journal.coffee

Everything that once seems impossible to forget can very well be forgotten. It is not a thorn to remove but a mist that fades, giving way to a clearer landscape. You do not simply dislodge an unpleasant moment or a sour event in life. You let it fade away as more things come into the picture—more detail and colour. And how do you forget something that never happened? Something you only imagined into reality? You wait. That is what you must do. You must wait for time to pass. The fog always clears, and the view after is always one to look at. You must bear with it and wait for the haze to dissipate. Heaven awaits beyond the veil of all that you must let pass. There is impermanence in all things. Nothing is for certain; no moment is final. As long as you’re breathing, there will always be a natural succession to every moment. Every second follows another.

Life is but a series of veils, lifting over and over to reveal something else beneath, like a painting within a painting, like Matryoshka dolls; there is always something within, and slowly, it makes itself known. As the veil of the past lifts, joy engulfs everything else, and this too is a veil. It will lift to reveal what it reveals. What is it? I do not know. To worry about things before they arrive ensures twofold regret. Imagination can never truly predict what comes our way; to imagine the future is to stop looking at the present. Worry ensures the loss of both what is here and what shall come. Why put yourself through all that misery? A city is as beautiful cloudy, and misty as it is under the warm summer sun. To prefer one over the other does nothing but limit the human experience.

If this joy passes, I shall wait ardently for what it reveals, of what lies ahead of it. If it is misery? Then misery it shall be. I cannot lose out on the sun out of some unfounded fear of the rain. If it has to pour, I better get drenched while remembering the sun’s warmth than nothing. If you have seen the light once, you have seen the light forever. If you have felt joy once, you never forget how it feels. The rest is the fog clearing so you can see what is in front of you. The fog always clears.

I do not worry about what my life will amount to now. I am sure it will amount to what it shall amount to, and it will be as fitting as it would be, and there is not a single thing I would be able to do about it. The only thing I can do today is to accept it all with my arms wide open and my heart open just a tad bit wider than my arms, and I must invite it all—the possibility of what may or may not happen and what I may or may not become. I only have my little corner, my little piece of nothing in the world, and I adore it like nothing else. This peace, this calm, I must drown in it like how we sometimes dive underwater to check how far it can take us, how long before we need to come up. I must drown in all that is around me, and when it is time for me to come out of it, life—staying true to its very nature—will urge me out of it all. But for now, this water looks tranquil enough, and for now, I lay submerged in these days, amounting to nothing but a satisfaction I cannot put into words. In moments like these, we wish we had someone who understood not our words but more: someone who understood the pause, for this is a pause like no other. For better or for worse, I only have people who understand my words. My silences are my own; I do not intend on trading them.

Perhaps, it is not a fight we can win—the battle for a softer, tender, slower world—but it is the only one we must keep fighting. It is the only drum we must march to and continue, by all means necessary, no matter the cost. It is the responsibility of those who can imagine it—the intuitive, the dreamers, the idiots—to keep sounding the battle cry now and then. What is the cry, you ask? It is a different cry, fitting to a different sort of fight. We don’t fight in loud proclamations; we rally with afternoon naps, coffeehouse music, and soft laughter shared on a bright sunny day. And so, in this exhausting air of another clear, hot Saturday, I must lay down, read, and slowly drift off into sleep. It is the only true mission if there ever was one.

It baffles me how casually we perceive time, even though we know it is the only thing that makes life go round. It may be make-believe, but so is most of what we do. Time passes, for better or for worse. Fortunately for me, it has passed for the better, and I could not have asked for more. But I must not take this casually for whether I prefer it or not; the clocks will tick, the calendars will change, the months will roll, and the years will go by, and I must learn to adapt when it happens. I must not watch it carelessly. This moment, there will be no moment like this one. I must preserve it all in memory. If possible, I must make an inferior copy in these words.

The coffee will never taste the way it does right now. The sky will never look the way it does right now. Three birds sit on the sill of my balcony, engaged in perhaps a conversation of the highest importance. The sheets of grass are still wet from the rains over these past few days—an odd sort of comfort when I walk about on the balcony. We have been blessed with a brighter day today; with it, the sky has changed to the bluest of blues and responded in kind. The white clouds slowly sail over the blue like ships on the sea, and the hills have never looked greener—islands, interrupting the blue, cutting it short at the horizon. The trees stand tall in the orchard after a bountiful season. The sun shines on us graciously today. A quiet expression of joy is spread on everything as if this landscape understands the flow of time and how it must savour it in its way. What a day to be alive! What a day to experience everything. For all my loss and all my gain, I would not have it any other way; I would want everything to stay the same.

At about one in the afternoon, I come back inside to start working on this and that to pay for odds and ends. The room smells of burnt coffee. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast lays half-read, calling to me, carefully covering the Book of Disquiet. My gaze moves to the plants, which have turned towards the window light as they have grown. I have turned toward it, too, in my own way. All it took was time. There is nothing casual about it.

A lot can happen between two monsoons.

Deep inside the caverns of my heart is an unwritten poem. I do not know how it starts, but it ends with: and so, all my choices have led me here. That is all life is, and that is all we are ever meant to be—an end result of all that we chose with the time we had, and more so, what we chose against. Our omissions make us who we become. Our choices are the footnotes, but what we leave behind is the prose.

All of us are meant to become exactly who we are not by some divine dictation but because when we reach the tail end, our choices, made entirely out of our own volition, lead us there. All I have chosen has made it impossible for me to choose something else. Whoever I become will, down to the last detail, be determined by all I left behind, for it too was a choice.

They tell me there is a universe looking out for me. I don’t see myself as necessary for the universe to think about me. Still, I do know what I have left behind, and what they call the unexplained, I call the consequence of choosing against. If I decide against a love that does not serve me, it is no universe that saves me but myself. And what of the hole in my heart? A consequence of the same choice. Looking at the gaping hole, I must choose again to leave it be or fill it with all I can find, and so as I fill it, I leave behind the gift of depth. There is no one choice but a continual choice to lead us exactly where we reach. To live is to choose continually, and to choose is to decide against everything else.

I have chosen to sit at this desk day after day for the past six months and watched the sky change its colours beside me like a dedicated companion, and I have watched the life inside explode with flowers and burgeon with hope.

All life is a secret, personal ballot with votes continually cast to determine where we reach when it ends, no matter when. All life is but a journey to reach the most elusive of all places—the bottom of our hearts. All hearts have the same poem, etched deep within their farthest corner.

I do not know what it begins with, but I know it ends with: and so, all my choices have led me here.

When you meet someone, and they tell you about their dreams, you hear with an understanding unlike any other. But then, you meet a thousand people, and they tell you about their dreams, and slowly, you start to notice how everyone wants only one thing: something different. And yet, they do the same things as one another; not an ounce of their life has any difference. It is disappointing. You see the potential of difference as clear as day, but most people live the same way. No amount of time spent with the average person would uncover any quirks or mannerisms because they are absent. As if some burnishing of the soul had rubbed away all their individuality over the years, leaving people with no edges, no identity—only smooth repetitions of the same person with vague dreams.

The fear of being specific made sure nothing would be different. Most people wanted different, but if you asked them, “in what way?” they had no answer. And if you asked them, “would you trade your whole life away?” they refused. It is not something different that people want. It is something of their choosing, but they are not ready to face what it is and what it would cost to get it. Even if they were ready, knowing what you wanted was a study unlike any other. You had to sit with yourself and ask, “but why?” for every desire until you reached a point where the answer was silence.

Everyone wanted the same things because every personality was smoothed out to the extent that all they could do was reflect what they saw. It is the dirty individuality of the dreamers that helps them achieve impossibilities. To be eccentric was to know who you were, to have a rebellion in you like no other, to have a surface so coarse, no one could polish it out of you. It was only then that you knew what you wanted. All else was empty talk with a drink in your hand and the burden of unfulfilled dreams on your shoulders.

To want different, you had to live differently, and even if you did not get what you wanted, you could at least be proud to have tried. All dissatisfaction was a response to having your identity rubbed off you, and the everlasting guilt of letting it happen.

In many ways, I had not imagined a life so abundant when I was a child. I had imagined extravagance like children do, but I had not imagined abundance. What is the difference? The pompousness separates them cleanly. I feel a cup of coffee is abundant. A cup of coffee anywhere is abundance. A cup of coffee at the in-house cafe of a fancy hotel, being rested softly on the table with a smile from an attractive server, is extravagance. It is no longer a life I crave; no part of me desires sophisticated luxuries. I pity those who run after them, for they will forever be trapped in a hell of more. I only want an abundant life—where I rarely run out of coffee, music, or joy, for joy is sweet in all its forms, music is beautiful in all ways possible, and coffee tastes like coffee. We cannot change the distinctive properties of things. We can only add a flair of vulgar haughtiness to it all. Good taste is an elitist lie.

And if it is taste one is after, then they must develop not wealth or luxury, but tasteful habits: to read literature and to consume art. No, not for showing it all off, but to experience this world and its infinite pleasures, all with the patience they deserve. There is a sculpture in every tree we look at, an impression in all skies that grace our eyes, and all people who walk on any street of this world are metaphors. And if it is winning one is after, then they must learn to win over themselves: in body and in mind. The body can be a humble abode or a terrible cage; it only depends on how well you use it. The mind can be a brutal master or a reliable friend; it depends on how well you learn to navigate it. To master both is to win continually, over and over, for the rest of your life.

Expensive liquor does not get you drunker, and you cannot make friends out of people who only know you for your usefulness. They will all run behind you, ahead of you, beside you. They will tell you how you need to keep running towards gilded dreams. Keep walking; look around. Look at the field and the lake, how pretty and complete it all is, how fulfilling the familiar face of a friend feels, how abundant life is in and of itself. These are the things of good taste.

The irrelevant events of my life are now just stories I tell people at a party. All feeling, all love I held so deeply, is now a cheap laugh or worse, an ill-timed joke, a scoff and a sip of whatever drink is on the table, over and over. All my years going forward will amount to the same—so will the years of others. All lives make for a good joke if told right. I feel this is what numbs people eventually, this tarnishing of what once was the purest of emotion. A joke, laughter, the thud of the mug on the table—that is all anything is ever worth. Where has the time gone? I have slowly written and laughed it away. Where has the sadness gone? It has become material for a show no one pays for but everyone goes to see.

I have told the stories of letting things go for more years than I spent doing it. I have told the stories repeatedly to strangers and friends alike, and strangers who turn into friends especially, so much that I seem to have lost track of what I originally felt. When I look back, I see only stories of stories. The events and how they transpired has faded. They have lost all their originality and charm. The same story gets told, with bits and pieces amassing over it like iron fillings get pulled onto a magnet lying about on the table—banality attracts banality, tragedy begets tragedy, and joy seeks joy.

It is but the curse of the curator, the raconteur: to find stories at all times, no matter the cost. He is the person who suffers the most, with this curse of constant inventory, constant remembrance. I am writing at all times. I think of a metaphor before my heart gets a chance to make contact with the surface and shatter. The story is written while it finds its way to the ground, and so is the joke. And when lost in a bout of happiness, a quiet part of me takes notes.

On the one hand, my life happens right in front of me. On the other, I can’t help but think of writing about it, or perhaps, which parts fit correctly, and which I can conveniently forget or omit. It is a second-hand life, the life of a storyteller. The first draft of all I feel is given to the page or the narrative. The leftovers are what I have when I sit and sip coffee by myself.

I am not bitter, but I am cautious. Not an invitation; my happiness is a warning. I shall not gamble with my laughter, for the dice are always loaded, and the house always wins. I return with empty hands and an empty heart—defeated utterly only for the promise of more. When I get home now, I immediately close the door. I make up my mind for a life like this—bulwarked and protected—but something in me leaves the door ajar, almost for a hand to slide in to push it open. Even at my most careful, a tiny opening, a crack or two, lets you see within. We can paint over it as if putting on a disguise, but if there is hope in us, it shall leak and drip and make itself known. Hope does not know to hide. It only knows to open doors.

But what do I hope for in my furtive, almost cloaked manner? Beauty in all things. I leave the door open for beauty to arrive in all forms. I want to read words that take me by surprise and stab me in the gut, to read something beautiful enough that it kills something in me. I want to look at art, find a corner in my heart I did not know existed and be left alone to fend for myself until I find my way out. Music, pictures, and films should be so beautiful they decimate me from within. And love, I hope for love. I hope for a bolt of thunder hitting me point blank and somehow, magically, not killing me instantly or at all. I wait for a love that feels like a cloudburst in the middle of summer. You see, the very thing I protect myself from is the same thing I crave—a love so beautiful that all the flowers around me pale in comparison once again. True beauty exists to destroy you. It should make you shiver. We feared the skies before we worshipped them.

I tread cautiously, not so I am not crushed, but only so I can steer clear of banal beauty and lukewarm love. Beauty is a trial of courage, and hope is the oldest gamble; but some of us have the unique persistence to continue playing, to keep rolling. I should know; I am one of them. I want to experience beauty and passion. I have no interest in the tepid; I want to be scared out of my wits and let it all invade me. If nothing else, I want to die trying.

If I shall amass a big enough fortune in this life, and if this happens early enough for me to retain the openness of my heart and mind I revere so much, and if this happens timely enough for me to still have my wits and energy about me, I shall build a library where the coffee never runs out, and as ironic as it seems, I shall have a room there for people to engage in discussion, in conversation. I would let people argue and scream and do it myself. Indeed, reading is a private, intimate activity. Any attempt to make it social is a corruption of it. But once the reading is done, once you have read through the entire book, cover to cover, marked and folded the pages, you want to talk to someone about it. It is a disappointment like no other to read a good book, to have it engulf your actions and thoughts, and have no one ask you a single thing about what has changed within you. A gross injustice—I will fix it in my own way! A place open for all to come read, and when they’re done reading, if they so choose it, a room to rave about it.

The library, this room, will be an invitation to all artists, especially writers, to come from far and wide only to engage in the highest of forms of artistic camaraderie and rivalry alike. Sometimes, when a lot of time would pass, I would stand by the door and listen to their heated debates on philosophy, society, art and all things that affect the world. And we would build a guild of our own; from a tiny wooden room, we would start a cultural revolution. The backroom of a library that never shut its doors, they will say, that’s where it all began. Perhaps, at night, when everyone would leave, if they ever wanted to, I would clean up and sit down to write. I would look back on how once I wanted to escape, to build a cottage in the hills and never come back down. I would chuckle at how people and things change. I have not met them yet, but I know all those who join in will be my friends for life, but more importantly, legendary artists.

But before all of that, before the revolution, before the backroom, before the library, I must burn the midnight oil. A generation of artists depends on it, and truth be told, my life does too.

It is time for me to let things happen. To let it rain, let happiness fall in my lap and not shoo it off or ask it to wait at the door. It is time for me to open the door before it knocks. It is, perhaps, why happiness is elusive. It waits, and then, remembering past scuffles, we let it wait. We never open the door out of spite. This spitefulness is what I need to let go of, what I need to let the rain wash off me, wash away, and I shall let it. The other evening, as I stood waiting for a cab, a cup of coffee in my hand, it began to drizzle. I stood waiting. It continued drizzling. I was done worrying about these imagined troubles—problems I create on my own, only to fail to solve them, ending up in a sort of chosen misery.

Since I opened the door to everything that can happen to me, good and bad, everything has indeed happened. It has been my only learning, perhaps, hidden underneath the surface of the many things I’ve learned in this short life, to let go. It all brings me back to an ordinary evening: me, being afraid to keep a cup on the railing, lest it fall; a familiar voice telling me to let go and see what happens; the cup not falling off after all. The lesson is half a decade too late; the voice has but faded into the depths of my memory. I shall do my best with it, in happiness and in pain. I shall let things happen; I shall let it rain. This trust in my fate, now that it is here, what must I do with it besides live? Since time keeps moving, whether we ponder over things or not, I’ll continue with this unbound trust: everything will turn out okay as long as I keep walking.

The latter is something I have always known. I wonder if that is why I met you and you met me. For me to teach you how to keep walking, and for you to tell me to have trust in the path, and for us to go in our own way. I wonder about this as I stare at the blur of the city—grey, faded, engulfed within the pattering white noise of the rain. But what good is wondering? I leave this thought on the wet marble sill of the balcony. I go back inside to begin writing as the music and the rain sing a duet. I look out the glass door. The drops have washed my thought away.

So it goes: we think we are the sole gatekeepers, the only experiencers of emotion, the only wardens of a feeling, and we tell ourselves everyone has had heartbreak, but not quite mine, and everyone’s lost a fortune, but not quite like I have. Then, we hear a song, read a poem, or find a story. We learn it is a tale as old as time, that there has always been one person who has experienced the exact feeling, down to the last detail. Suddenly, we are not as crucial to the universe. We are but one of many, and slowly, this happens for all things until we convalesce into the whole.

Everything that can be seen is seen already. Everything that is to be felt has been felt already. The difference arises in whether it was written about; even then, most of it is written about, painted, or expressed. All the essential things in life demand to be written. It is not the prerogative of the writer or the artist to choose their subject. Their only job is to channel it and put it out. We’re but vessels. We express so someone has a yardstick when the ground shifts beneath their feet, when the volcanoes of their doubt erupt, when the rage traps them in a storm, when love engulfs them and leaves them in a blizzard, cold and starving. Even in that, we are one of many. There are no unique people, and even if one argues we are, all people are different in the same ways.

The world runs on irony. To find how we differ, we must first be of the people; to find how we’re the same, we must first try to diverge. And eventually, we must come to the middle in our own way. There’s always a middle. I will always be as different to my fellow people as I am similar to them. It is only a matter of what I seek and what I want, and even then, it is only a matter of what I get. Not all lost roads lead to paradise; not all crowds are true and right.

There will always be a tattered note before every lost road: I travelled this, too. There will always be one person who hesitates within a crowd: I think of leaving, too. This is the job of the artist. To help the conformers defy and to help the defiers conform. The artist must always stay suspended in the middle. Everyone else comes and goes.

The cold morning air has subsided while I have sat here, staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor. The hills have turned hazy again as the city has come to life after a bout of early rains. The sky is still a bright blue, filled with fluffy white clouds. It does not seem it will rain until the evening now. I have noticed all this and more in the past two hours. Perhaps, three. It is natural to lose track of time when one is procrastinating. And since it will not rain for the foreseeable hours, I have no excuse to not begin writing.

Until a few hours ago, I could still make my case to the council in my mind: I was relishing and embracing the weather. You see, I have waited for monsoon for a long time now, and I am not like other people. It has rained daily for the entirety of last week, and it is all everyone wanted. The sultry summer air has been replaced by a humid waft or a cold shower, with nothing in-between. Now, most people want something else. They want it to stop, but I am not like them, so I sit and watch the rain for as long as it shall last. And therefore, the writing has to wait. With a case strong as this, I would convince my mind that this delay in my writing is justified.

And then, to convince me further, I would think about July. I would talk about how July has arrived. With it, only a single lesson graces the skies outside my window: nothing good comes from interrupting the flow of time. With an argument as strong as this, I could not deny myself this hour of prolonging, of staring at a blank page. Of course, now that the sky is clear, my defence has fallen apart, and I am nothing but a delinquent, wasting time. It is surprising how quickly things change. And as the world around me conspires for me to begin, to let go of this slow dilatoriness, this languid disposition of a slow Saturday morning, now turned into an afternoon as the sun peeks out from behind the clouds, it occurs to me I am out of coffee.

And like a stubborn mule, I sit at my desk, unwavering. There is a certain charm in not doing anything after all. Oh, to be the most prolific of sloths, the most productive of slackers, but on most days, a lethargic fool.

If I was meant to write a hundred good sentences in the entirety of my life, I must write a billion, hoping to stumble to the hundred. To wait for genius was to waste it altogether. There was some of it in all of us. If I sat around waiting, I would wait my entire life. I had to write and keep writing. There is gold in me yet. It only shows up mixed with the rest, but it does show, and that is all we ever want. To not share the gold in you, no matter how little or how much was theft from the world. It was a gross injustice and a blatant crime. With this understanding, I only wish to write; I don’t wish to write the perfect sentence anymore, but god, I wish I knew how to stop trying.

And what if I run out of things to write? Then, I shall write about nothing, for no writer ever writes about anything after all. It is not the subject but the writing that says what is essential. It is pretty easy to talk about the important things; they are important already. Paint me a picture of a pebble, paint it with words and make me fall in love with it. Then, I shall lay down my pen and kneel before you, my life in my hands, ready to serve. To write about nothing in particular and to do it well is the mark of an exceptional writer. And when a friend asks me what I want to become, an advocate for the undiscussed is what comes to mind. Of course, I do not tell them this; I keep it to myself. My telling them who I aspire to be does nothing; my sitting at the desk every morning is what gets me there.

Like love, like all noble things, to chase greatness was to muddy it, to insult it. It was the most vulgar pursuit a person could indulge in, and yet, all writers did it. Despite their bold claims, all writers aspired to be great. Greatness greatly differed for all of them, naturally, for no two people look at a pebble and paint the same picture, but all of us chased it. For me, greatness is my hundred great sentences. If I can manage them, I will have made my mark. It seems to be a simple errand, but it is anything but routine, and yet, this routine churning of words was how you got there. To be a writer was to be a banal being who dreamt of greatness—a living contradiction.

The world demanded complexity because simplicity made it uncomfortable. Things, simple things, like living properly, were impossible to comprehend unless you committed a sort of social treason, refusing to conform to the accepted criteria toward it. As you found your way into greener pastures and flowering fields, they often asked how you arrived there. And when you told them the answer was nothing, they did not understand. They wanted a ten-point guide and a seven-step plan, but there was absolutely nothing to it. The fact that the answer was as simple as stopping to look around now and then did not sit well. The machinations and forced intricacies of the modern age make it impossible for simple things to exist, yet they do exist. Some of us keep them alive.

There is little else I can think of as I have finally started to breathe after spending months building a life as simple as I can at the moment. Perhaps, one would say, I have become complacent, but for what? I do not yet know. For most of my life, I have chased myself; I could always see myself—a better myself—walking ahead. I would always run behind it, and I would always stumble and fall short. In many ways, I have always wanted to become who I knew I could be, and I have reached a semblance of it in more than one way. I don’t know if this is a temporary respite from a lifelong chase, but for the first time in my life, I am not running. I hope these days are not numbered. All the surety I demanded from others, I was only meant to find. All this grief I now understand so well, I was only supposed to leave behind.

And so when someone asks me how I got here, and I tell them I arrived when I stopped running, they think it to be a riddle or some sort of jest, but it is the only truth I know. Until we stop running to catch our breath, or altogether, we cannot see where we are. Most happiness is passed in a blur when we zoom past everything; most life, too.

Never before was I so happy, continually happy till July. It has been a blank space to rest in between battles for most years. July, for me, has always been a ceasefire. I have rested with bouts of drinks in the sun, brunches, lunches, and laughter. In the rainy envelope of the month when nothing happens, over the city where nothing ever happens, I have spent the past few days preparing for what is to come. Naturally, it is beyond me to predict whatever comes next, but something eventually arrives, and that is life. We must always look forward to things changing because they do so without our say-so, even if we don’t want them to, especially then.

I spent a good chunk of last evening doing nothing, revelling in my inaction. I sat with the doors to my balcony and my heart open alike. The flat seemed to have been cut off by a sheath of falling water. No sound from outside could interrupt my moment of languor, for there was no sound at all. There was just the drops tapping; it seemed to have taken over everything else. There is nothing more pleasurable than being removed from the world temporarily. When the rain stopped pattering, I walked to the coffee shop. I stopped to look at a bougainvillaea that has now covered the sidewalk. The rain had made its leaves so much greener and the flowers so much prettier.

It has been my secret to happiness. To stop and look at things not in the way of just staring at a tree and calling it beautiful but really looking at it: to look at how its branches intertwine, to look at the leaves and their intricate lines, to look at the flowers, all of their parts. Looking at the detail is a gift; not using it is a sin.

While sipping my coffee, I overheard some people talking about how little of it we should drink. I nodded softly in agreement; then, I took another sip with the misplaced guilt of a thief. In my lethargy, I put my head down on the table, losing myself in the music. I got up, paid for the coffee, and left a minute later. Just then, it began to rain.

As I stood to wait for the cab, I realised I was not worried about getting drenched. Worry was the least of my worries. It was still July, after all, and in July, we rest.

I often only dream of the world I am in, but there are changes, little aberrations from what I know, a street placed in a slightly different way, a building that should not exist, a stream of water where there is none. It baffles me how these places have stayed the same over the years. That is to say, if I were to dream about the home I grew up in again, I would also dream of a canal-like stream about five hundred metres from it. There is no stream. But my mind remembers what it dreamt first.

There are countless buildings—their details saved from when they were first conjured, and streets—streets I know like the back of my hand but have never truly seen because they do not exist. But who is to tell me this world, this living, breathing world in my head, is not real? There are places I have never been to nor seen, but they do exist. I remember them. Quite regularly, when simply lost in thought, I remember things rather vividly, almost like how we recall a day from long ago. Then it occurs to me: this lucid memory is a lie. When I stress to think about where I saw the building or what the day was like, I realise it was a dream.

In moments like those, where I can almost picture something enough to draw it, I question everything I know to be real. The other day, I thought of a beautiful Prussian blue building, down to the last step on each staircase. I sat trying to remember when I first visited it, for it was as normal as recalling any other, but there was no memory. And it occurred to me that it has been in a dream all the times I’ve seen it. It does not exist. I have never been to it. I would not know where it was even if it existed in this world.

It is but rumination to even talk about it. These matters are far bigger than me for me to even begin solving them, but it compels me to ask: what is real?

Did this person whose life I dream of have a stream near his home growing up? Does he visit blue buildings or walk on streets leading to an old tenement where he lives? Does he dream of this flat, this desk, of writing these words? Does he faintly recall them, too? I would never know.

For now, the blue skies of early July demand me to go out for coffee.

Life starts unravelling long before we notice it. It is only when we sit down, years from when the first domino fell, the first cut in the tapestry, the first pull of the thread, the first push into a collision course that we see it. When we see it, though, we cannot do much about it but remark on it. That is all there is to it. That is all there is to do with the past. We can remember it, but life must be lived forward. There is barely any cause and effect to life. This intricate web of destiny, this winding maze, only tells us one thing: nothing causes anything, and most that happens, happens for so many reasons at the same time, you might say there is no reason at all. If there is, we cannot be the sole judges of any of it.

But there is one thing we can decide for ourselves: we can continue walking.

Life starts growing like a vine that does not need permission to climb up the pipes, fences, walls and lattices until you see nothing but green all over the house as if it was always there and a verdant paradise of plenty. The human ability to forget should not be underestimated! While sometimes, vines are let loose intentionally and given a hand, in most cases, nature finds a way. Abundance is the only language nature speaks if you allow it time. With time, my life has grown remarkably in ways I did not, could not have imagined when the unravelling first began. And since I started walking, quite like the vine, I have grown forward and forward only to arrive here with happiness in my heart and a sense of peace I cannot put into words.

As I make camp in this little clearing full of green, I realise I have walked incredibly far.

It’s late, but I can hear the clouds rumble. I will wake up to the rain tomorrow, I tell myself as I lay in bed. I will wake to a city muffled by nature, silenced by the Gods, softened by a million kisses from the sky, landing softly, each making its mark, not that we can see it. It is the collective effort we will all see—the result of a stupendously long affair going on for millennia. When the air about the Earth is too heavy, when the Earth is exhausted, the skies shower it with love in plenty. The love is what we know as rain. I think of all this, almost imagining these words written on the page before I sleep. I will wake up to the rain tomorrow. That is reason alone to wake up at all.

And in the morning, I wake up to find a torpor in the air, a sort of tranquil inactivity. It is raining. I go out to the balcony and look at the world. The hills are absent from the landscape. The honking is occasional, most of it muted, and there is nothing but the patter all about. I look at a brave bird still swinging about; the others probably found their way to their nests, or well, the exterior units of air conditioners, tiny holes in buildings and all corners they can fit into. No one finds their way back home if they’re out and about when the rain comes—a temporary respite is enough. I think of this as I watch the bird playing in the rain. I can sense it is playing because it is not flying to and from anywhere. It’s flying about here and there but with no intent to leave. At first, I think it is crazy, but then I realise we are one and the same.

Once it begins to pour, and if you’re still outside, your first bet is to run to shelter. Now, if you’re lucky, you find it, but if it continues pouring, and if you’re without shelter, what better answer is there than to get drenched? To give up and to give way to what happens to you? To not care about safety when it is pouring after all?

And what happens when you’re drenched enough, when there is no way out of the shower, when you find yourself stuck in the middle of it alone?

Like the bird, you begin dancing.

I have changed cities countless times now. I have rented places and uprooted my existence for a little over four. I have pushed doors and flung them open with a backpack and a few suitcases in my hand. Eventually, when my life got heavier with more things to carry and even more to remember, I hired the movers to help me out.

Slowly, I have watched empty rooms take shape and fill with little trinkets and things that make it all a home. I have learned where things were, where they were meant to be, and, more importantly, where they felt right. I have had places where books were on a desk, on a shelf, in a corner, or on the counter. I have slept more on couches and rugs than on beds, and I have spilt coffee on all three occasionally. I have spent drunken nights both in and out, dazed, confused and lost in a delirium I cannot make sense of clearly still. I have learned to do the dishes, cook the little I can cook, clean ardently and regularly, take care of myself when I’m sick, and discipline myself when needed. In many ways, I have done it all alone.

And this was my worst fear growing up—doing it all alone—and so I craved love, and I begged for it, and I wanted us to build a home of our own, and there you were, and there I was and yet, I seem to have missed it all.

There is so much to learn about life still, but I have learned most of how to build a life, build a home, and I have done it by myself, and I don’t see how that will change anymore. And sure, I will let you bring things to the table, but the table will already be there, and it will already be set. I’ll clean the house a certain way, and I’ll have my lists and my todos and places where things will already be kept.

When I meet you, if I meet you, I will already have a place of my own. I can’t wait for you to ask to change the curtains because grey is a bit dull or add more plants because nine is still not enough, but before all of that happens, before we spend afternoons baking and making a mess of the kitchen floor, or slow dancing in the bedroom with the lights out, I will hesitate because you see, love, I’ve spent so many years building homes by myself, I never quite learned to share the key.

How do I keep writing? How do I keep living? There may be a reason. I do not know which one since the reasons keep coming and going. No writer writes for one reason alone. He keeps writing until he can hang onto something else, and time passes. People live for different things in different years, too. No one lives for one reason. The reasons will continually change. It is the living that continues. It is the writing that goes on.

I have lived to wait for certain happiness and written to pass the time. When the wait was over, I got a desk and put it in the space created inadvertently in the corner of the room. I began writing. There was a semblance of happiness in all this, albeit not the one I had waited for. It seemed like the only good use for the corner of my heart. I have written every day since. Many live to forget and write to imagine things that never happened—as a proxy, overwriting what happened. They highlight the good, inflate it and make it larger; they forget to capture the elementary detail about the bad or omit it entirely.

Perhaps, the better questions are: why do you write now, at this moment, and why do you keep living? I believe it is a question I have asked myself one too many times recently. It is a question I have asked many others as well. Take the last evening: I sat sharing a stack of banana pancakes with a friend on a Monday evening, and with my mouth stuffed, I asked him, “Well, you know how it always is; what do I do now that I am happy?” He said nothing, but the answer was right there.

You live. You continue getting delectable pancakes with your friends, you look at the rain and wait for it ardently, and when it arrives, you scurry back into the house in an irony nature does not quite understand. You continue laughing and, if life demands, crying. There always has been so much more than our collective pursuit of individual happiness. You go through the motions, contribute to the world, and see what time has in store.

Sometimes, if you’re like me with a desk in the corner, you must sit down and write about everything. I write because I don’t know any other way to live; I live because what else is there to do anyway?