journal.coffee

Perhaps, it was a global crisis. Perhaps, it was the age. Maybe, it was both or maybe, it was how things had always been. I reckon that was it. Things had always been that way. The more I talked to those around me, the more I started finding stories that ended with a sigh, as they looked at whatever drink was in their hands and uttered a phrase odd understanding. “It is what it is,” they’d tell me.

⁣⁣Their biggest dreams—of extravagant careers, of ballad-worthy love stories, of grandiose adventure—left their eyes as they’d continue staring at nothing momentarily. Then, they’d look up and smile, their eyes weary and tired. I’d return the smile, of course. An inexplicable clarity was in the air all around me.⁣ All of us knew what was happening to all of us at all times. It was an acceptance that wasn’t forced but felt reluctant, still.⁣

Perhaps, this was how it happened. Perhaps, this is how the unfazed adults present throughout history were made. Not by spontaneous heartbreak but through a sort of continual failure, a continual mismatch between how they imagined life to be and how it turned out. Life was but a slow burn. But there was hope somewhere in the air, too. Behind those smiles and those words of walking away from battles we were too tired to fight, each of us found an ounce of happiness in one way or the other. At least, we were learning.⁣⁣

It makes me wonder if this was the secret to happiness all along—the acceptance. Yet, unless you dreamt and unless you failed, you couldn’t know what the others meant. You could recite a rote maxim, a platitude, but it would all be absolute bullshit. You’d know it in your heart, too, of course. It wasn’t in accomplishing dreams that we found happiness; it was in the failures; it was in making do without.

⁣⁣Happiness was what came after the reluctant acceptance. I wonder if it was when we said to ourselves, “it’s not at all how I had imagined, but perhaps, this is not so bad after all; it is what it is.”

⁣⁣Maybe, it was in that precise moment that one was happy. Maybe, one had to reach it of their own accord.⁣ Perhaps, a generation reached it together, roughly speaking.

Maybe, we had.

I believe everyone has a war within themselves. It’s what we live for; it’s what we die for. I don’t know where it comes from or why we fight it or if someone manages to win it. I see it everywhere. Show me how someone does all they do, and I’ll tell you what they’re fighting for within themselves.

For a long time, I’ve thought my war to be one for balance, but I’m learning now, I have always had balance. It’s been a war for reason. For as long as I can remember, I’ve scoured for a reason to be alive, to have a justification for everything. My war has been for the why. It’s the only question I have ever asked: why?

Sometimes, however, the answer to winning a war isn’t fighting through it all; it’s in finding another way; it’s in avoiding fighting altogether. So, now, I don’t want to know why it is that I am here. That’s the answer. I couldn’t care less if it is for myself, or those around me, or for some purpose I haven’t yet discovered.

I’ve always romanticised everything to make it seem larger. However, things just are, and no word or metaphor can make them any more or any less. If anything, we only made desperate attempts to capture this thing we called life, and fail miserably while we’re at it.

The bottom line of it all is, I’m alive. I want to like being here. I don’t need a reason to do so anymore. I want to like the days regardless of whether they’re good or bad. I want to appreciate the life I live, with all its mundane trivialities.

Perhaps, nothing will change on the surface. I’ll be the same person I always have been. I’ll have the same days. I’ll help the same way. I’ll do the same things. But, I’ll not be at war with myself at all times. I’ll not be asking: why?

I wish I could tell you how liberating it feels.

I wonder if you find yourself laughing through the day only to end up in the dim glow of your bedroom lamp, standing lifelessly, consumed by a thought too many as a morbid song plays in the background, too.

I wonder if you tell everyone you’re fixing your life as if there ever was a thing like a broken life in the first place, as if there has to be a proper way for life to be, and that if there was, you knew what it looked like enough to claim you’re hard at work to hammer it into form when all you know is how to barely brave twenty-four hours without losing yourself to the voices in your head, sometimes.

It baffles me, the audacity with which you claim you’d like to be more, to do more, as if your smiling at a stranger isn’t enough hope in the world, as if your rushing to see a friend isn’t important enough for it to count for something, as if you stringing words out of thin air did not add anything to this otherwise bleak world.

I wonder if you think of these things too as you ask yourself how it is that you can suddenly fall from a peak of ecstatic emotion into this abyss of nothingness. I wonder if you blame yourself for not being happy enough, as if the nothingness stops calling when you’re laughing, as if it has ever stopped calling, as if this is the first time you’re fighting it all.

I wonder if you lose yourself, like I do sometimes. I wonder what you do to get out of it. Do you like walking? Perhaps, you do. I wonder if like me, you walk on the road to nowhere in particular, too. I’ve been treading the road ever since I was a little boy. Frankly, I won’t mind some company. I wonder if we’ll ever run into each other.

It baffles me we haven’t yet.

In the culmination of it all, of years of holding on, of years of anguish, of years of trying, I learned my problem wasn’t that I couldn’t choose. It was that I didn’t want to choose. I wanted all of myself, in all ways, at all times.

It was as if I lived two, three different lives. As if I was changing my entire self repeatedly within a span of twenty-four hours, with each side trying to say, “this is the true me”, just as the other took hold and denied me the opportunity to be at peace, at ease. Perhaps, that is why I was so perpetually exhausted.

I wanted to spend all my days doing nothing but writing and living the slowest imaginable life, but I also craved a sort of tangible contribution to the world around me because I understood it. I understood the great human collaboration. I was also privy to artistic solitude.

I wanted to love someone with all my heart and also, love no one else but myself. I wanted everyone to be with me, and I wanted all of them to leave me alone.

On the outside, my indecisiveness was shrouded by a surety that paralleled none other, my conflicts were portrayed as unmatched clarity, and the schism within me slowly became an epitome of balance. On the inside, I was falling apart as all sides of me grew in different directions with unimaginable pace.

Slowly, however, the limits of it all were making themselves all the more visible. This conflict wasn’t one of whim or fantasy either. I continually acted upon all sides. As everyone I met kept telling me I was doing something right, for anyone could find camaraderie with some side of me, I kept asking myself: who am I?

And in the culmination of all things, after everything had fallen apart, I learned, I was all sides of me, equally. Perhaps, it was a unique edge. Maybe, it would be why I’d lose myself eventually.

The bottom line was, I didn’t want to choose anymore. I wasn’t even inclined on trying. I was going for everything and everyone I could possibly be, or nothing at all.

Have you ever wandered onto a familiar street without intending to go there at all? Have you ever tasted a meal, the first bite of which took you on a trip through the summer days of your childhood? I reckon that is how I felt today.

It was as if I was going back into an old friend’s home; one I hadn’t visited for a while. Nothing spectacular happened; nothing particular happened either. You see, I was walking down the same streets I always walk down today and suddenly, I felt this odd knowing.

I felt as if I had been wearing someone else’s clothes up until now, and it was only at that moment that I got to wear my own. Perhaps, that’s how it feels when one suddenly comes back into their stride. I wonder if you know what I mean. I wonder if you’ve ever been lost inside of yourself, if life has ever made you hide from yourself.

I can put all the metaphors on it but it wasn’t as if lightning hit me; clearly, it wasn’t a shock. It wasn’t a realisation and no large epiphany appeared. It was as if I had tucked myself into a warm blanket after a long day and a cold shower.

I felt a comfort I had long since forgotten, like a weight lifting off of myself, like holding coffee with both hands after getting drenched in the rain, like finding shelter in the starkest of storms, like a ship at sea stumbling upon a lighthouse, like a musician finally finding their tune, like the fog finally lifting after days of blindness.

Today, for the first time in what has only felt like an incalculable amount of time, I felt like myself again. Nothing changed, of course. Nothing ever does. Yet, I believe, it’s all for the better. I reckon I’d been lost for far too long.

I wonder if you know what I’m talking about. But then, I believe it’s all for the best if you’ve never been lost at all. It gets terribly lonely when one does. To others, you’re right there.

Yet, you continue to ask: but where am I?

You told me you’ll come back, eventually. You said the waters will get calmer and we’ll sail through. I loved you. I’ll wait, I said. While you were gone, I spent time walking around, tracing the streets meticulously, like you used to trace the lines on my hand.

Eventually, I got tired of walking by myself. I started building a home in your memory. It was all over the place, at first, but it took shape slowly, quite like how I fell for you. I knew you’ll always have a place to yourself in my heart.

I spent afternoons lazing around in the hall of our flaws and all our mistakes. In winters, the warmth of the memory of holding you was enough, really. I could last a thousand winters remembering the smile on your face. It was the warmest thing I knew. Perhaps, that is why I went out of my way to make sure I saw as much of it as possible. I loved you more for myself than you.

Maybe, that was the start of where we went wrong. Or maybe, we were never right at all. I never thought of it that way until, like all good things that overstay their welcome, the house got old. The years took their toll but the house stood, albeit the plaster on the walls started to crack; the paint, once bright and beautiful was now dull and melancholic.I lived in a nightmare of my own making, clinging to days I could barely remember myself, but I was living, and that was enough.

Then, one day, you showed up at my door. Everything lit up, as it should have. The house became how it used to be. I made you coffee and we sat, talking. We talked about how life had fared, about everything.

Finally, I asked if you remembered the promise. You said it had been a passing thought at best. I smiled and said I understood.

When you left, the illusion broke. The floorboards creaked until they gave in. The walls fell on each other. The house collapsed. It took its time, but the memory died too.

I took my time, but I left, eventually. Now, I live in a place of my own. The light is astonishing, really. The other day, I passed the ruins of all I ever felt for you. I stopped for a bit, staring. A boy walked around, too. He asked me, “do you know who lives there?”

“A ghost,” I said.

When I was much younger than I currently am, I’d often find adults wasting time while saying goodbye. I’d see them dawdling. I found people getting off the couch only to stop near the door yet again. It didn’t make sense to me, of course. I thought they didn’t understand what goodbye meant.

I know now that when I’m in the car with a friend, I wish for some light traffic, only so we get more time to talk. When I run into someone I haven’t seen in a long time, I often ask them if they have time for coffee. I’ll often wish for it to keep raining if I’m stuck waiting with someone.

I’m the last to hang up because I want to hear someone’s voice for the last time, again and again. It’s as if one has to steal time with someone because life allows for so little of it. When we’re done for the evening, I often ask friends if they’d like to spend some time or watch a movie at mine as we order takeout.

When someone tells me they have to leave, I sigh. It happens all on its own. I have said enough goodbyes; often, I’ve said them more than once to the same people. I know now why the adults would not let the others leave.

Life tends to starve you of the presence of those you love or want. The voices you hear every day can turn into voices you hear in a month or sometimes, years. We were all starved for the presence of everyone we had ever loved.

Between all the busyness, the chores, the visits to the bank, the grocery shopping, the work day; between all those mundane and banal activities of life, you sometimes get to steal a moment with someone; an unwritten, unplanned moment.

I’ve learned amidst this thing we called life, all we ever want is to steal a little bit of time. So, I often ask people if they’d like to walk or take the longer route or if they can still talk for some time.

I know now why the adults took their time saying goodbye. I know now why they sighed and hugged, or used more words than necessary. I’ve learned the only way to let someone go was slowly, gently, and with a smile on your face.

The only way to say tell someone goodbye was to wait, to linger, and to ask them: will I see you again? I hope I do. I love you.

A note to my reader:

When I think of myself as a writer, I think of myself as a jester of the world, and I belong to those who need a moment of respite. My act of writing is one to entertain. I do not write to inspire; I do not write to change. I am too little to make a large dent in the world, and these words are too simple for someone to take note of them.

Now, of course, a jester entertains but a jester also makes you see things you know to be true but would not accept. He makes it apparent with some wit here and there. A jester is the perfect mix of show and life, often using his own act to show you something hidden from yourself.

A jester is also, of course, a fool, and a fool I am.

I could, obviously, write about three hundred words of la dee doo and give you two seconds of sunshine and false hope. It isn’t hard to do. I can whip fifty of those pieces by the morning for you if that’s what you’d like. That stuff sells too. People love leaving a piece thinking the next rainbow will grow from their footstep.

But, I won’t.

I’d rather give you something else. I’d rather give you the truth with a metaphor snuck in between. I’d give you a moment of belonging, of knowing there is someone else who feels something you feel; that there are others. For that’s what I have always needed too: not to know it’ll be okay, because it always is okay in the end, but that it is okay to feel how it feels as it happens.

I’d rather talk to my demons and my angels all night long, laugh with them over cups of coffee and whiskey sours and tell it all exactly how it all is. Just so we can be together for a minute, you and I, as equals, as humans. No, I don’t know some secret to life, and no, I can’t answer everything.

In the end, we’ll be fewer, you and I, but we’ll be the real ones. We’ll be the ones who sit together and do not say a word sometimes, but the ones who know. We’ll be the ones who know.

That’s why I write to you. That’s why I write at all.

There was a unique resignation in me that I couldn’t quite articulate. No matter what happened to me, I could always find a way to chalk it up to how I got into the situation in the first place. I could boil it down to my last action, and how everything that’s wrong spiralled from that first step, my first step.

It was a personal hell, if nothing else. If I had gotten into an accident in the morning, I’d have already convinced myself of my errors and what I had to do differently by the time I unlocked my door in the evening. I had caused all my heartbreaks; all my disappointments were my own doing.

I lived that way for years, absorbing the blame as a proxy for everything everyone ever did to me. I had to learn how to let life happen to myself again; and even in that, I somehow found a fault of my own, of how wrong I had been, of how I had been torturing myself for years.

Even in my liberation from the prison I had made for myself, I had the absurd resignation I could never properly put into words. I had a habit of convincing myself I was wrong, even when I had been right, absolutely right countless times before.

I wonder where I found it—this habit of mine; I wonder who gave it to me, who I stole it from. I reckon, at some point, I must’ve picked it up myself. Ah, you see, this was how my life echoed inside my head. Everything boiled down to a fault of my own, eventually. It was how it had always been.

I had to learn to be like a child grazing his knee while playing outside and never sitting down to analyse how to walk correctly the next time around, never thinking about it, never having the thought tiptoe around his mind.

At twenty-five years of age, I had to learn to laugh it off. I had been terribly slow to learn some things in life, but I had to start somewhere, and I had to start someday.

Today felt as good a day as any, and so today, I let it all be.

Hey, kid. A little lost at sea, are we? It’s okay. It happens to the best of us. It’s a difficult thing to answer, too. Why do you do what you do? Why you are who you are? I know you’ve been asking yourself the same questions for years. I know you’ve been frozen in time, stretching yourself in every sense of the word.

Thing is, the world will always be disproportionate. There will always be a mismatch. There will be a mismatch of happiness, a mismatch of effort, or a mismatch of love. We, humans, are horrible at keeping things balanced. We tend to make a mess of everything we touch before we start to fix things.

Don’t worry if you’ve messed up a little. If anything, you have a knack for fixing things. Most can’t guarantee that, but you tend to leave things better than you found them. You always have, and you always will. At least, you’ll die trying, which is as noble an ideal as can exist.

The question isn’t what you get in return or how you feel. One does not make an effort to get something; we act based on who we are; it shall always be that way. So, tell me, who are you?

You see, the world eventually tries to turn everyone into the same person. The same broken people, repeated by the millions. The same woes, just in different shells; the same hatred, prejudice, and grudges. Yet, here you are, trying desperately to dislike others and failing.

There is goodness in you. It has been there since you were old enough to ask a stranger if they needed a hand without thought behind your offer. I know you think the answer is guilt, but it’s the world talking, not you.

They will point out your suffering until it’s all you see. There’s more to you than a few open scars. I know you find it hard to hate and easy to forgive. It’s who you’ve always been, and there’s no need for you to change. They can do with someone as emotionally resilient as you.

There’s just one last thing I have to tell you. It’s something the world—I—should’ve told you a long time ago: it’s not your fault. You can be happy, and you can be good; there’s no reason to choose one over the other anymore. It’s not your fault, it never was.

Go now, do what you do best; be good, be yourself.

I was doing the dishes tonight, and I thought of you, again, for a wee second. If I was honest, though, it never has been a wee second. I have thought of you tirelessly and endlessly for years. I know I said I should write you more letters, but life and the way we always seem to miss each other has made that terribly difficult. Not that difficulty has any importance when it comes to love, but then again, what do I know of loving someone? I have barely begun to love myself.

When I think of us—you—I often go back to lying near the raging sea in the middle of June all those years ago. The happiness on your face from that night has kept me going for a long time now. That was many Junes ago. I’ve abhorred monsoons since. It was only recently that I have learned to embrace the rain again. It still reminds me of you. That, or a cup of chamomile after getting soaked.

When in the valley, I still think of the winding roads, the hairpin turns, of watching the town at our feet, of the blinking lights shining in your eyes as you told me about your day. The truth is, my little argument with the hometown is simply that you’re not here anymore. The streets, while crowded, are awfully empty without us walking together. For that reason alone, this city will never be what it once was, or what it can be; it will never be home.

Even with all the talk of letting go, of being friends, of losing ourselves to time, of everything else in between, I have missed you terribly. Some part of me, while entirely okay with this absence, will always think of you when October begins. I miss you like the night sky misses the stars in cities with too many people and too much light; not entirely empty on its own but well aware of how it is when the stars are around.

I wanted to write you a letter like I promised I would. I got caught up with life for a bit, but it all came back to me as I did the dishes tonight. While I have to go now, I have nothing but all the love in the world for you, regardless of time, space, or any reality.

A part of me will always remain drenched with you on that evening in June, laughing, as the waves lashed and pounced around us.

I’m glad it has to be that way.

Most people you saw around were waltzing through life because they couldn’t care less about most things. And then, there were the others. The others, like you and like me, we stopped now and then. We stopped in awe as much as we did in heartbreak.

It was this extreme propensity to feel. Some were born like that, some got humbled by life, but all of the others had one thing in common: they felt.

They looked at the sky after it had rained and felt it cleanse themselves. They looked at a tiny baby clapping his hands, sitting like a true king on his throne that was a table in a café and they couldn’t help but feel joy. They also saw something terrible and it knawed at their conscience for decades.

They didn’t just hear or see things, they absorbed them and made them their own. A gut-wrenching story someone told them would leave them with an emptiness that they would never forget as if it had happened directly to them.

But the others also suffered from a terrible possibility of losing themselves. If one felt everything profoundly, one often broke earlier than most. The human condition ran a bit too fast and far in them, and that was the curse.

The curse was also a blessing. Most of the others had to get it out, of course; else they imploded. The others were the artists, the painters, the writers, the oddballs who took things a tad too seriously and went a bit too far. But to them, it was natural, almost instinctive.

I was never told to write, and if I ever have, I have written terribly. The only time I can manage to get a few words out is when the words demand to be written. I’ve written on the curbside, in my flat, in cafés, on benches, in deserts, on beaches, and most of all, in my head.

All my life, I have been stopped in my tracks by all things terrible and beautiful, and always I have felt them to the core, and always I have let them devastate me from within. I do not know any other way to exist.

The only thing I know is that when you’re walking and you feel something, you stop and you put it down as honestly as you can. You’d know it too, if you’ve ever felt it—the desperate need to get it out.

If you didn’t, it ate you up from the inside.

While walking around town, I often came to an immediate halt, took my phone out and jotted a few sentences down. That had always been my process. I seldom sat down to write. I just thought of a lot of disjointed series of sentences and passages. I forgot most. I wrote some down. I used even fewer.

The one secret I knew was if you wrote a sentence with a particular emotion, especially at its peak, and then you didn’t use it while that emotion lasted, that sentence became useless. So, I often discarded old notes. It was a shame, really. Some of those rejected notes were really good, but words were like memories—they blurred with time.

It was an exhausting year.

I sat down on the rug in the absolute silence of post-midnight and set my cup of tea beside myself. The hall was lit only by the beige lamp a friend had sent me as a housewarming present last October. I began to absorb how utterly long ago I had unwrapped and set it up. If I could remember a word beyond disgusting, I would use it to describe the months that led me here. However, I was too tired to think.

As I went about that train of thought, some tiny glimpses of laughter I could remember from here and there made me feel warmer. Or perhaps, it was the cup of chamomile I had been sipping. When exhausted, one couldn’t care less where comfort came from, only that it was present.

I went back to reading my notes and stopped at the most recent one: if there’s a limit to hope, something tells me I’ve reached it. That, perhaps, I’ve crossed it. That I’ve broken something I don’t yet know in the process.

I wonder if there was a better way I could have put the year into words. Never before had I started from scratch so many times. Autumn was awfully cold that year. I could only imagine—and fear—how the winters would feel. I sat there sifting through my notes for the next hour.

Eventually, I got tired of doing it, like I got tired of most things that year, and decided to go to sleep. If I could, I would sleep until the end of December.

There wasn’t much left to do. I had tried enough.

Did you know a moment is roughly ninety seconds? If you’re not careful, however, you can often get trapped in one. For some, these are ninety seconds of regret. For others, it’s a moment’s worth of lost love.

Yet, there is wisdom in starting over; there is heart in forgetting. If you can’t bear to carry a moment further, there is happiness in setting it down. If you don’t know how, set it down anywhere, and continue walking until you can’t remember it anymore. Things happen, and then they stop happening. They don’t need to define what comes next.

New things are going to happen to you. You’ll see better skies. If you do it moderately right, there’ll be more moments that are easier to carry. It’s a long life; surely, you can smile for ninety seconds.

If you want to build a home in a moment, build it around your mother telling you things are okay. If you’re going to set camp in time, set it near the table that’s echoing of laughter. There are no rules; you can set up shop on a relaxing October morning as you lie in bed looking at the single strand of light trying to peek at you from between your curtains.

There is no meaning to this, but there can be if you create it; that’s all any of us are doing. Sometimes, it works wonders. Other times, you’re stuck in a tiny moment of failure for over half a decade, lamenting over how you could’ve been better. If you have to create meaning, make sure you don’t punish yourself.

If you’re like most people, you’re probably not as terrible. The world runs on people like you—those who carry a sort of unmatched hope in their eyes, those who tell people to have a great day. Yet, if you’re going to be good, promise me you won’t do it out of regret.

Remember, the goal is not to walk as far as possible. It’s to not miss the bunch of daffodils growing in the grass. If you walk with too much weight on your heart, you often miss the daffodils. Sometimes, you miss something far more important. Not that flowers aren’t important.

In my experience, they have proven to be the most important of them all. And yet, I had to forget some I saw a long time ago; the October sky I saw today demanded it.

So, I walked away.

There’s a sort of horror in sitting by yourself at three in the morning or night, whichever way you put it. To me, it depends on whether one is still trying to sleep or if they’ve already given up. As soon as you give up, it’s morning.

The horror is not unlike the short walk back home from the nearest bar when the feeling of utter loneliness hits you as you dread opening the door to your little palace of one. For the fifteen minutes you take to get back home, you think about how chores are waiting for you, but more than that, there’s the silence that is going to welcome you with open arms and engulf you in the closest thing to a hug you’ve felt in a while.

It’s utterly terrifying but by the time you reach the door, you’ve almost convinced yourself that it’s not the first time you’ll open the door to nothingness; that it wasn’t going to be the last; and at least, it was your nothingness. There was a solace in being uniquely lonely.

Everyone was lonely in a slightly different way, and for some, there was belongingness in their own way to be alone. I was like that, too. I’d hope there were others. It would be devastatingly lonely if there was just one who felt this way. As is the case with most things we feel though, there never is just one person feeling something.

In any case, coming back to the current moment from this tiny detour of a confession that won’t end, I’ve been in a sort of haze lately. I can’t remember why I do what I do. For the life of me, there’s no memory. There’s only this endless reflection of myself spread over the mirror of similar years, all facing each other. I seem to have reinvented myself a thousand times over only to learn I am who I have always been.

I have always sat by myself. I have always walked by myself. I reckon I’ve always been tired, too. I don’t remember a second of my life feeling otherwise. Perhaps, this is the very first time, I am genuinely tired of myself though. It’s the first time I’m tired of it all.

There’s a horror in sitting by yourself, working on something at four in the night, but there is comfort too; at least, there used to be. Perhaps, it was when I wasn’t so exhausted of everyone I’ve ever been.

My grandfather lived to be seventy, I think, and while I didn’t take many lessons from him for we were not as close, I remember this one thing he told me when I was a child. In fact, he was quite insistent and pestering about the idea. He said I shouldn’t look down while walking; that I should learn to walk with my head held high, no matter what. Of course, being a child, I didn’t take his advice.

It’s funny because out of the countless sour memories I have of him, this is the one thing that has stuck with me for all these years. I have a tendency to focus too much on the path. His words are a fair warning for me to look straight ahead at where I’m going. I am not quite sure what I see yet.

I am not sure how many years I have left under my tally. I have come too close to death one too many times in recent years to not trust the idea that everyone gets to an old age. But there is one thing that I’ve learned at the ripe age of twenty-five that I can impart onto others as my grandfather did me.

I’ve learned that life is a bargain, and that wanting is never enough. The wisdom was in learning to take what you get. If you want a love beyond all stories you’ve ever read and all you get is a friend, take the friend. If you get everything you’ve ever wanted but have to trade your peace of mind, you make the bargain. If you get a minute of happiness amidst it all, grab it ferociously.

There’s a truth here, and it’s one of the hardest things to admit, really. The maxims are wrong; you don’t get what you want or deserve, you get what you get. Sometimes, it’s a pint of guilt, seldom it’s a cup of happiness, and often, it’s an untimely death. The only options you have are to accept it or have life thrust it upon you.

If you accept what you get, as gracefully as you possibly can, there’s hope yet for you to have a life filled with smiles and happiness. That’s the only thing I’ve learned so far. Now, I walk around with my head held high, knowing that I am learning to take what I get with grace.

For all my obsession over control, the only thing I’ve managed to learn is how I don’t have any, and how I’ve never had an ounce of it; and how it’s all been for the best.

The other day I sat in my apartment like I always do. There wasn’t much going on like there never is anything going on. For all stories of my being able to handle multiple responsibilities at the same time, I’d have little to show if someone were to walk into my home unannounced. Most of my days went lazing around on the rug. It’s surprising I even get anything accomplished at all.

I sat in front of the TV. A rather hilarious episode of some show was on it. I wonder if it was as funny as I remember or if something altogether different was happening within me, but I burst out laughing. There I was: a madman, sitting alone, watching the TV, laughing uncontrollably without a care in the world. Perhaps, it isn’t as out of the ordinary for most people. For some of us, this feeling of joy had, for the lack of a better word, died.

Make no mistake, I have not felt dejected in months. Yet, as my laughter grew louder that day, in that moment of absolute loss of control, I learned I wanted more of this; honestly, attempting to write about it has been a terrible mistake. However, since these words are here, I can’t do much to take them back.

Now that the crime has been committed, I want to tell you that there comes a moment in our lives when we experience something that we had lost without realising it. We tend to lose a lot of ourselves if we’re not looking, and we were seldom looking.
At that moment, I knew nothing else; I only knew it was important.

Moments like this particular one are important. As I sat there laughing for an hour or so, until my stomach hurt, until my eyes got watery, nothing mattered. No amount of heartbreak I had experienced was important enough to make me stop. No memory overflowing with regret could take it away. No failure was staring me in the eye.

Towards the tail-end of a rather eventful year when the single strand I had been hanging by broke and sent me flying across a mess of my own making, when I lost myself one too many times, I found a single moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

On an uneventful afternoon, I stumbled upon joy. Perhaps, for the first time in a long time.

You don’t build a life in a day. The memories of your childhood trapped softly between the pages of a familiar book is what lays the groundwork, really. The rainy days set the music and the tone of what’s to come. Spending monsoons in your room by the window without much to do and growing up, realising you’re never sitting near the window again, is what you eventually learn life is about.

It’s about remembering. Life was all about remembering the little bits. It was of remembering the kiss from three years ago as the rain pattered on the windshield. It was about remembering enough to love, to try to love again and again. It’s also about forgetting. It was about forgetting everything and starting a new life in another city. It was in forgetting just enough and not a smidge more, so you continue to love again and again.

But love is not all life is about. It was about the certain snack you can’t decline when offered. It was about the specific way you folded your laundry because you did it like that once and never changed. Or, the cup of chamomile you brew every night because someone rubbed their habit on you. It was about the catchphrase you stole from an old acquaintance. It was about your brother’s mannerisms you didn’t realise you ended up copying.

Life wasn’t just taking, too. It was about giving. The best part, in fact, was the giving. It was in lending a hand even when your arms were tired of the weight you already had on them. How difficult could helping someone with directions be, really? It was how you often found yourself when you were lost. It was about finding yourself in others.

Life was about the time a little girl walked up to you and showed you her origami and you acted all excited at the genuinely remarkable piece of art. Life was about keeping that experience and many others in your heart as you sat down to write a few words, creating art of your own, resting on the shoulders of ecstatic kids creating something only because they could.

You didn’t build a life at all, really. It just sort of happened to you. It has always been this way for everyone who has lived, and I don’t quite see a reason for that to change.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sleep to the thought of you or wake up to a dream or two. If I were forced to lie, I’d lie about the times I think of you or what you’re up to during the day. I’ll tell you it barely happens.

Truth is, and I wish this were mere exaggeration, you’re always on my mind. If my mind were a room, you were always lingering near the door or moving about from one corner to another, doing your own thing. It used to irk me, but over the years, I’ve learned to let you do what you may.

So, as I go about my day spamming cups of coffee, working on things I love, drudging through things I hate, laughing, crying, going into bouts of anxiety, spiralling, catching a hold of myself, and managing to sleep just in time, I let your face grace each moment in my thought; the sound of your voice often becomes the very thing that brings me back to myself.

It has always been this way, and I used to think it will always be this way, too. But sometimes, I forget what you look like. Of course, a blurry image of a face persists but those details like the tiny, barely visible mole near your nose or the one near your eye are lost. Like an old, weary negative with scratches, I have started to lose the full picture.

I often forget what you sound like so I have to replay you saying my name over and over again like an old cassette that gets stuck in the player. Of course, I can take it out and fix the tape, but there’s something about how you say my name that makes me wonder if that’s how I want to remember your voice.

But, I have started to forget the rest. A lot of it is like letting something truly important die but never realising it until you’re at the funeral. If I was honest, we’ve been through more than one of those. I still wonder where you are or what you’re doing. I wonder if you think about me, too.

I just wanted to tell you, I have nothing but love for you. A sort of love I can barely even put in words, but I have to try. It has started becoming easier, though: letting you go. It dawned on me when it was raining the other day. I visited the grave of your memory again.

A flower had grown on it.