journal.coffee

My silence was a private affair. It was too important, too intimate. I could share words with everyone; I was always full of words, saying more than necessary on all occasions. I would not dare share my silence with anyone. It belonged only to me. To sit with someone without saying a word was the greatest declaration of my love. I sat by myself on most days—happily. With people, I was loud, obnoxious, opinionated. With myself, I was calm, quiet, restful. I preferred the latter, but it was not to say the former was pretence or a lie. We all had parts we wanted to show others and parts we wanted to keep to ourselves.

That is not to say there was anything to hide. There is rarely anything to hide about silence. It wasn’t a question of introversion or a label of any kind either. I did not believe in labels. The moment you labelled yourself, you became permanent, unchanging, stuck in your ways. It was a question of accepting the fluidity of being a human being, of having different sides to oneself. Everyone has more than one person within themselves—only a few of them admit it, and rarely any of them lives according to all the kinds of people they are. It was a difficult balance to maintain, but it was worthwhile.

These words came out of my silence—the things I did not say, even when I was with other people. I could not write a word if I said everything out loud. Where did this habit come from, I wonder, and which came first, the words or the silence? I could only ponder over it but couldn’t answer clearly. The only thing that mattered in this confession was how I have now come to terms with these pockets where I don’t want to say a word to anyone, of only being able to maintain small talk to get a cup of coffee, of dreading no one I know walks into the café.

And if push comes to shove, to talk at length, to laugh and to tell all stories I could without contempt, softly telling my preference for silence to wait for me by my desk. To tell it: I will be there soon, and when I’m there, I won’t utter a single word.

Maybe the cost of moving forward was to spend time and live both in the past and the future simultaneously. This was as true for people as it was for countries and societies. I think of this strand of thought, unravelling it as I wait for my train on a dilapidated platform in a crowded railway station with trains that belong in a museum standing on one side and those which came right out of a factory on the other. People seldom realise this contrast framed right before their eyes. Perhaps, because they have places to be. We never stop to look around when we’re rushing towards something. Running towards something, however, did not guarantee moving forward. For that, we had to be okay with what came before and the possibility of what could happen next. To move forward was to be present in every sense of the word. You had to be in the moment, not lost but aware.

As much as I tried to continually move forward, it was easier said than done. It was a fruitless attempt. You had to be present to protect your state of mind from the pull of the past and the desire of the future. I was always in a state of present aloofness. I was there, but I was almost always somewhere else, too. Often, I was at the desk writing still. That is not to say I did not know how to move forward. For all my words about the past, I did not quite care about it. For all my imagination, I barely thought about what could happen next. All that had happened, had happened. There was nothing I could do about it. All that could happen, would happen regardless of how much I wanted things to stay the same. We could not halt the flow of time without consequence.

I think of this for a little while. Inspired by this sudden epiphany, this newfound clarity that visits me now and then, I look around, forgetting I have a train to board for a second. I look at the surroundings, the tracks running long till as far as I can see. I look at all the people. I see myself in all of them—so many different journeys, all heading in the hope of happiness. Just then, an announcement for my train’s arrival echoes through the speakers.

Like all times before, I lose the perspective; I have a train to catch, I tell myself.

All writing in all forms is a question: do you feel this, too? All writing is a dance. It’s all a coordinated movement between the writer and the reader. There has to be a dash of entertainment in it to make it worth the reader’s time, but it is really all about the question. And of course, the more familiar an emotion, the more people engage with the words describing it. All writing in all forms is a plea: I hope I’m not the only one.

There were different kinds of writers. Some needed a novelty of experience. They were probably the good ones who could channel new thoughts, fresh ideas, visions for the future, and most importantly, ask new questions. Some were dreamers. They created fantastical worlds, their only question being: do you want to run away, too? To escape was their strongest desire, and to help others do the same, was the highest reward. Then, there were those like me; we did not have anything new to offer. We were champions of the everyday, the commonplace, the mundane. We wrote about what interested us—nothing interested me.

There was only a mild intrigue about everything coursing through our veins. We asked questions, sure, but not those which changed the world. We only had questions to make sense of the tedium. Our first question was often: is this all there is to it? And before anyone could answer, we immediately followed it up with a remark: we must learn to live with it. Our novelty was spread between the cracks of the daily drudgery, and our escapism only offered us a moment of respite. When all was said and done, we were as unnoticeable as those lost in crowds.

We were all asking the same question: do you feel alone, too?

They tell me a lot of things. They tell me how I had wings in my shoes, that I was a quitter, as if it was the right thing to stay put when every cell in your body tells you to leave. They said I left things and places faster than most people, as if that was somehow a problem. To me, it was a simple decision, and I made decisions quickly. It suffocated me—sitting in places I did not want to sit in, living a life I did not want to live anymore. It killed me slowly. Perhaps, it killed all of us, and I was the only one willing to admit it. I was the only one with the winged shoes, after all. At least, I could try to run. It was better than being stuck in one place all my life.

They tell me I fall in love quickly, as if it were a flaw, as if I was the one who did not understand what it was about. To me, loving someone was a simple decision, and I made decisions quickly. I did not have it in me to wait around for inspiration or dire circumstances; once I knew what I had to do and all I needed to know, I jumped. It was the only way I knew how to live. It was the only way to fall in love—by immediate choice. The error was in waiting too long, being too slow. Most love was lost in waiting. People had a tendency to wait around for everything, even answers.

They tell me I was too particular, as if there was any other way to live besides knowing what we wanted, or trying to act like we did anyway. Surety, even in pretence, was the only way to kill doubt. You could not become more certain by acting unsure. It was a fallacy. It was also a trick. To be more sure about something, you had to risk being wrong. And me, I was the most uncertain of all people I had ever met. I had to be sure: about my favourite breakfast, about the music I enjoyed, about who I loved, about what I wanted, about everything. It was the only way to check if I was wrong. How else would you know?

They tell me a lot of things. Often, I have nothing to tell them in return, as if my explanation would change a single thing about what they had to say and as if their acceptance would make a difference in how I carried myself every day. We were doomed to live how we lived, for better or worse.

What would I do without you? I often thought of this when I looked at you or when I brought a bagful of what weighed on my mind to you. It was the only thing on my mind when I asked you for assistance on one of the many wars being waged inside my head—my mind has always been a tattered battlefield. You were the cavalry. Then one day, you did not arrive. They say the cavalry was always late, so I continued for a while, knowing all too well I only had to hold my ground. Then, it hit me like a bullet in the back—there was no cavalry. At least, not anymore.

And somehow, I dragged myself out of the no man’s land into the trenches I had dug on my own. Nothing left in me, barely breathing, holding out for hope: the cavalry may yet arrive. Lost in the daze of exhaustion, I dozed off, losing count of the days. I opened my eyes and saw nothing still. Alone, I crawled through the trenches until I found myself away from it all. I climbed out of the pit and into the forest. Struggling to walk in the labyrinth of my blurry thoughts, of my befuddling state of mind, of the maze of confusion, I somehow managed.

Time passed, and the wars in my head had all but ended. The end was all closing in, and I sat by myself. At least, that’s what they thought. I spent time alone, but the ghost of expectation was with me. The memory of being left behind was the undertone of all I did. I sat alone with it, and we talked over and over about the same things. The question still weighed on my mind: what would I do without you? And then, slowly, I found an answer. Perhaps, it wasn’t even the correct answer, but I had come this far, and there was more to life now than the memory of you.

What would I do without you? I would go on for as long as I could. For most things, that much was enough.

The sense of doom has never left our side for once. It was the simplest observation, especially if you read a little bit of what went about in the world before you stepped in it. The further back you go into the pages of history books, the more you notice how the collective feeling is always of fear, of questions—uncountable questions. It is never the right time or age. It is always a little off. The world will never be the paradise promised; it was always paradise lost. It often took knowledge of impending catastrophe for someone to realise how good life was, despite their handful of qualms with it. They often remark how they will live better if given a chance now, for the lack of a better word. Why does it play that way? I don’t know the answer, for I’m no different. I, too, tend to look at life from the same lens—a lens of not enough.

But, I am learning now. Perhaps, I may disagree with this later—when the memory of my personal hell and the state of the world is blurred—but today, there is only one thing I believe I should be doing: wasting time. When I say wasting, I don’t mean to let time be of no use, but better use. The more I have thought about it these past few months, the more I know what I want to do. I only wish to loiter about and sleep in the sun without a care in the world. It was the better use of time. There is a freedom when nothing weighs on your mind. Take the rain, for example. Earlier, when the sky turned a pale blue, raising the softest alarm known to us, it imparted a hurry in me. I must finish whatever I am doing. The thought dictated my days. Now, when it begins to rain, all I think about is how I will get an hour or so when no one will demand much from me. The showers make doing anything impossible, even when you’re safe inside your home. At least, it is a believable excuse.

The more I look back at my short life, the more I notice how I’ve missed out on so much. To be happy, you must be present. I don’t intend to be oblivious anymore. I will find a way. There is still time. For now, I only want to make the most of the day ahead, and when I say make the most, I mean laughing enough to make sure I remember it.

At the zero word mark, there is nothing but sound. The clock ticks in another room, equal intervals, naturally. It tells your right ear time is passing, and you say nothing for you know. There’s more; the vehicles outside, the honking, the one guy who uses it to craft a tune as he cruises through the street; the sound of the wheels and the engines—some roaring, some soft, all of them in unison.

At fifty or so words, there’s more still. Some construction in the neighbourhood, the repetitive striking of a hammer, starting with equally spaced knocks but going faster as whatever is being driven into whatever takes its place. A nail, perhaps, you wonder. What else could it be? Then, another series of knocks speeding up with the enthusiasm of a child banging a toy on the floor.

It’s about two hundred words now, or so you think, and the washing machine in the washout right beside where you’re sitting is playing a song of its own: the motor whirring at its own pace, the symphony of a mechanical twirl as clothes spin inside it serving as a first-rate lyric of a song you aren’t quite enjoying but don’t mind. Then, the sound of the keys on your keyboard as you write further, thinking about nothing much but how to deafen the noise. Then, you stop to take a sip of the coffee which is probably colder than it was already when you began writing—slurp! You set the mug down on the bed, a muffled thump.

Just then, someone talks too loudly on the road, or the building beside you, maybe. Why are they so loud? You listen in on the conversation, half out of annoyance, half interest; finding nothing of significance, you get back to the words. You tread on, a car is unlocked. Inching towards the end of it now, you hear a leaky tap! You cannot quite place it; it could be in the washout, masked so far by the machine, now in its drying cycle. A vendor on the street passes by—his voice growing louder with his approach.

Almost done, you hear your breath now, soft but audible—the inhalation, the exhalation. As you reach the end of this unique sensory experience, a crescendo! And then, nothing. All noise fades; there is no sound now.

There’s only silence. You can now start the day.

Now I don’t know much about how to make money. I know enough to know I can make my share, but from a long time ago, ever since I remember, really, I have not cared about these games people play. I would rather lay in the grass and read a book. It is not that I do not want to care about building a career or having a series of calculated steps that make my time and life appear spotless on paper; I cannot care. It is not in me, and the more I accept this, the happier I become. The greatest injustice we could do to ourselves was to live a life that wasn’t our own.

The world runs on money—my beginnings have taught me as much. It did not have to drive my life—this, I had learned much more recently. I was not naive, but I was now more open to the idea of living life the way I wanted to. There was no aversion for money in me. In fact, I very much wanted enough of it, but a plethora was out of the question—I would not know what to do with it. The most important thing I could offer the world was my soul; therefore, giving it was impossible. The next most important thing I could offer was my time, and that I wanted to spend on things that inspired me, instead of becoming a pencil pusher, following instructions verbatim, creating instructions for others which they followed to the line.

Sure, I could do this and get a life where I would not have to worry about much, but I know I will worry still. I will worry I am not writing enough, or thinking enough, or even sleeping enough. There was always going to be worry. It was about the kind of worrying we were okay with inviting into our lives. If I had to work on something—which I have to anyway since coffee grows expensive by the day—I was better off making smaller bets that saved me time and did not once ask for my soul.

When I think of all this, I remember a normal day: me, sitting in a seminar hall, reading Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, not a care about the jargon on the screen ahead. I should have known then what I know now. All of that is a means to an end. Words to me are an end in themselves. A good sentence is where I start and where I end. All in between is nothing but padding—context for my life to exist.

There is a mirror. There’s nothing remarkable about it. As far as mirrors go, it is terrible at its job, for it has a spot where the reflection blows up like it would in a funhouse mirror. But this mirror is in my brother’s house now. It’s the same mirror from the room where I grew up. To see it in another place knocks me out every single time. It is such a simple act—to move something somewhere else, but to me, it is one of the truly fantastic things about how we lived our lives.

There was magic still in our identical, industry produced goods, regardless of how prosaic they seemed. For millennia, the story of humanity has been intertwined with the making and using of things. They were here; lives were lived, and this object, this little thing, was a part of it all. It may not be its most glorious part, nor the most vital one, but it made this life real. Pots and pans tell us about those who came before long after they can tell their tales themselves. Love is often stored, not in people’s hearts, but in broken necklaces kept safe in a pouch. It is often stored in a little ceramic planter—a reminder of a single day in a life teeming with days. We could not remember everything, and to recall what we forgot, we had things.

A home was a beautiful place, not because some interior decorator made it so, but because it had contributions from others. It was a collaboration, an orchestra of memories. A book a friend left at your place and never came to take back. A pen that did not belong to you, but you can’t quite place how it landed in your drawer. Chairs and tables stored laughter like a time capsule. When taken care of, things lasted more than we could ever hope to do.

There is a mug. There’s nothing remarkable about it. As far as mugs go, it is terrible at its job. Wrapped in cracks, it is not safe to use anymore. It knows more about me than most people could ever hope to do. Perhaps, it is cracking now, for it can’t hold anymore. It reminds me of simpler times—when love was easy, when all we talked of was art, when the bills were infrequent, and the struggles, fewer.

I have forgotten much about them; only the mug remains. It still tells me to keep writing.

I was tone-deaf to the sound of certainty. I could not know it even if I had it in my hands—not that I have ever had it in my hands. There is not an atom in me that is certain. Perhaps this is why I have searched for it all my life—in places, vocations, and love. My finding has been to no avail, but I have learned something else about it. I have learned to revel in the lack of it. To embracing being lost, to moving without knowing, to doing despite the odds is what it means to be human. It is the simplest truth there is, and it is the only truth there ever will be. To be human was to be uncertain. There was freedom in not knowing. It was the only thing I was sure of now.

I have not known who I am for a single second. All my words have been attempts to reach some conclusion for this inquiry, but I have been grasping at straws, and I have nothing to show for my search. All I have managed to understand is that there exists in me—in everyone—an immense ability to start again, to redefine ourselves at the slightest hint, at the smallest wish, at the softest urge. Before we knew it, we were people vastly different from who we thought of ourselves to be. Perhaps, that is what I was supposed to be—an example. Even if that were only for the ten or twelve people who were privy to the events of my life.

And what of life? Life is cunning. It’s like a little fox who you notice peeking at you from between the woods. As you look away to call a friend or take a camera out to treasure this moment of pure happenstance, the elusive fox runs away. When you look back, everything is changed. There’s no fox, only its footsteps. They remind you of how it was there once, that you did not imagine things. Before you know it, life changes, and there was not much you could do to change this—only accept that there may be something else soon where there was a fox once. That even the footsteps are gone eventually, forgotten, trampled by a deer who walks over them or washed away in the rain. You could only look at the clearing from between the forest, but you could not know.

It is the only lesson I have learned so far—that I don’t know a goddamn thing, that it is meant to be this way.

March was here, but in my head, I still wandered about the streets in winter. Some part of me was permanently frozen in Octobers and Decembers long gone. I often wondered why it was that way; it did not sit right with me, this inane calling towards colder days. There was something about walking on a chilly evening that pleasant days could not compete against. We all had our own affinities, and I always felt at home in the auburn leaves leftover from autumn, in the cold, drab air, in the craving for warmth. Perhaps, that was it; that was the answer. No matter how much warmth I received, I was hungry for more. This winter inside me was maybe a longing if nothing else.

And yet, when warmer days arrived, this craving would not go away. Some of us have felt so terribly cold at some point, nothing was warm enough. Maybe, that is all I wanted to tell myself until I found a warmth I could call my own. There was a warmth in briskly walking by yourself on a wintry evening. Maybe, this romantic attachment in me—of walking by myself, of nodding hello to strangers sitting around a fire, of the last cup of coffee from the café pulling its shutters down, the last song I hear emanating from within it—maybe all of it was a proxy for the warmth I knew I deserved. Perhaps, it was all my way of waiting.

But then, I often forgot about this obsession with warmer Octobers, if any could exist. I forgot the time, the month, the year; I even forgot who I was and what I was waiting for. Often, I found warmth in familiar faces, around a hearty dinner, in conversation, in the love I knew was all around if only I stopped walking away from it. It was in those tiny pockets of time that I realised the only truth there was: we only felt the warmth we allowed ourselves to feel. One might still shiver on the onset of spring, and one could still be content around a table in the middle of December.

As I had this epiphany, I realised it was almost the second day of March. Winter was slowly fading into the shadow of a colourful spring; I felt my obsession fade away, too. If there was a moment to seize, it was this one right in front of me. And if there was warmth, it was here, here and only here.

It has always baffled me how in films when they want to show a passing of time or a phase in someone’s life, there is often a pattern—five or six activities. They will either quickly get better or worse at them in the spirit of time. Of course, it depended on the context in which direction they swayed. There will be a B-roll in between, showing some scenery or clouds. Then, we met the new times, the new person, almost within a couple of minutes. By saying this, I don’t intend to insult any filmmakers. It takes immense effort to condense life honestly into a few minutes, to show without telling as they say. But, I want to point out how we tend to think our lives will work similarly.

In real life, things work differently. We often forget it when we walk out the theatre, ecstatic, inspired, enchanted with what life has to offer. In life, when you start working for something, it isn’t a montage of two minutes; you live the months, or if you’re unlucky, like most are: decades. I disagree with the adage: life passes in the blink of an eye. Life passes slowly; it burns. It’s memory that is fickle. Like a good system of keeping records, memory can roll things up and make them feel smaller, merely because the days were unchanged, but the days were there! You lived the days. It was difficult, and sometimes, impossible, but memory does not recall it. Memory recalls how you were a child two seconds ago, and now, you worry about honouring your bills or trying hard to be the child again. All adulthood was a path back to what we did as children.

The emotional transition in films is often stirring, but I believe we often forget how slowly emotions change, how life vacillates between grief and joy and drudgery, and how they return. Oh, how they return. I still miss my dog four years after he left us. I miss the sound of his paws on the floor. The echo returns like all echoes should. I don’t grieve him now, but sometimes, the missing is different. I feel what I felt when he left us. It is how life works; we must recognise it. We have to live all the days over and over before things change remotely. To live life is to go through the days slowly; to remember it is to forget them.

If I could, in some magical event, talk to myself from a few years ago, I would like to tell him some things.

I hope you don’t get what you want in life. I hope your dreams are broken and shattered into nothingness before you even have a chance to try. I’d tell him it was better than having them in reach, in approach, in the palm of your hand, barely; it was better than watching them slip through the gaps in your fingers. Dreams once broken cannot be dreamt again without being reminded of the shrapnel lodged in the heart.

Given how I remember myself, he would not take too kindly to it. Perhaps, he would be offended. An argument about how we made our own luck would ensue, and he would be right, of course. We are rarely wrong, just out of touch, out of flow with time. When speaking, we could not know which of our words would come back to us, in what form, or way. Life has a peculiar way to show all of us are eventually wrong.

I hope you learn to forgive yourself. When I say this, he would probably ask me what for, and I would tell him you’ll know when the time comes, but when it comes, I hope you don’t take as long as I did. I hope you make time for everything. When I say this, he would tell me how he always makes time for everyone. Knowing his response beforehand, I would let out a chuckle and a sigh and ask him to make some for himself, too.

I hope you learn to watch the sunlit, auburn leaves fluttering in the wind. I hope you learn to savour it. I hope you find the time to sit down and read—not to find new insight, but to enjoy it, to enjoy words.

I hope you laugh a little more, and I hope you don’t forget you are still early. There is more, so much more, so much left to see, to feel. Stay away from ledges, I would tell him, both real and those in your head. Walk carefully, I would tell him, especially toward oncoming traffic in a city you’ve still not been to yet. I hope when the time comes, you find your footing.

I’m sure he will tell me he knows all this, that I should leave if I have nothing more to say, that he can’t waste more time. I would laugh. Lastly, I would tell him, I hope you learn patience…

…but life will teach it to you anyway.

An insurance agent called me yesterday. I told her I had no need for insurance for now, that my needs were covered. She insisted I listen to her pitch. I said, alright, let’s hear it. She told me how they have insurance for all sorts of things—even domestic accidents. She started listing the domestic mishaps we only read in the papers: a gas line broke, a heater burst and someone fell down the stairs. The last one made me smile.

I wanted to interrupt her by telling her: but ma’am, I have fallen down the stairs all my life, do you have something for falling in love instead? But it would be untoward; I told her I was not interested still, thanked her and hung up. By then, the little joke had taken all the available space in my head. All I could think about was falling. I’ve never quite had the balance. Someone I once gave my heart to said this lack of balance would be my undoing—in every sense of it. All my attempts at finding it have been in vain.

I’ve fallen down all my life. I’ve fallen down the stairs enough times to know to not run as fast, and yet, I skip steps because I’m always late. I learned to ride a bicycle when I was ten. Most kids, by then, could ride without their hands on the handle. Being late is all I know. As much as I value time, I was always a minute or a year too late. Tardiness was both something I detested and built right into my bones. I’m always running because I’m always late, and in the panic, I fall. It was the only thing I knew to do.

But the other day, when you walked up to me over the patio, before you said a single word, I made my mind against falling. When I looked at you, I wanted to find a surety in my step. I wanted to walk with patience, no rush in my bones, no fear dictating my feet. I did not want to fall for you. I did not want to fall anymore. I wanted to walk with my head held high for as far as we could go.

Without saying a word, in every step I took, I wanted to tell you I’m here; I can keep myself up. I will stumble; it was in my nature to stumble, but for you, I will try not to. You made me want to grab the balance that has eluded me for so long. I wanted to choose to walk with you.

Goodness had little to do with the inherent qualities in someone. Goodness was about knowing in your heart what anyone in the world, especially you, is capable of, and then choosing to be good, to do good, every day. It was not virtue but practice, and you failed more often than you succeeded. Every person was capable of hurting another, capable of indifference, capable of tyranny. It was what made us human, after all. It baffled me how malleable our souls were, how changeable, and how naive each person was, including myself.

Goodness was beyond thoughts and words, of course. It was action. With the exception of children. For children were always good—even in their words. Until they grew up and they learned to choose how to act. The very appearance of agency was the loss of innocence. When they could choose what they wanted to be, people seldom chose good. It was why the world had, throughout history, been caught in a terrible state of affairs. The first realisation anyone had while coming of age was how all of us were terribly selfish.

Goodness was not being selfless. We couldn’t be selfless. Goodness was a measure of how easily we could think of someone else before we did anything. Some people quickly thought of others. They spent most of their lives in the service of other people. Some did not think of others at all. They spent their entire lives in a bubble of their own, in a public isolation, of sorts.

What about me? Like with all things, I was in between the two. Unlike both sides of it, and like most people in the world, I was going to spend my life constantly worried over things I could do nothing about, events I could not change, and people I could not help. It was a fate decided long ago. It was a battle I could never win. Perhaps, all I wanted was to be a child again. Wanting to be good was to be in a state of perpetual helplessness. All I could do was try.

Perhaps, on most occasions, trying was enough.

When was the last time I felt love? It was a difficult question to answer. The correct answer is, of course, this morning when I woke up and realised how anyone can have a heavy day or two. The less selfish answer was last night when I had dinner with family. Another response was when a friend listened to me talk about things troubling me over food and drinks. The further I go back in recent memory, the more I would stumble upon love, love, love. Yet, if you ask me about the last time I felt it, I would not think about it. If I did, I would know it was a second ago when a kid waved to me from the window right across from mine. However, since I would not think about it, I would only tell you it has been long. Often, our stories were marked by the days gone, the absences, the love lost. People lived in the daze of memory.

If you were observant enough, you would find a score of people looking wistfully at a table in a cafe. It was not an uncommon sight for someone to play with the band on their fingers, eyes fixated on nothing but the floor. The urge to change a song that came on suddenly was not uncommon, or pausing to buy a chocolate bar before you left the grocery store through nothing but muscle memory, a remnant of what used to be ordinary days. Tea preferences were often a shrine to someone we knew once. When being served coffee, they would tell you, just one sugar, please, recalling someone saying the exact same thing over and over again. The echo of the request dictating their days. Our mannerisms were rarely our own. Love—the loss of it—was hidden in the every day.

And why do things differently? I wonder. I carry every person I have loved in every living day of my life. More of me comes from them than I can keep track of. It was going to be the way it was, whether I liked it or not. Other people have a tendency to leave little bits of themselves in your life, like an insurance policy, as if they were saying: I don’t intend on leaving, but if at some point I have to, do remember me, and I will remember you, too. I hold nothing but love for everyone I have loved before. If anything went any differently, I would not be sitting here writing these words.

I got into a cab, said Hello, and the general small talk ensued between the driver and me. As we passed one of the fancier blocks of the neighbourhood, all with the lavish restaurants and cafés, he said how everything is corrupted now, that a logo was no indication of quality, that none of these neon-lit signs holds its ground. I understood where he came from, but I asked which of those places he had tried—out of curiosity. He narrated his experience, of the bland food, of the overcharging, of the terrible service, of all the fluff of modernity plaguing our towns.

I had never been to the restaurant in question. And I did not believe in having a strong opinion about something I had not experienced, either directly or through proxy. So, I told him what I thought. I told him how I thought food was at first sustenance, but it was a somewhat subjective experience beyond the basics. Even beyond food, good to him and good to me would be two different experiences. He never told me what he thought of this, but we did not talk for the rest of the ride until the very tail-end; it was a silent disagreement.

It was the oldest sin—to think our experience was the same as anyone else’s. It was the basic tenet of life. As much as we saw the same apple, we could never quite agree on it being the same red. We had our words, of course. Good, delicious, calming, relaxing, joyful, saddening, boring, love and whatnot. These were only labels. The experience could not match the words; they all fell short at all times. The words I write could not tell you how something feels. I could try to give you an accurate picture, but a writer either settled for plain descriptions or verbose exaggeration. There was rarely an in-between.

All we had with us were our words, and words fell flat. When all words were said and done, most lives were a great case of rapid, unending, unforgiving miscommunication. Humour me: what did you see before someone told you the complex, elongated tapestry of brown and green was indeed called a tree?

No matter what I picked, I always chose poorly. It was in my very nature to make the wrong choice because as much control as I exercised over myself, I was someone who thought from the heart. My decisions did not come from a procedure or some deep analysis. I acted on a whim. It was all gut, all feeling. It never has been thought. It never can be thought. Despite my logical pragmatism, regardless of how much philosophy I read, deep down, I was a terribly emotional man. Those who thought practically had no need to befriend Kant, Camus or Sartre. We craved what we lacked.

All my life has been an exercise in patience, and yet, it has been marked—no, scarred—by moments when I lost my cool. I remember being foolhardy, rebellious even. I remember saying too much, saying more than was necessary. It’s hilarious because those are days I can count on my fingers. I won’t even need to use two hands. I don’t remember the days I kept my wits about my head, when the voice of reason—of tact—told me to stay down. Perhaps, all my life has been a practice in patience because I am a terribly impatient man. It was in my very steps. You could notice it if you watched me on a general day.

All love I’ve lost has been because my ego was too large, too hungry. My obsession with extending a hand came not from some altruism or even nature—it came from regret. It came from not extending a hand when it mattered the most. It came from the haunting that needed no nightmares. I did not need to wake up to it. I was reminded of the times I was too selfish every minute of every waking hour. I extend my hand not to help, but from a need to absolve myself of the guilt emerging from the few times I can’t wash off my conscience. As helpful as I was, deep down, I was a terribly selfish man. There is not one sentence I have ever written that was not about myself.

As righteous as I seemed on the surface, I was a deeply flawed man. I knew three languages, to varying degrees—five on paper. And yet, when it boiled down to the brass tacks, I was only fluent in apologising.

Anyone could get used to sadness; to get used to humour was the harder thing. It was also the more necessary thing. The more hurt I found under my skin, the more convinced I became that humour and only humour was going to save me. Some people were more brittle than others. They were also more risible than others. It was a complex word to say they had a low standard for laughter. I came from a long line of idiots—connected not by blood but by being able to laugh at the smallest things.

As morbid as my words were, those who knew me well knew I had a terrible knack for making ill-timed jokes or how humour managed to find my life on its own. Perhaps, it was necessary to balance the ease with which I wandered in the depths of my mind. My brand of humour was peculiar. I found pleasure in ridiculous puns, everyday absurdities, harmless mannerisms. No story I shared with someone on a table was without a joke. If there was a living personification for the word klutz, it was me. I found it challenging to walk without falling, and I gave toddlers a run for their money in spilling things over myself.

Humans were essentially funny creatures, constantly threatened by the environment—made worse by the urban obstacles we faced daily. Laughter was easy to find. A jacket stuck in the door handle as you whiplashed back into a room you were trying to leave. Stepping on a puddle of water knowingly, and slipping. There was inherent clumsiness in us—even the smarter ones, especially the smarter ones.

Take the other day, for example. I walked, lost in the daze of some old memory. Just then, a dog looked at me from the other end of the street. We locked eyes. He was a stray, considerably large for someone who had to fend for food. In about a split second, he decided to give me a chase for my life. So, like any reasonable person, I ran. I was his special prey amidst about a dozen others. He chased me for a good hundred metres. When I stopped, I laughed for the hell of it. A man laughed at me too.

That evening, I learned how a dog chasing after you was yet another solution for escaping melancholy. Perhaps, not the most ideal one, but like any well-timed joke, it got the job done.

The world wanted you to be wise, but it wanted you to be wise on its terms—not a year too early, not a decade too late. To be as wise as your peers, no more, no less. To move along, to move together, no matter the cost, no matter what’s lost. This was a terrible realisation. I had always been out of synch. I never learned how to dance—my steps have always been missteps. I have unknowingly stepped on toes all my life. I did not intend on it, but some of us cannot walk too well in crowds, no matter how careful we are—and I was naturally fastidious.

I was impulsive. My decisions did not make sense to me until they played out in ways I could not fathom or predict, lest I expect they make sense to others. I carried out my days with an unwarranted sense of ownership ever since I was a child, reading in the school library by myself. In simpler words, I have, on all occasions, followed my heart. I do not recommend it to everyone. It tends to break more than it makes, but it makes for exciting days, and when you meet someone for the first time, you have a lot of stories to tell and many views to share.

The same effect is what most people grew tired of eventually because they could not match the novelty of experience, or rather, the aloofness and naïveté with which I carried my life. It was amusing to many at first, yet this grew into a host of different emotions at some point. I had been on the brunt of a wide gamut of criticism, argument, and even envy. It was not easy to stand on your own, as romantic as the idea seemed.

On most days, most people enjoyed the company of those most like themselves—in all senses of the word. I was no exception to this rule, but I had not come across someone who was so out of touch with time and reality as myself yet. I often joked about how I was good company in small doses. Truth be told, it wasn’t my own sentence. It was something someone said to me once as a casual remark.

By the time, I had become so used to this belonged aloneness, where I could stand with others and yet, have few count with me, that I found it fascinating. So, I stole it in respect of its accuracy. It has been the only way I’ve described myself since.