journal.coffee

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.

I sat in the cab, engrossed with a problem I was trying to solve with my work, a short family trip that I had procrastinated planning on, and of course, writing—in that order. Just then, I noticed the wrong road getting closer and right as the driver was about to make a turn, I told him it was the wrong route. In this ordeal, the intricate tapestry of thought I was lost in collapsed quickly, and all I had done since the moment I left the apartment was lost. I only wrote bits and pieces mentally for the rest of the route, which was not as long to do anything else. I am only putting all that down now, like a loyal assistant. There are multitudes in me. I give myself the orders like a general and follow them like the cavalry. This autonomy has given me so much, and it has taken so much. Now, with everything split even, I sit and write.

As I jot the words down, having iterated over them a hundred times since the evening, I realise there is madness to my method. There is order in my disorder; even when I am in disarray, I am fastidious. When I meet a friend or acquaintance or talk to them on the phone, it is not uncommon for them to ask me: How do you do the same things every day? How do you keep up with it? How do you not forget or lose yourself and never find the motivation to start again? I try to answer them, but then, I get as close as we get to articulating how we breathe. It only gets harder when you try it. Some things appear naturally in people. For a lot of people, it is unforeseen genius. For me, it is this tendency to keep at something.

For many years now, I have joked that some of us are the children of Sisyphus—we do not know why we roll the rock uphill, and if we ever did, we have long forgotten. Jocular as this remark is, I am now beginning to see some truth in it after all. I could not tell you why it is that even if I stop writing in the morning, an hour in the night clears itself up for me as if I had planned it. The universe conspires for a lot of things. In my case, it keeps me where I am as long as I truly want to be there. What it wants from me? I will never know. I am but a man who sits and writes, whether it is day or night is irrelevant.

Lately, I have not adhered to my schedule and have written haphazardly and variably as the days have waltzed past me. Now, I can confirm the muses have their window, and if you miss it, you are gone for good. Nothing will come out of you, no matter how long you sit there at the desk. But like all guests, the muses are understanding and are open to some adjustment and accommodation. In this golden month, as I am still trying to get a grip on my wholesome days, I have made it a point to inform the muses of my tardiness as early as possible. “I apologise,” I tell them, “the day has already unfurled, and now that there are things that depend on me, could you revisit me in the evening?” And when I have had my dinner and drinks and come back to the desk after an exhausting day, I find them waiting. In life, with all things, all you have to do is ask kindly, and even inspiration obliges you. A sweet word, honestly spoken, is better than any pumpkin spice syrup you can concoct on these heavenly auburn days.

The sky was golden this evening, and I could see the flavour of October slowly engulf everything. I was convinced I could make another coffee, sit and start writing. If I had, I could have distilled the evening into prose that would have put the crisp leaves of early autumn to shame. But as enticing as the idea was, it would not have been honest of me to stray away from responsibility, and no art comes out of dishonesty and malice. So, I only made a cup of coffee and stood at the edge of my balcony for a good ten minutes, taking in everything as it stood in front of me. An eagle soared right above the golden light and sky, and the trees were all dolled up with the golden orange blush of the fall sun. And as one tends to get reflective in such moments, it occurred to me how in a few days, a full year would have passed from the last time I was unhappy.

It was when I turned twenty-five years old and thought I was too late for all I was meant to do and everything I was meant to be. The leaves were golden last year, too, and the leaves will be golden next year, still. Now, I know I have arrived wherever I was meant to reach, and I am writing—it is all I was meant to do.

I wrapped the day earlier than usual, which for most people, equates to wrapping it at the regular time. But there was a childlike excitement in me when I did this, and so with time and a bit of the leftover daylight on my hands, I walked to the coffee shop. On my way there, I passed traffic—cars clogging the streets, stuck; the scooters and motorcycles shimmied and zigzagged around them, only to halt at the traffic lights. The illusion of progress is a cruel irony.

Traffic reminds me of many things. It reminds me of unfulfilled dreams in middle-class homes and lovers waiting for someone who never intended to return; in short, it reminds me of helplessness, and not just any helplessness, but one inflicted onto the self. Like the crowds never realise that they are the very problem they blame when individually commenting on how crowded the city has become, people who bring about problems now and then would do well to realise they were the problems themselves. Even if not entirely, they at least played some part in it. But as I walked to the cafe, I shrugged off this thought. I had wrapped the day early. We cannot all worry about the world at all times; that, too, is a luxury. We have work to do and bills to pay, and if we have an hour, coffee to savour and not just drink as a means to getting through the day.

This was my moment. This was my hour. I was not intent on giving it away to something I could not solve. We have days we care about the ills of the world, and there are days of vanity. This was a day of vanity. The general person goes to work and then comes home and does this repeatedly throughout the week. Even during this, they have time to sit down, read the news, and say, with all their morbid seriousness, “what a terrible world, what a terrible world indeed.”

No one is as aloof or heartless as to not see how this ship began sinking a long time ago, but that does not mean they cannot enjoy a drink now and then. Life is too short anyhow, and all of us are splashing towards the lifeboats. We do not want to be reminded of the world we live in on some days. Some days, it is only about ending it early, taking a long walk, and sipping coffee, quietly.

Sometimes, I sit engrossed with work, but my mind wanders, and I allow it to go as far as it can. To work and to write at the same time is a well-kept secret of the literary world. When people tell you they do not have time to write, you ask them, cordially and nonchalantly, but do you have time to live? In any case, I sat like I often sit, a screen in front of me, some trivial work that may or may not have a significant say in the grand scheme of things. I thought of how most of us are already living in the tail-end of history, that most of humanity has happened already. We are but imitations of each other, all of us working on things to keep the world running. The risky voyages to different, unknown lands are all done. The exchange of culture, of bringing recipes, spices and cats from your land to another, is over. All we do has happened before, and none of what we do will ever be remembered. And then, I thought of how every person before me must have thought of the same thing, and yet, in some way, their life has stood for something.

On a Monday, like all Mondays, I end the day partially asleep as I tell the cabbie to take the correct route before I drift off, only to be woken by the patter of rain on the window and the metallic clinking of each drop on the top of the car. This shower seems as ephemeral as my sleep since it, too, comes along for a minute, only to disappear. Then, I reach my parents’ place, laugh a little, and have a hearty dinner. And after that, I come to my desk and hover near it until I can resist no further, and begin working again. At first, this saddens me a little, but then, it occurs to me how privileged it is: to have work and to love it. Entire lives are passed without even a glimpse of this pleasure, and here I am, drowning in it. The sun had shone, and the rain had taken centre stage; I did not remember anything about it. This, too, was a blessing in disguise.

Sundays are for intentional delays as you do everything with complicit tardiness. While on other days, you often tell others how you were not responsible for being late, that there was traffic, or the imminent end of the world stopped you from arriving on time, on Sundays, you tell them you woke up later than you had intended. You own this folly with such confidence that they must nod and remark on how it is Sunday and we all deserve some rest. And if nature is benevolent, it begins to rain on Sunday, and you can traipse around without having the conversation at all. I came home after such a day, and it started raining while I was on my way back, which to some degree, thwarted my plans to stop for coffee. I could have stopped still, but I wanted to have it on the patio, and the image of a man having coffee by himself as it rains around him did not make the thought enticing. If anything, I could detect the paucity of the positive in the prose a moment like that would inspire. So, I came home.

Then, it stopped raining, and for a second, from underneath the cotton cover of clouds, I could see the blue sky again. But it is October, and all our days have gotten shorter. Before I saw the blue, I saw the night descend upon the city. Now, as I sip coffee by the window and write these words, I ponder how one decision can change even the words someone will write. Each moment we experience locks us out from living the rest. I think of all this, and I debate going out for a walk and coffee later in the evening and if the rain would not return.

There are half a dozen versions of me and half a dozen versions of the evening ahead of me. It can go any one way from between them. Ah, the infinite possibilities of life. It is funny how paralysing they feel. Yet, we continue choosing for and against things and eventually, life does happen. My life only exists because there are so many lives I decided to not live. These words exist because there were countess words I was never in the position to write.

The feeling of going to sleep early, not because you want to, but because you are devastatingly exhausted and then waking up with a soft ache in your body, not because you did not sleep well, but quite the opposite, is incomparable and unparalleled. The restfulness of waking up early on the weekend and stretching yourself as you move about the house with your eyes peeled only partially does not come easily, for the exhaustion that compels you to sleep does not come easily, but when it does, you get to experience one of the affordable yet rare pleasures known: a good night’s sleep.

I woke up on the weekend, completely restored, and restored as I was, I thought about love. After some deliberation, however, I realised there were better things to do. Life is so much more than romance—so much to do and see. How glad I am that I get to live and do the things I do, go to sleep, and do them again. There is little space for all else. Now, I meet people but fail to call them afterwards. This may look like apathy to them, but it is only a side-effect of preoccupation for me. Alas, it does not bode well for my case. Then, I never see them again; if I do, it is months down the line and on accident. They tell me they found someone and that they are engaged now. For a second, I feel something along the lines of regret, but then, I brush it off like you brush yourself off when you have a habit of stumbling and falling on the street now and then. It changes nothing; you continue walking as if it never happened. It is a story that is getting old hastily as time continues to climb forward.

Time, time, it keeps passing. It is October already. A part of me questions where this year went, and another laughs and talks about happiness and joy. I am a mixture, a batter of all my ironies. It is the beginning of Saturday. Perhaps, I could make pancakes out of it.