journal.coffee

How would you say that? It’s a common question you ask when you meet someone who speaks a different language or comes from a place absolutely unlike your own. And then, when you have the pronunciation down, you realise you meant the same thing after all. And this happens over and over again, regardless of how many people you meet and irrespective of where you meet them. That’s the human experience. That is what you cannot take away from us—the common folk, who have control over embarrassingly little, and who still try to make the world better. The people laugh the same way. They get drunk the same way. And everyone wants a rum and coke at some point, jet-lagged as they may be, even if they need a friend to tell the bartender they need one. There is no replacing this, no matter where you go in the world, and anyone who tells you otherwise can show themselves the exit. To the rest of us, I say salut and salud and cheers and prost and na zdrowie.

“How would you say that?” I ask now and then when I sit around people who are like me in more ways than it seems at first, and “how would you say that?” my new friend from a country far away mumbles before he finds the word for whatever he is trying to convey. There seems to be a long distance between all places that have ever existed, but if you are stubborn enough, the middle ground seems to not be so far away, either. All feelings exist in all places, and all places have some way to convey them. There is little else to say when everything has been said before, but when you’ve been thinking for far too long along the same lines, a change of pace is a good shuffle. It shakes you up; it tells you there is more to it all; that there always has been more to it all.

But all of it can be said, and most of it begins with the most common question of all: how would you say that?

To have a wonderful day and not have anyone to tell about it is a tragedy. We rarely remember our days for how they felt but how we told the story. If there’s no one to tell the story to, the days fade into nothingness. Most of your days will fade into nothingness. To tell someone about the tiny pleasures, the large wonders, and given they have the time, everything in between—that is all we need. Most happiness begins and ends the moment this happens, the moment you share it with someone else. That is the only function of happiness: sharing.

Nothing is more irksome than the moment when you feel nothing but umpteen joy, and you cannot find anyone to tell the story to. It is why we click pictures. It is why we must share them with others, no matter how blurry the picture is, irrespective of how it may capture but a smidge of the glory, and on most occasions, fail to do even that. It is not the picture that is beautiful; it is what you say about it, how your eyes glow up, how you go into a craze of the memory. It is in those things that the purpose of a picture is fulfilled. Everything else is high, elitist art—no one understands or cares about it. All else is a selfish, meaningless pursuit. It is the poor pictures that make the most sense. They show the urgency; they capture the moment.

As I sit here by myself, ruminating on a beautiful sunrise I witnessed from over thirty-thousand feet in the sky in the brightest version of my life, I think of the pleading. I think of how I begged and said I needed some time; I think of how true it all was, of how true it had always been. Just some time and trust is all most people ever need. Many have to beg for them; few ever receive them; things happen regardless, and life goes on anyway. The only change is in who is there to watch them along with you. The only difference is who you share the stories with and who gets the blurry picture of a sunrise. Pain is easy to share; it makes for good poetry. Life is all about sharing happiness; it is about who you share it with.

I sit in the most crowded cafe I can find in the mall’s centre on a Friday evening. I do this by myself with a cup of hot americano in the corner section of the cafe. The table stands by itself, facing the faceless silhouettes of shoppers scurrying and straggling, passing the bar-like table. At first, this seems to be a rather unwise decision. Other writers would tell you it’s too loud and chaotic, with their snarky remarks about consumerism, the stream of distraction of the whistling industry-grade machine, and the faux hellos echoing over and over like some sick simulation. But all that, all of it, is an excuse. If I have learned only one thing about what we do as writers, it’s that you can write as well in a silent room as you can in a buzzing hive of cash and credit. You can write in places that look and feel the same, regardless of what city you go to, and you can write with terrible coffee as you can with which tastes like heaven.

If there is anything I have learned, it is that there is only one way to do it. I’ve learned that it is as simple as sitting at a random table in some cafe and doing it, and I have learned it is as complex as managing to focus on the words ahead of you. That is how all writing is done: one word at a time. The page is coloured in marks of black, and slowly, it seems like something is there, but you begin with one word. That’s how you start, and that’s how you end.

My father often tells me driving well is about driving well for a hundred metres over and over again. I still don’t know how to drive a car. I don’t know a lot of things. I don’t know how to cook anything besides a few eggs and some pasta. I don’t yet know how to find love and keep it. Be that as it may, I know what I know: I know how to write; I know to take bits and pieces, these bookmarks from my life, and eternalise them, one word at a time. In the end, I may not amount to much. Perhaps, nothing great will come out of my hands. But these words, these vignettes torn right out of my days, will have something to say.

And if, in the end, they say nothing worthwhile, then that is what my life will stand for—no more, no less—but it will all happen one word at a time.

It was a muggy night yesterday, or at least, I remember thinking this before I slept. It’s too warm, I remember saying to myself. I woke up in the middle of my sleep, craving water. The bottle beside me was empty, so I got up, my eyes almost fully closed. Trusting muscle memory, I walked to the kitchen groggily but just then, I saw this golden glow emanating from outside the curtains.

At first, I thought this was all a dream, that I may very well be still sound asleep in my bed, and this quest for some water was some twisted game concocted by my mind. But then, I peeked through the curtain to see the glow was real. I was still thirsty, and this was no dream, so I went to the kitchen, filled my bottle up, and went into the balcony to witness the most beautiful sunrise. A tinge of yellow over everything, as if a light coat of watercolour had taken over the world, and since no one had woken up yet, there was a soft silence about everything.

I stood there, sipping water and looking at the sun and the hills. In that moment, entirely engulfed by the sheer peace ahead of me, I did not want anything else but to stand there, and so I did just that. I came back in, the room was still dark and cosy, and I decided to sleep a little more, thinking about how serendipitous life is in all its little and large ways. There is nothing else you need but a little randomness and a little urge to get a glass of water in the middle of your sleep, and it can change everything.

You do not remember much—all memories fade into nothingness—but you remember stories like these. You tell people about them for years, and they stare at you, puzzled and perplexed. It was only a sunrise, they tell you. Be that as may, you reply, it changed everything still, not that I knew it at the time. Not that we ever really know. But there is a feeling, and often, that is enough.

I woke up terribly late and rushed through to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, but over this six-step stretch, I slowed down and began to laugh instead. I made coffee and carried it to the desk while smelling it; it smelled like a potpourri of hope and happiness. In these days, when none of me is hidden, when all of who I am is out and about, and there is no schism between who I want to be and who I am, I see life for what it is: it is an exercise in patience. I suppose all we do here is about waiting, and one must wait patiently. I have waited for so much; I have seen it come to pass in odd, mysterious ways. Like a lonely house in a field that no one visits until someone stumbles upon it on a rainy day, every wait has a purpose. I have waited for so much more; I have had my heart sink deeper than the heaviest rock you can toss into the sea, but all things wash ashore eventually. I have found myself stranded on the beach alone and tired, waiting still. For all the wait we have in life, we are often in an unfounded rush. Even if you oversleep, there is still the rest of the day to go through. If you are patient and if you look around, much can still happen during the day.

And with this thought, I sat at the desk and began writing. Just then, it occurred to me that the coffee was still hot; there was still time. There was still time, and life was just beginning to unfold. It was a beautiful day—the sun was still out, and the clouds had slowly begun to engulf it. The sky had not yet turned grey, so you could still see the hills, and the birds flew about casually, no sense of urgency in the flaps of their wings. Of course, I had missed some hours of all this, but there was still enough of it left for things to happen. That is all life becomes in the end: waiting for things to happen and then, if you’re patient enough, responding in kind.

These are days of greatness and glory. We do not know it yet, but people seldom do. I think of memoirs, of how the lost generation could only tell their intertwined kinship in hindsight. You read about them, and you wonder: did they know? And of course, they didn’t! They were there to have coffee, to drink and to walk about Paris, but mostly, they were there to write. Most of them kept writing, and now we think of their names, gilded in all the good there is, but they were just people living. That is the most important thing to know about it all. We writers are terribly honest creatures. We do not have the luxury of delusion. We only say the words are good when we’re halfway through them, and it occurs to us that they are.

We need this honesty. Someone who has never read a book will find whatever they read to be good; we must not trust them. And what of those who have read a bit too much? We must not trust them either. Their bearings on the goodness of writing were lost a long time ago. Like one continues brushing teeth, they continue reading—out of habit. And so, we cannot call ourselves good or great before we are, and even then, even if we did reach there, the words will come as they always do. The words will always come hard; they don’t much care for who you are or what you’ve done. To the words, you are simply someone who sits to face the blank page and begins to tell the truth.

I met someone for coffee the other day. She asked me if the words were any good since I had been writing for long enough. I told her they were the same as they have always been. Words were like coffee—there was always some tuning to do. There was always something to fix. There was always more to say, and there was always more to remember. We don’t much know what the greats did differently to get there, but we know they wrote. They wrote until there was no life left in them. There is nothing different about this, and there shouldn’t be.

They read those who came before them, and we read them, and all of us have written. There is kinship in this, too.

Life is not endless opportunity. The person I could have been had I never started writing is long gone. That is what no one understands about the possibility of life. You begin with countless paths, but the more decisions you make, the more this gamut is curtailed. That is why decisions are crucial, and that is why we get to make a plethora of them in one life. Every decision starts a path towards becoming a certain kind of person, but it almost always also removes the other possibilities. Even if I stopped writing a word today, the course I have been on up until now would not be erased from memory. The years will have been spent, and for better or worse, I will have written regardless of if I continue doing it or not. It is a paradox of possibility: it is always infinite, but when you look closer, some of that infinity has been spent already.

To do something is to buy into the future that doing creates, even if you only do it once, even if you never do it again. As I sit here, having made all the decisions I have made so far—to hold on, to let go, to keep going, to stopping—I wonder whether we make the decisions or the decisions make us. Would I be a different person had I done things differently or did I do those things the way I did because of the person I am? Of course, these are but musings of someone with too much time on his hands, for a change. As much time there is, there is always more we have to do with it. No matter how free someone is, they will always have things to do. Perhaps, no decision I make will fully take this away from me: a coarse urgency. It has always plagued me, but the days lately feel like a start.

I have always been in a hurry, and because of it, I have always been late. I have been late in holding on, I have been late in letting go, I have been tardy in my will to keep going, and I have stopped in all the wrong places. For all decisions and all their consequences, at all times, I have had the looming fear of being late. No decision has been able to change this much for me—until now.

There is a calm wafting in the air. There is calm in the music, in the cup of coffee on this table, in my heart. I do not know what else to feel about it. I only want to lie down and read until the sun begins to set. I believe this is what I have been running towards for all these years. This is it. I know it in my heart. All of it starts within me and ends there. All of who I am is here, and all of it is welcome. I do not want to trade an ounce of myself. All my faculties and thoughts only scream this on this irrelevant Sunday in August: what a wonderful life!

There comes a point when you do not want to change; you do not want any more answers and, indeed, no questions. When you’re here, you must resist. Most rarely do, and they turn into a caricature of who they were and a reflection of those who came before, and nothing changes. The world is not moved, not by a smidge, and all that they did will turn to dust years before they do. In this happiness, I shall not forget that things change; with them, so do we. This calm will change at some point, which is all the more reason to read in the sun, to savour every ray. I will remember the warmth when the sun sets and clouds cover the sky. That is the instinct to stand in the stray patch of sunlight that falls in the room. Save this warmth, our body tells us; there may be none later.

But for now, I want to sit here and look over my shoulder right outside at the pigeons perched on the roof ahead. It does not elude me that I may have gotten older earlier; this is a good thing in most ways. For all the good in my life, many of my years were purloined; my life has always skipped ahead, like a problematic tape. There are seasons I don’t remember. Years of my life stay unaccounted for, like some old picture that gets lost amidst a plethora of paperwork. I wish I could tell people the cost I have paid for these gifts they revere. I wish I could tell them, but people don’t much value time, and more often than not, time is the only price we pay.

For now, I shall read in this patch of sun. There is little else to do, and what is more, I am not willing to lose even a second’s worth of time—enough has been stolen already.

The way I know I love someone, which is no one these days, is not when I think of them after the day ends and folds into the night, after I have done the dishes and I lay in bed. The night is so cold, so lonely, even dogs begin howling. I want a love of the afternoon, the rush hour traffic, and three PM post-lunch cups of coffee. When I stand in a cafe queue, scanning the options from the menu above, and I wonder if I should get you something, I know I love you, and that is how I wish to be loved: in the brightest hours of the day, under the same sun.

Tell me you think of me during the day, as you run about the grocery store, bags in your hand, balancing a paper cup of coffee along. Tell me you passed a billboard with a pun so forced and terrible that you knew I would be the only one to laugh at it. And in return, I’ll tell you of how when I walked about the streets or the park, I thought of you, and once I did, I could not stop like how when we think of breathing, it takes some time for the body to take over, and you have to keep breathing until then. That is how I thought of you: intentionally, and when it all subsided, just like breathing, you were still there in the back of my mind.

And of course, we will talk about our days at dinner, but we will have been in them. It is the only way to know you love someone. Not when you tell them about your days, but when they are a part of them: in their little ways, their presence is continuous, in bits and pieces, in little things you remember, in songs and in films, and in passing restaurants and buildings, and peculiar antique stores, and gift shops, and florists and nurseries, and grocery stores.

I do not know of promises of forever; in my little experience, they always seem to break in the end. I know this much, though: I’m a simple man, so when I get coffee, I always get the americano, no snack along with it, but when I stop at the cafe in the evening, I will always ask if you need something and if you say no, I will get your favourite, just in case.

And I will always do this because I will always stop for coffee, and you will always be on my mind.

And that is how I will know: I love you.

Someday, when you’re fifteen, twenty-five or fifty, you will sit by yourself or stand with your hands on the balcony sill, and you will have a cup of coffee around somewhere or in your hands. You will look ahead, and something will tell you this is it. This is where it all converges—this moment is the beginning and the end of your time—everything you have ever said has led here, and everything you will ever say will come from here. This is my life, you will say, this is my life in ninety seconds’ worth of time. You will, for the first time, call it your own and mean it. In this moment, you will see it all. All past lovers will seem like an essential step in an obscure recipe; all lost friendships will suddenly feel like they were important, too; and all future will look the same as the past—with people, with things happening all around, and somehow, this time, you will feel ready.

Just then, you will remember some memory buried deep under your conscience, or simply, like all good days, you will have forgotten it. We often forget the good. It is terrible, but that is how it is: the good parts are good, and the bad parts feel worse. As the wind blows or some music plays on the speaker, both of which are essentially the same for a good song is like a gust that blows you away, and all soft breeze has a whistle to it, you will remember a lovely day full of sun from back when you were way too young, when being this old felt like a distant dream. The laughter will slowly echo back. It will start with a trickle, and you will scoff first. Then, you will chuckle and begin laughing. Most happiness begins as a scoff, not because it is not real, but because you cannot believe it. Most happiness feels unbelievable. I often wonder why that is the case, given all of us search for it.

I don’t know why we cannot believe it when we’re happy, but I do know all of us find it, whether it’s at fifteen, twenty-five or fifty. There is always a moment that engulfs you. Ninety seconds’ worth of your life; nothing remains the same afterwards.

Everything is on time now. No letters arrive late; no telegrams are delayed. The weather does not stop our transport permanently, and the packages, despite irritating logistics, are delivered. All the responsibility falls on us now. This is a problem, of course, for we, people, like blaming fate for all our tragedy, but the message is never late anymore. It is only us who are too late; we are always to blame. It was always our fault, but now, we cannot hide behind an excuse.

No lover can tell the other that the letter was too late, stolen or burned, that they did not read it before kissing another. No death can be shrugged off for an ounce of false comfort, for there is no uncertainty. The news travels all too fast. Everything has to be coped with, and we are not so good at so much coping. No one can up and leave, only to start a new life in some other place with a new name. People cannot leave each other behind altogether. People of the old revelled in a luxury we cannot begin to imagine. They enjoyed the uncertainty in communication.

This responsibility is the modern tragedy. All our words arrive now: we cannot rely on the happenstance of fate. Fate is an outdated idea in a world that no longer depends on it. There are checks and balances at every corner. There are a thousand ways to communicate immediately at a stone’s throw for each person. Our problems rise and fall in this certainty: every message will arrive. Everything we have to say has a way to be said. We cannot make excuses over distance or time; we know we are only fooling ourselves, and so does everyone else.

It is a heavy burden to carry. We all need someone to blame for things that have happened to us. While some still have their Gods, you cannot blame the mailman anymore. You cannot blame the operator for disconnecting you before you said I love you. No messages are written down wrong, causing a collision course or happy accident. Most often, you will have to blame yourself. It is the subtle tragedy of technology. It is a responsibility unlike any other.

There is no such thing as fate, as far as words are concerned. All our messages arrive, at all times, always.

I stared at the book in the dim light of the only lamp lit in my bedroom, a cup of tea beside me, trying to read, but the words were all jumbled. The sentences were in front of me, but a part of my mind did not want to read them, so I kept the book aside, apologised to Hemingway in my head, and closed my eyes. Everything I did not say weighed on me and pushed me into the bed. It was almost suffocating. Almost, which is worse than the whole. Most life is eventually incomprehension. No understanding takes place. Just how, in this torpor, the book did not make sense to me, our lives become unintelligible to other people. They see our days unfold; they hear us talk about them, but the words are all jumbled up, and nothing sticks. This, too, feels like loneliness, and therefore, privy to the feeling, I apologised to Hemingway when I had set the book down.

It was a lonely feeling, but I could ignore it no longer. My life was slowly becoming an esoteric puzzle I could no longer share with others. I have always shared it in parts, and the pieces were grew fewer by the day. On most days, it was not worth the trouble to share my troubles. Sharing my joy was, of course, futile from the beginning. Most people, lost in the pursuit of any or all happiness, never learn how to respond to it when they receive it. Their confusion only grows when the happiness belongs to someone else. Even the friendliest of faces feel envy, and if you’re observant enough, you can see where it leaks from. In my privacy lies all my joy, and in it lies all my hurt. Most people are only good to laugh with over some joke that does not matter; most camaraderie is shallow, transactional or ephemeral.

To share things with others is to lessen them. Most life unfolds when no one is looking. This is not by choice or even circumstance; it is how it has always been by design. Lost in my thoughts with my eyes closed, I fell asleep with the book beside me. When I woke up, I made some coffee and tried reading it again. I read through fifty pages before it occurred to me that I had to start the day.

Things will happen to you in autumn, and you will not know the extent of what they have altered within you until two springs have passed and two summers are folded into monsoon. You will think you have a tally of what has changed, but there is always something more beneath what everyone else, including you, can see. You will find yourself sitting on a familiar couch, surrounded by people you have known all your life, and something within you will scream: get up; get up and move; if you don’t, you will be stuck here for the rest of your life.

So, you get up. You get up, get a cab and leave. You will stop at a café and sit by yourself, but you will have left. That will make all the difference. In life, this will happen over and over again. You must get up and leave each time. There is no other way. You rarely ever ask for it: to outgrow whatever you call life or other people. You simply do. When that happens, everything echoes wrong in your head. Everything alarms you. But someone has to get off the couch first. And when you sit there, feigning interest in the same things you have talked about a thousand times and pretending laughter at jokes that don’t crack you up anymore, you will know it is you.

And then, as you sit by yourself, you will think of things you could not talk about, and for the most part, the thinking will be enough. Even if it were not, you would have already gotten off the couch. You will think you know what this has changed. Until years later, you will sit somewhere else, doing something completely different, and you will remember this again. It may be in the August that comes next, or one that comes a decade later. But you will remember getting off the couch. That is all you’re going to remember. That will make all the difference.

The rejection of an ideal is not in talking ill of it. If one does that, they inadvertently accept that it exists, that there is some value in it. To reject an idea, you must never talk about it, you must rarely mention its existence, and you must show that life is possible without it. Without relying on labels, I carry myself righteously, as much as possible, which is my argument for how I see things. The way I live is the only thing I have to say. My life, without all labels people find comfort in, will eventually be a testament to my point of view. There is no need for any anger or debate. There is no time for any either. There is a whole life to live.

I do not deem any labels worthy of talking about. I do not intend to acknowledge their existence. To me, the world is the same, with or without them. People who hide behind them will find something else to hide behind, as they always do. This will not have any say in how the world will still spin. This will not have any pull on the proportion of good and evil in the world. It will only let some people sleep peacefully at night. Why should I break their infinite mirror of illusion when I can simply live a life that forces them to stare uncomfortably at their own reflection?

Unlike what many friends and lovers have told me, this is not a neutral position. I think it is, in many ways, more aggressive than debating principles, but it is a pacifist approach. We do not have to be at arms to bring about change. There is a reason we invented language and, more importantly, punctuation. It is not about the right word but a fitting pause. The pause has split borders, it has broken affairs and hearts, it has divided families, and all that without a sound.

A long time ago, I decided that is what my life would be, even though I have made an exception in my approach by writing these words. A long time ago, I decided in a noisy world full of opinion, my life will be an example; in a world overflowing with words, it will be a pause.

I have, with all my faculties, accepted that time flows faster when you’re happy. It was January yesterday. I started it with a sigh, part out of fear, part out of exhaustion, and a smidge of hope squeezed into the space between them. It is August already, and it seems to be ending faster than it began. I do not know where my days have gone, but they have passed, and I have things to show for them. I have these words. I have memories. But it was January yesterday. That, too, is the truth. All my days are the same, and all of them are good for the most part. I wonder what someone does once they get here. I wonder why people keep chasing things when it is in stopping the chase that you reach any semblance of peace whatsoever.

I sat to write in the morning, but hungover as I was, I decided to take a nap. When I woke up, I started reading. Then, I dozed off again. But it was Sunday; on Sunday, you meet people and handle chores. So, eventually, I dragged myself out of bed and started to write again, just so I could leave in time to do both. I picked the cup up out of muscle memory and realised the coffee had gone cold. It did not matter. I was still happy. I was still writing. That is all the change in the world. That is the only change that has mattered. I am writing. I have never written as much as I have since January.

They ask me: what did you do to get here? I tell them I wrote my days away. They laugh. I don’t know why they don’t understand. All people must do things they want to do, things that are dear to them, even with all the troubles and tribulations of life. Everyone must earn money, and everyone must eat. But you must find a way to do the other thing that constantly weighs on your mind. For me, it is writing. For many, it would be something else. But everyone must do it. That is the only way to be at peace with life, no matter what happens.

The rains are still here, even though August is ending. It has been the most torrential monsoon this year. This is how I will remember August from this year forever. The overcast sky looming beside me, and me, sitting here, writing, every single day of the month. There is no better way to remember anything.

As the bus passed the same inconspicuous bend in the road I often paid attention to on my journeys back and forth all those years ago, it occurred to me just how much had changed in less than. There are things you remember that, when shown to other people, would not strike as significant. But, a stump on a random bend in the road is a landmark in the personal history of you. That is how it is with some things in life. They mean the world to you while the world shrugs them aside. It does not mean they are not important, only that not everything important is worth sharing. You will eventually find, there is a lot not worth sharing.

I recently had a realisation, naturally borne out of an evening spent at the cafe after a long day of work, that all good things happen in my life in isolation. The celebrations last a few minutes, and then I return to work. It is not to say I do not enjoy myself, but only that there is something in me that understands it’s too important; everything that I do is important, if not for the world, then at least for me. And thus, sitting to celebrate a worldly achievement means nothing to me simply because I could not care less.

While all my celebration is a private affair, all my destruction is a public spectacle. If I sometimes manage to dress it well into words, there is even applause. No one truly comprehends what absolute obliteration does to someone, but everyone claps for it, even when the destruction is so complete, even the embers go out. This has always been the case, and this is why, even with all my love for them, I do not trust other people with most good things. Those who applaud pain simply because they find they, too, have felt it are not to be trusted with something as valuable as joy.

Like how at a party, a guest picks something up to look at closely, only to stumble and break it, people often tend to crack open happiness. It is best to have your own monuments on hairpin turns without a picture to remember them by. It is best to hide your joy in plain sight: in a room that is not locked, but only the door looks so unenticing, no one wanders into it when looking for the washroom, even in error, even at all.

All art is made in conversation, in words spoken about all things possible by people who did not have much to do on a banal afternoon. There is inspiration in the awkward silence after you say something and someone disagrees with it. Then, instead of an argument, you get a bout of quiet before they tell you how the pasta is terrible, and you tell them the coffee is burnt. Then, you question why you even visit the place as regularly as you do. But the disagreement has happened, and the inspiration has struck; that is all art is about.

Art is not proving what you have to say is worthwhile or true, but only that, like all people, you have something to say. The correctness of it is often up to the times. All banality is art. All things to do are the enemy of art simply because they are a deterrent to the possibility of pointless discourse. An artist is someone who, when asked about what they do on a general day, almost always answers they don’t do much. The everydayness of sitting, staring at a screen, and fidgeting with a pen rather than getting some work produces more vivid poetry than the amber sky, stolen from the backdrop of paradise. And what is more, the poems are more honest than anything a romantic could write, simply because they are real. They come from regularity.

Not everyone can see the most beautiful sky, for not everyone sees beauty the same way. The night sky looks like home to many, and some love the cerulean reflection of the ocean at the first light of the morning. Some prefer golden sunsets, and some like the overcast greys. But all people are bored in the same way. They look at a screen and wonder: what am I doing here? And sometimes, they ask: does this matter? Do I matter? And all people do this, and all do it the same way. The poems they write after this will always be more universal.

No one can agree on what heaven looks like, but everyone knows the muggy afternoon in the middle of August when they realise another year has ended. No matter what someone does, they will feel this furtive approach of December, and all of them will sit for a second, wondering. They will tell a friend about it over coffee.

And then, some will make art out of it.

You casually walk around in your apartment, wearing a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, an empty cup in your hands. You’re heading to the kitchen to get a refill—another coffee. Just then, as you pass the cabinet that always hits your toe, you realise how many years have passed. There you stand, paralysed by this realisation, three steps from the kitchen; you stand still, remembering. Just like a puppy that happens to find itself in front of the mirror stays still, considering the mystery of reflection only to forget about it in a minute, you, too, snap out of it. Then, you finish your quest to get your coffee. In that moment, that temporary suspension, there is a question. How did I get here? I was ten years old yesterday.

Just like a puppy’s brain ignores mirrors, for it cannot comprehend them fully, we forget time. We do not think of time, of years passed until we sit down and reflect, or sometimes when it hits us as we get up to get coffee. But then, we forget again. On countless funerals you attend, on numerous news stories about people passing, you tell yourself I will live better. Then you ask yourself: what does better even mean? Am I wasting time writing these words, and if yes, how will I know? We cannot know we have wasted time until the time has passed. All time that has passed appears to have been wasted, despite how much you laughed, and cried, and lived. Time is not something a human being must know at all times. I wish we knew it before we invented the clock. But even the clock, and how it came to be, speaks of only one thing: our obsession with holding time.

When we learned we could not hold time, when we could not control it, we decided to capture it in sixty seconds, in sixty minutes, and twenty-four hours, thinking we could find some semblance of control. But then, all the clock and the calendar do is tell us how much time has passed, nothing more, nothing less. We check them, only to forget about them. Before we know it, we are in an apartment, getting a refill of coffee, and we seem to have lost track of how we got there.

As I sold myself short, they told me this was humility, that it was a virtue, and little by little, I have peddled all of who I am for chump change. My want for goodness has turned into a disaster. It is no longer my concern to prove someone wrong, or right for that matter. I am a nobody; it is for the best. To live life to exhibit my inherent capability is not my concern either. I know the lengths of my ability and the boundary of who I can be today or in the end. My concern is only to live my life with the little good I manage to do out of my own volition and ability. There are no sleepless nights; it will all be easy now. That is my promise to myself. If this is humility, I want none of it. I have played a willing fool for long enough; if this is the sin of pride, I am ready to be prideful. If all the world is a reflection of who we are, then I have spilt gross underestimation into it. In times with a significant dearth of goodness, some people are expected to carry it all like Atlas did. But Atlas was a titan. We are no such thing. Not yet.

All this, of course, is mere fantasy, a soliloquy to lighten the soul, or at best, wishful thinking. There will always be people so soft that they cut like butter. The world will always focus only on the softness. Only much later will someone realise the cutting still happens. Sometimes, the realisation never occurs at all. Whether it occurs or not has no say in the matter of softness. Some of us were destined to lend Atlas a hand now and then, and if that was not the case, we still had a choice in the matter. Goodness, after all, is not just virtue. Goodness is a balance. It is a tightrope one must walk until they reach the other end, and realising there is nothing there, they must walk backwards. They must do this over and over until they learn it’s the walk that goodness is about. And like you cannot rest on a tightrope lest you fall, there is no rest for the good. But even those who overflow with this urge to keep walking must get some rest now and then, close the door, and get a good night’s sleep. Even Atlas was punished into lifting the heavens; no one has once seen him smile.

I am in love with the present. This is a peculiar problem. All the world is chock full of crowds drunk on dreams, living in the daily despair for the pursuit of what they will never have, hanging on the promise of paradise, unwilling to accept how even paradise is laid brick by brick. This sobriety of having no dreams takes some time to set in, for all of us have been drunk on them for far too long. When it does, it brings about a peace you cannot much explain.

One might say I have grown complacent, but I have grown anything but more ravenous, my appetite for happiness continues to grow, only the dreams are now much more real, they are grounded, and slowly but surely, I am on my way to building them, a day at a time. That is why I am so in love with the present now. As much as I pave the road to wherever I am going, I would not want to be anywhere else.

It is not up to us to not go forward. Time does that for us. But we can take a look around and be engulfed in where we are. I feel at home in this town I live, with the people I live here with. I no longer dream of impossible castles in the clouds or a love fit for legends. I dream of not things but seconds and minutes, days, and how I want my time to feel. There will always be a house to build, but what will you do in it? That is the question no one asks. It is the only one worth asking: what will you do with your time?

A gilded house glistening with gold where no one does anything, after all, is not a dream but a nightmare. People think they can substitute this responsibility all of us have—to spend our time—with dreams, but they forget the common denominator. No matter how high you build your castle, no matter what love you find, you will still have to pass the time. You cannot speed through it, nor can you slow down, but you can find a way to enjoy it, and if not that, to make it bearable.

There is no person as rich as the one who prefers their days as they are, with all their tribulations and blessings. All else is an empty vow, or put bluntly, procrastination.