desperately want to jump across. I tell them this to varying degrees. Before we shower it onto them, we must always gauge a person’s ability to take the truth. Most people are broken vessels, with invisible cracks here and there, and if you pour the truth onto them, the cracks give way, and nothing good comes out of it. But then, after all is said and done, I sit at a coffee table with my deepest troubles and insecurities, and I remember I, too, am the same way. I, too, pretend to cross hurdles and call it a life well-lived, knowing too well I put some of them there.

Yet, even if we lock ourselves into a prison and swallow the key, we must break out of it as if someone else has put us there. The quality of the solution does not change, regardless of who began the problem. An insect flying into a room must find a way out, irrespective of whether the gust pushed it in or whether it flew of its own volition and confusion. That is its only goal in the little time it spends inside: to leave safely and not be spotted, and if spotted, to manoeuvre away and not be smacked, and if caught, to hope, to hope their jailer is a child who intends to let them out.

And this is what I tell people when I tell them the truth. It is not our concern how the mess came about; it is our concern to leave it, to make it out alive, and sometimes, we must do what we must do, and hope, we must hope for kindness. But before all of that, before any of it, we must admit we are in the wrong place. We must excuse ourselves as soon as we can. But most people seldom leave. They spend their lives changing the furniture and redecorating. But the prison remains a prison, no matter how you dress it up. More often than not, I cannot tell them this, for they cannot handle the truth.

I would know; I am like that, too. I am like all the people I talk to. All people are broken vessels, and if not broken, most of us are, at least, cracked.

I woke up with a puffy nose and made some coffee, and sat to read my words from yesterday. As it usually happens, last night’s malaise had followed me into a new day. Then, it occurred to me that I had to leave for an early breakfast with a friend, so I washed up and left. While waiting, I ordered a cup of ginger, honey and lemon tea, hoping to resolve this little situation. It would have been alright too, but then just across from me was the most pompous and raucous bunch of people sitting. It was not that they were happy and, therefore, loud—the loudness of happiness is different. And while I was not intent on eavesdropping, their conversation managed to reach me regardless. But then, I believe you cannot eavesdrop on a public spectacle. The little I managed to hear before I blocked this noise on an otherwise serene Sunday morning was enough to tell me there was a potpourri of insecurities on that table.

It is not uncommon to come across this particular archetype of people, and there is little we can do about it. Even if there were some societal solution, I believe it would not begin at Sunday breakfast in a cafe. Thus, I quietly chipped away at my breakfast and continued to lose myself in the verdant interplay of trees and branches right outside the window. I noticed bees buzzing about the leaves, and I recalled how this tree blossoms with beautiful red flowers during spring. All that buzzing has a purpose, and we do not see it come to fruition until months have passed. Regardless of how loud or soft people are, perhaps, they have their own purpose, and if not all, then most of us have some part to play in this world. Or maybe, I was giving too much credit to terribly rude behaviour by leaning too deep into the metaphor.

But then, it was a sunny weekend morning, and I was sick, and one tends to be forgiving on days such as this. I continued to have my breakfast, and I continued waiting for my friend.

In these years inching towards getting older, I have come face to face with the irony of my peers, of people who lived life saying things they did not believe in, getting by with only words and nothing else, and now I see. I see why history repeats itself. The world is an old, grey-furred dog running after its own tail, spinning in circles. It is old only in its visage; in its heart, it is as naive as a puppy. There has been a murder of trust. All conversation of fighting for a better world has been nothing but a dagger in the backs of people like me—those who say what they believe in, who live it, who live and preach it. Most people I broke bread with, as we talked about how we will not repeat the errors of those who came before, have devoured their oaths and promises like they devoured their meals. This moral heartbreak has been a tiresome slow burn. How naive have I been? How convinced I was that we were the chosen ones, that we were to build it better together? I think of this, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart every second as I walk about and go about my days. I cannot do anything about it. I can only hold out the hope that there are others like me who I will come across, and we will live with virtue, kindness and compassion, and we will live in the attempt. The attempt is all there is—the attempt to make it all better.

For now, this is a bookend. This is an intermission in my understanding of the world as I go around, and I see how the world is as blind as those who raised them, that people would exchange the highest of values at the prospect of chump change and shallow puddles of cursory joy. All generations must suffer this, I believe, this mass wave, this mass reveal of the true nature of the world. There is little more I can say about it. I meet people, and sometimes, it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart to watch it all burn the same way, to watch it all burn as it always has, to watch everyone drinking water out of their cups, saying, “this is but a glass of water; it has no power over flames so far and wide” in unison. It breaks my heart.

The morning seems further away in time than the day I have spent, which is evident and true when you consider the mathematics of the hours. But we rarely go with how things are; we almost always trust how things feel. And as far as feeling is concerned, I remember waking up early and brewing coffee but not getting a chance to drink it since I had to leave to meet a friend over an early breakfast. It seems all I remember from that moment is getting a sip, smelling the aroma, and thinking: what a waste of a good drink; I did not even write anything. One may ask: why make an effort when you know you will not drink it? And then, I’d ask them why do we do anything? Habit. I did it out of habit like most people live out of habit. I only brewed a cup of coffee; it could be much worse.

And then, I spent the day in drudgery. Working. Talking, working and eating, and only thinking about wastefulness, not in the sense of waste of coffee, the food, but waste of coffee, the fuel. I can write well without coffee or drink. Still, the morning hit of the simple, deliberately brewed cup must not be underestimated. It changes all the words; it makes them better. And then, after the day, I went to dinner, and the drinks in me reminded me of the coffee I had wasted in the morning. On my walk back to the apartment, this was all I thought about. It was good laughter and good drink, and we must not waste it. We must not waste it twice in one day. Something good must come out of it in the end. All regret is only that and nothing else: a waste of a good coffee or drink. It was a good day, we tell ourselves; I should have done more to remember it clearly.

When I came home, I hastily took my shoes and socks off, threw my jacket on the same chair I stumbled towards, and began writing. I must not waste this moment, I thought. I am happy right now. It has been a day; it has been a day full of love and laughter. There is nothing in me that would waste it. No, ma’am, I would sit down and write about it all. I would sit and write and keep writing until I fell asleep.

I walked to the coffee shop after dinner, a hoodie over whatever I was wearing, part out of habit, and part out of duty, instilled in me like a hangover from years before when I pretended to live like a writer and wrote barely enough to call myself one. Now, I live like a person and be that as it may, I know I must sit and write, come hell or high water. I am so awake, at all times, so brutally awake that I see everything, I see words in silence, and I see meaning in banality, and I am so tired, at all times, so brutally tired that I do not want to look at it, and I want to go to sleep and do nothing else, nothing else at all. And then, I realise I can do none of those things. I can only stay suspended in the middle. There is a tendency in me to seek balance, and there is a tendency in me to struggle to find it. At first, I think of this, and it bothers me, but then I remember all questions are tunnels and all answers wait at the end. All answers mandate crawling to them. There is no other way. And if you cannot crawl, you must at least be willing to walk a mile or two to get coffee. It’s a start, and it gets you somewhere. On most days, it is more than enough: to arrive somewhere.

It was ten at night. Well, two minutes to ten. I sat on the white patio chair, sipping coffee and yawning myself into oblivion. I thought of how there are answers we all find and then quarrel over. “We have crawled and gone through hell for them”, we claim, “they must be the only truth.” For most questions in life, however, there are only two answers: all of them or none of them. For most inquiries about how we carry ourselves, the answer is neither what you believe in nor I; the answer is both at the same time or none. On most days, the only single solution to most questions, as ironic as it appears, is the prospect of another equally correct answer.

But we have walked through the tunnels to reach happiness. How must we lay the sword down? I do not know how, but I reckon it must be in trying to sit and see everything. I wonder if that is why we writers devour coffee, our eyes wide open—we must see everything.

There are easy answers to most things in life, and then there are difficult answers, and god forbid I make the easy choice.

Occasionally, I am overwhelmed by my stubbornness, my sticky individuality, and my firm sense of self. I have a habit of making life more difficult for myself. For all its benefits in the individual’s search for truth and goodness, the social maverick lives mostly in public isolation, in crowds but never of them. We do not choose a life of non-conformism, our fate in our hands, without the crutch of borrowed morality. It is instinctual, almost spontaneous and sometimes, I wonder if something is missing in me. Then, I sit by myself and let the thought beat my spirits to death, watching like a helpless spectator. No defier has ever chosen to defy. Their mere existence is defiance. “You always take the hard path”, they tell me, “which is not an error in itself, but why must you?” And I tell them, “but I don’t, I don’t pick at all. I never had a choice in this, and if I did, I made it long ago.”

My identity is a collection of oddities in a box of decisions and consequences. I listen to the jarring silence as I sit and go through it wistfully. Only because of this tendency to walk on my own, only because of this and nothing else, I have no home, and home, for me, is scattered all over. I am a cultural orphan, and all the culture I have is cherry-picked and filtered. All my identity is picked like one picks a language they don’t speak. It has taken me years to get fluent in who I am, yet there is an accent to me. There is an accent that reminds me I come from somewhere still, and I don’t belong there now, and who I am now does not fully belong anywhere. All of who I am comes from this immense cost I continue to pay every day, and it is worth it; it is worth paying the price. But there are moments where we all sit and ponder how different things would be if we had been any different, and all of us think of this, knowing all too well that we are who we are, and that is the gist of it.

There is a soft rebellion in me. I do not know what to do about it. There is no fight to fight, only a life to live, and I live it; goodness knows, I live it.

We tend to be reflective when we sit on a bus, going nowhere and somewhere simultaneously. I reckon this parallel, and of course, the sheer lack of things to do, puts us in a state where we sit and remember. Before I boarded the bus, I carried a book and made sure I had enough music to listen to. I never got around to reading the book, and I listened to the music as you heard a word of advice you did not ask for, feigning attention and letting it wash away into the background noise like a rather excited river pouring into the sea, disappearing into it.

During this time, I somehow navigated backwards through all my steps, years, and tire tracks I had left behind; I traced it all to a moment I don’t quite remember, for we remember things unclearly after some time. And as more years pass, it gets even harder to trust your ability to remember something. We tend to put a layer of fresh paint and varnish on memories now and then. One cannot be too sure about how one remembers things. In any case, I remembered looking at someone—another person, a living human being with their own life and dreams and hopes—and thinking they were the answer. I did not know what they were an answer to, and I did not care enough about it to ask. I thought it was good as long as I had an answer.

Years have passed, and having danced through the fire and reached the greenest clearing in the history of all clearings, I now sat on a bus on the anniversary of the death of the life I never had. I sat there having asked the questions, and I sat there having answered them all. I knew, in my heart, that what seemed like an answer once was only procrastination. Like how a band-aid falls off on its own because the wound demands greater healing, the answer I so desperately sought had ripped itself off and fallen behind without my realising it.

This was all some time ago, of course, and I did not want to think more about it lest I got my spirits down. There was still time for questions and time to answer them, and even though my curiosity was more ravenous than ever, I was not desperate to look for answers in other people. So, I dozed off and let the bus carry me. What else was there to do?

The more years pass, the more my appetite for silence and peace grows. I want to devour the calm on a regular day, and I wish to drown in the banal conversation that seems to go nowhere and everywhere all at once. When you start out in the world, straight out of school or college, you do not imagine your ideal day to consist of nothing but some coffee, some drinks, some talk, some work and some chores. Then, you spend some years and realise you would make a blood oath with the devil and trade your soul for an hour-long afternoon nap. I began my twenty-sixth year here on a bus, and then, I arrived wherever I was to arrive, and I slept through the afternoon. I would not have spent this time doing anything else. But do not mistake my nonchalance for lack of cheerfulness. There is cheer in the air, and there is laughter, and there is joy, and all of it is wrapped in the net of a quiet understanding, with a bow of contentment sealing the present. What more do I need, I wonder? And I hear the absent whisper of silence.

As the bus cruised through the night and the lifelessness of empty cities, I stared out the window. I looked at it all—the rows of trees punctuated by rows of shuttered-down stores, and I thought about life. As much as I wanted to write it down, there was no coherence to what I felt, so I decided to keep my words away, tucked and folded under the clothes in my backpack. Then, for a good hour or two, I kept staring outside amidst my fellow passengers’ snoring, the intermittent honking and the obnoxiously raucous conversation between the bus driver and conductor—a welcome contrast to the silence, like a broad brush stroke on a blank canvas. Then, I dozed off, and it was early in the morning, and I was in another city on another day.

Nothing was grand about this, nothing remarkable either. Most things in life are things you can comment on, but there must be moments that merely exist, and they are part and parcel of being alive, of living. Nothing you can say about them makes them any larger or smaller than they are in themselves. They just are, like we just are, and as much as we want to believe otherwise, that is more than enough.

I sit at the bus station, waiting for the bus to park in its bay, and as one has little to do in these situations, I sip tea from a small paper cup and think about coming and going. Almost two years ago, I came to my hometown amidst the most uncertain time in the world, like many others. I had left my job behind, I had left my friends behind, and I had left a life behind. A living, breathing life with potential and a path ahead. And as one often plans in these situations, to feel a semblance of control when there is none, I planned to stay for six months, with a certain hope that things would settle down and I would leave again. Of course, when nothing is up to us, no plan comes to fruition, and this decision, or lack thereof, was two years ago.

Now, I have built a life in the city I grew up in, and as I have changed, so has the town. Neither of us is the same, and for some reason, I can’t imagine myself parting ways again. Perhaps, this happens when you can see a good present and an even better future. Like how you meet an old friend after years and slowly ask questions to get acquainted with this new person you still remember, I have befriended this city once again. I have an apartment, some friends and a living, breathing life once again—the one I did not plan on. Yesterday, I renewed my lease for another year, and even though it was a lease for a flat, it very much felt like a lease for the life I have now, which may be why my thoughts have only revolved around the coming, the going and now, the staying. I have never once been able to say that I stay somewhere. Perhaps, a part of me has always been afraid to stay put; I have always wanted so much from life.

Now, as I sit here on a dilapidated plastic chair, happy to leave for a vacation and even happier to come back, I realise I still don’t have everything I have ever wanted, and something tells me I never will. But, I have something here which I have searched far and wide enough for. It occurred to me yesterday how I have always been more than ready to leave. But my joy only arrived when I decided to stay.

Everything looks more beautiful in autumn, even the quiet moment you spend sitting near the window, sipping coffee on a hazy weekend afternoon, covered in all the sun the world can muster. Yes, even that, even sitting by yourself and doing nothing looks better. The aesthetic of loneliness is purely about the season one feels lonely in. When it is snowing, and even if it does not snow, the loneliness in winter is dark, it is dry and dreary, and of course, it is cold. In summer, the loneliness is loud and spent on expensive brunches and drinking during the day. In summer, we do not know that we are lonely; if we do, we do not pay attention to it as often. For spring and monsoon, the loneliness looks alike. You spend your days engulfed in the offerings of the world; it is all a bit too much, and it is tucked away in public moments, hidden, of course, but out in the open: in gardens and picnics and colour, or under the generous cover of the bus stop with a hot, paper cup of coffee in your hands, waiting for the rain to stop. Only in autumn does loneliness look gorgeous. It feels warm, and it looks golden, magical. It is in these months, and these months alone, that one can feel lonely and not get any guilt. The world around us burns in brown and red and orange, and it says, burn along, no one is watching, no one is watching.

Now, I do not mean to imply I am lonely. I have not felt loneliness since last autumn, but then, all of us feel it now and then. It does not mean we are lonely; it only means we have felt what everyone feels for a bit, and then we have gone about our business. It is moments of repose, of inactivity and inaction where I feel this, and I reckon, where all of us feel it. It is when we have a second to regroup our senses, and then, as we are entirely present with ourselves—an event rarer than one might think—we realise there is no one but us in this journey through time, that even if there are other people, they are lonely in the precise same way: in moments, sparingly, intermittently, and then, all at once.

Out of words and still groggy, I look at the plants on my desk and notice new stems and leaves. At first, this shocks me, but then, I realise things grow even when you’re not looking. Then, I sip my coffee nonchalantly and pretend this moment to be of little significance. But it is; it is of much significance after all. We are rarely proud of ourselves.

The other day, I met a friend I hadn’t seen in a while for coffee in the evening, and we talked about how our lives had fared—the good and the bad—since we last met. As he talked, I could not help but lose myself in a separate thought: that I’ve known him for a decade. Then, I began doing a mental inventory of the people in my life and how much time had passed since I met them. It occurred to me that there were many people I had known for a decade or more. Of course, this was irrelevant. Time has nothing to do with how much you adore someone; neither should we think of it this way. But the thought was comforting, and an intricate web of these years, these events was woven right in front of me.

I believe this does not happen immediately, but at some point in life, you sit and look at things, and you realise a lot of time has passed since your earliest memory. There is so much you remember, so much you do not remember, and so much you have deliberately forgotten. The passing of time ceases at this moment. From then on, it will not matter how many more years have passed. Be that as it may, things will continue to grow, and they will continue to change. It will all happen whether we look at them or not. It is how growth happens: hidden in plain sight.

One day, you walk by some unnoticeable plant, and in a few years, there is a tree there. You did not see it growing. It only happened.

I sit on the rug, drunk enough to know the glass of wine can spill at any moment and drunk enough to not care about it. There is an ambience of quiet yet satisfied exhaustion in the apartment. I am protective of this peace, too protective for my own good. To sleep and to wake up to silence is a vice not discussed as often but one that is potent. Like the strongest liquor, this silence engulfs you. It holds almost immediately, but you don’t realise it until you have taken it by the bucket, and then, it all comes to you in one strong hit. Solitude and love are intoxicating in the same way—you do not see them coming—and they are addicting in precisely the same way—you do not know when you’re under them. And when you are under them, you only want things to stay as they are forever.

I wonder what caused this sudden comparison. Then, I hear Skeeter Davis’ voice, and it occurs to me why I happened to think of love in this hour of solitude and why I feel inclined to defend my position without any inquiry or summons over me. I chuckle and get up to get a refill. I notice the collection of Bukowski’s poems lying on the rug. I had forgotten about it until now. Sometimes, we keep things in a place, and even though we can see them clearly, they blend so perfectly with the scenery, the moment or the days, we stop seeing them.

It has been the case with all my troubles, too. I kept them somewhere and then forgot where I kept them. Now, someday, I will be cleaning out some old thoughts, dusting some dreams off, and I will find the troubles right there, making me question if they were right there or if I had invented them. But all troubles are always looming. Each drop of peace counts and each ounce of solitude is essential, and if you have some to spare, each spoonful of love must be devoured as wholly as you can.

But at this moment, there is little to worry about, and something tells me I will miss this night. I will miss the wine, the Bukowski, and the music, which has moved from Davis to John Denver. Annie’s Song plays along, and for a second, I forget I am not in love with anyone. Then, I remember it and gloss over it like a column no one reads in the newspaper.

Once you lose your laughter, and once you learn to laugh again, you will learn to spot good and bad company. You will learn to see those spewing vitriol even before they have a chance to speak and poison everything around you. Every word out of their mouth will be slimy and combustible. There are people we must humour and laugh with, and then, there are those who are the social equivalent of an oil leak—wherever they go, the flames follow ferociously, and which is worse, you cannot separate from them quickly and entirely. Some part of what they leave behind will be stuck onto you forever. I have been the one setting things on fire, and I have been the one fanning the flames, and now, I am none of them, and all of it is for the better.

The happier I become, the less I want to do with the little game of right and wrong and this and that. There is a larger context to things; beyond that, none of it has any say in how things turn out. What you and I have to say about it does little to change how things will go. The price of company is my solitude. I must be scrupulous in my spending it. I spend my solitude like a miser spends his gold—with great reluctance and general reproach.

It is not infrequent to get dressed, go out and meet someone for brunch. Only to return out of wits, tired and smaller than you left. Some, or most, of the sunlight you so patiently absorbed is gone. The world seems barren, empty and hollow. Everything seems to have either died or is on its way, and nothing is in the right place. This happens often, and then, it is evening, and it occurs to you it was the result of the company from brunch.

The trick is to always be busy, and if not busy, then to appear to be so. If you walk too casually, you must change it and walk with purpose, even with no destination. In the little time that I have been happy and in the few months that I have laughed again, I can tell you these are the only things that work. The trick is to always appear you have something better to do than talk to someone, which you do.

There is magic around us. We must not let them take it away. It is a thing taken too quickly, and then, suddenly, you forget how to laugh.

Building these magnificent golden days has brought more callouses on my soul than I can count, but all good things start tragically. There is a remembrance in my days as I remember lying on the grey, shaggy rug, out of body, out of mind, not sure if I would live to see another year, and that if I did, it would still not be what I wanted, and I would not be who I thought myself to be. How did I get here? I wish I knew. Anyone who tells you there is a plan or process to this is lying. You grasp at straws and pull yourself up. It was but a test, which I tell people now, but it was not some mythological trial. If I were to do it again, I would not know if I could bring the same outcome. It was real, and it was messy, and it was vulgar to the point of utter disgust.

Everything looks good in prose—good and beautiful—but all artists are merely stranded survivors who lived to tell the tale. But, they talk about anything but their storms. The storms are over, they say; let us rejoice and have a drink. There will be days when we talk about the ruin of being ripped apart in all directions, but not today. Today, the sun is warm and glorious. Anyone who has spent time rowing themselves out of a tempest knows not to talk about it. The ones who know will know regardless of your telling them, and the ones who don’t will never understand it with mere words.

So, come, it is still October, we say. Let us bask in the warmth and raise our glasses for a toast: may we get a thousand days like this, and when they are over, may we get a thousand more. May we never have to learn to swim as the rapids do their best to drown us. May we have nothing to write about except banal, repetitive happiness in cups of coffee, in trees and in streets, in people, and in all things that make this life worth living. May we all be vapid and commonplace and ordinary forever, and if that seems to be a long time, may we be just that for as long as life allows.

When someone tells me they cannot quite articulate their feelings, I tell them it is not uncommon, but I also tell them that it is a good thing. I long to experience things I cannot share and understand; I crave it. I love it when I see a sunset so beautiful, so destructively orange that it kills something inside me and births it anew, and then, when I try to tell someone about it, I do not have words that would do justice to what I felt. Then, I tell them it was gorgeous, but it wasn’t just gorgeous. A lone rose blooming on a fresh morning is gorgeous. There are more things in life beyond the visual aesthetic, and we often lack the words for them. A cup of coffee can be magnanimous when it saves you even without your asking. A table in a cafe with a heart and initials gorged into it is a better raconteur than most poets. It is not just old and wooden and brown. It is the story and the storyteller in one. The stolen nostalgia you feel when you sit in a cafe and come across a table like this cannot be expressed simply by describing it. It must be seen and felt.

We seldom find the words to tell these things and what they made us feel. I was speechless when I saw it. That is all we can come up with: speechlessness—the lack of words. It is the greatest level of human experience. Language, our ability to communicate, has brought us till here. Then, we go through life and suddenly lose all ability to say what we want to say or to write what we want to write. And then, we realise this is what it means to be living.

To be human is to regularly be at a loss for words.

It’s closer to the morning than the night, and as I sip through this wine and waste time the way I waste words, I think of indulgence. There is a book on the table I have not yet read. There are scores of books in my library I haven’t even begun reading, yet I buy them, like all of us, like every person in the world does.

A part of us wants to spend and get spent in the process of living. There is nothing we can do about it, and the only rebuttal in this debate is a call to the vagueness of right and wrong. When it is closer to the morning than the night, the rebuttal falls flat, as it has in this room filled with the fruity aroma of wine and classic rock. At this moment, time does not exist. This is a moment outside the zeitgeist. I sit with no wits about me and all the inspiration in the world. The greats whisper in my ears: indulgence, indulgence; it is all a human being wants to do; it is all we want in the end, to drown ourselves in the vivid experience of being alive.

I want to soak myself in every single word of poetry written before me. The abundance of art overwhelms me. Every emotion has already been felt, and all of it has already been distilled into work so fine, so incredible; anything we do seems like a poor imitation. My laughter is not my own; it is not original. None of what we do is original. All of it has been done before, yet we repeat the cycle. We live, feel, and risk the heart and mind, and we do it so often that we can barely keep track of the scars. Our loves overlap, our happiness is plagued by slivers of regret jabbed into it like daggers in the back, and our biggest fear is that we may feel something real. And when we do, we come home silently, no word to friend or stranger; we save it all for the page.

We hope we have drowned enough, that the scars are deep enough, that something new has been felt. Then, we do what countless have done before us. We sit in the dark, our silhouette hunched over the desk, bleeding ink.

It’s a hot autumn afternoon smack dab in the middle of October, and the sun as golden as the pint of beer I’m sipping tells me everything I have ever wanted to know. The breeze, albeit sunkissed, is refreshingly calm, and as it moves in its own way, it whispers all the secrets anyone ever ought to know. I stand on the balcony and watch the day shape around me as some kids make the most of the warmth—one skates about on his rollerblades, others play badminton, and one just sits there on the bench. It catches my eye, and I feel some kinship with him, but then, I don’t dwell on this and look further around.

The sky is always clearer as the colder months get on. If you’re privy to the science of it, you’d know cold and hot air hold moisture differently, but we don’t always think of the world from the eye of physics on most days, even if we know things. Most, if not all, look at the afternoon sky in October, demarcated cleanly by the verdant hills, and tell themselves that this may be a spoonful of respite on colder days. That is all we have for winter: a little bit of rum, some hot chocolate and the memory of the sunny afternoon from a few hours ago. Yes, no one quite cares about the why of things as long as they can conjure a reasonable explanation. If it is not reasonable, then it must be poetic. And so, there is no truth to things; there is only what we believe to be true. Most lives, if not all, are an amalgam of fact and fiction, where fiction is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is the imposter. It is the liar and the fraud. On most days, we cannot separate between the two; for better or worse, everyone lives like this and dies pretty much the same.

But it is still October; that much is true. And we are halfway through it; that much is true. And it is sunny, and on sunny days, we must sit with some beer and nap the afternoon away; that much is true enough for me to do it and not have doubts about. That is how most people live: in the absence of doubts. To seek truth is to be uncertain, and so, it is the lack of doubt that is the problem. We wear our surety as pins on our clothes, and then, we do whatever the hell we want to do, convinced it all makes sense.

When I shut the door at night, I shut myself off from the world. This is by design. I am not blind to the fact that I am a fairly private person. I keep to myself and most of myself away from the world. Each thought in these words is the closest someone will get to see who I am, and beyond my honest, wholesome time spent with the world, everything else is my own. Each thought, each instinct, and each idea is my own. In a world where you have all of you for display at all times, I enjoy a quiet, thinly-veiled privacy. Only curated parts of my life remain public, spread around like creamy peanut butter on a hot, crisp slice of toast. There is no grain in sight, no gap in between for you to see the whole picture. Unless, of course, you indulge.

I am a terribly selfish person in this regard. All of myself is my own until someone asks, and if and only if they ask that I share things they would not obviously and apparently see on their own. This lack of being forthright about my days and life is not out of some mystique. It is only that I do not much care to talk about things people don’t quite think about, and as ironic as it sounds, for these bookmarks are anything but that, I don’t quite enjoy talking about myself. It is, of course, a welcome surprise when someone asks me something no one else has, and this happens so frequently that I wonder how content people, even those closest to you, are when given a slice of the bare minimum of your existence. And so, whenever a question like that is put forward, I oblige happily, and I humour the request earnestly.

All families have folk stories of their own, pieces of irrelevant, personal history that they talk about when they talk about things. The other day, we recalled the time when we were children, and as the time and circumstance would have it, I spent a fortnight in a room by myself. Of course, by my own volition, like all things I do. And knowing this story and having heard it a million times, when I sit alone, visit the theatre alone, or walk alone, I often question this desire for anonymity and privacy. I think about that room I cannot remember. I wonder if I ever left.