journal.coffee

Talk about how you feel, talk about how you feel, oh fuck off. I don’t want to talk about how I feel anymore. Most people wait on to listen to some massive, life-spanning, overarching narrative—a heartbreak, a disease, an I-don’t-care-what.

You see, I could handle the big stuff, the events that unfolded in years, I had my grip on that all too clearly. I was too smart to not throw my life away and so, things usually worked out.

It was in the little things—the everyday stuff, the difficult conversations, the tedious people, the aggravating inconveniences; they fazed me, continually. I’d bear with most of them for the day, but towards the end, they’d be the ones spinning in my head, as it spun because of one pint too many.

I was heartbroken for years, I could handle another month. I had been clueless for decades, I could handle another year. It was the argument with a friend or something a stranger said or something I saw on the street that broke me usually, and that was too casual for you.

I don’t want to talk about how I feel. I want to call a friend and not say a word. I wonder how many will allow that before they call me insane?

So, spare me the bullshit. You don’t want to hear about how I feel. You want to listen to a story. You like hearing stories so you could use the platitude you read on a blog recently. Then, take the fact that you made someone feel heard today and put it on a plaque as you go to sleep, believing you’re a good person.

You really don’t want to hear anyone. You just want to be amused, and you want to feel useful, and for that, you can find someone else.

If you can sit in silence with me for a while, without you wanting me to put words to how I feel, maybe then, I’ll sit with you, and maybe just then, once we’re both done feeling how I feel, I’d tell you what bothers me. You won’t do that, though. No one would.

All everyone ever wanted were fucking stories and words, and all everyone ever wanted was to doze off believing they were heroes. I wasn’t going to give them that. I could save myself.

I told you, I could handle the big stuff, the long-drawn journeys. I had saved myself on countless days before—one more wouldn’t kill me.

The more I think about it, and trust me, love, I do that a lot, I think I clearly remember when I stopped loving you, and no, it wasn’t when I said I did. It was much, much before that. It was when I was telling you about this shoebox I had once upon a time. That I called it “the shoebox of memories”.

I remember telling you that I kept every tiny object that made me who I am today in it. Until, the box started to overflow, and so I decided to let it all go, but not until I took photos of everything, before I threw it in the can. I remember I was showing you the album instead. It’s hazy now, but I could see you listening intently, and I mean, why wouldn’t you or anyone?

But then, I saw your disinterested eyes, and so, I let the shoebox fade away into the conversation. Before I knew it, we were talking about how great the pasta was in that café overflowing with blinding white furniture and pastel pink flowers. It looked posh on the outside, quite perfect, really, but the pasta didn’t taste as good. I lied that day when I said the pasta was perfect or when I said I loved you.

I’m not sure why I did that, but I know why I stopped talking about the shoebox. It wasn’t because of your disinterest in it, which, I’m not even sure was there. It was because I realised I was stuck in the past and everything that had happened before. As much as I had let the shoebox go and put it on my phone, I was still amidst those trinkets, revelling in the stories of the old, and who I was and could’ve been.

I believe you realised that on the cab ride home too. After that, it was us fighting all the time. It was you berating me for hours. It was me not talking to you at all. I’d tell you of my drab day, and nothing more, and you’d tell me of yours. A cliché!

I think it all goes back to that day. I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d talked about that instead of the pasta. I think about that a lot every time I’m making some. I clicked a photo of it the other day and added it to the album on my phone—I barely check it now—I just add things to it out of habit.

Truth be told, I scrolled through it the other day, and I had forgotten half the stories. I wonder if that means something.

I’m continually following myself around. There’s this, and it might sound odd, but there’s this metaphysical visualisation, this weird idea that I have always had. The idea is that time is something I don’t want to believe in as a concept.

Perhaps, it’s because I have always felt as if I was on a treadmill or an abstract tunnel, but it wasn’t just me on it. It was every version of me that has ever existed, and that ever will. It’s me always running to catch up to myself.

I didn’t exist because I was all of those people. I was my own standard, my own yardstick to measure any growth at all. Nobody mattered because I was always on the treadmill. No one could tell me whether there was a right or a wrong because the only direction I had was who I could be and who I had been.

It was my younger self looking at my current self and thinking: I want to be that person; it was my present self looking to this idea for my older self and wondering: how do I get there? All of it happening together.

I realised at some point, the only way to go forward was to be your own role model. I want the kid inside me to know that the people he thought should exist, in fact, do, and always have. I want to be one of those people, and hopefully pick some others like me as I go along. I guess, I have always looked at it that way.

There is no me. I don’t exist. Just the reflection, the ephemeral silhouette of what I call my life on the treadmill of how we perceive time, running one after the other, not knowing which came first. All of my selves—past, present, future—existing together.

I’m a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of myself through the metaphorical tunnel. I was always running after myself, ahead of myself, continually. Nothing else matters. Nothing else came close.

Nothing could, not even myself.

On most days, I hated reading anything I had written before. I’d read something I wrote years ago and I’d get this feeling of detachment. As if I hadn’t written it in the first place. As if it was a vague memory that I could remember the presence of but not its details.

It stood there, like smudged marks of graphite that said something important once upon a time but are now reduced to a blur. If you looked closely, you’d see the lines etched on the paper, provided you were lucky it left a recognisable mark. Otherwise, it was lost.

I regretted sharing everything, in hindsight. Once a word was out, it wasn’t my own. It was yours. It was your neighbour’s. It belonged to your friend. Your sibling played with it, aimlessly. It was everyone’s and it was out. It was a part of my life handed into countless hands by myself.

So, no matter how much I wanted it to be the case, on some days with some words, I often wished I’d never written them. Some things should’ve been my own. You should’ve never known of them. Of course, I can’t take the words back. They were out there, forever. That was writing.

Although, I wonder if memories aged better if they were behind windows of glass or fences of metal—visible yet out of reach. I wonder if you could record them like that, keeping some parts of them with yourself, forever, never to be shared, and yet, spilling everything else.

I wonder if it was possible to write like that—without telling everyone everything. I wonder if I would ever figure it out. I’ll have to keep going as I have been—giving it all away—until I do.

Tell me, what do you make of irony?

There was nothing to tell. I had nothing to tell anyone. I had no story, and people told them all the time. It wasn’t like I didn’t live a life worth talking about. Far from it, on most days. Yet, I didn’t have what it takes to tell a story, you know?

A great war, a great tragedy, a great issue, a great struggle; I didn’t have anything. I was just a guy who had learned to string two sentences together. That was it. I was the guy who wrote, but I wasn’t a guy who was for something, anything.

I had no story to tell. There was a semblance of the classic tropes from rags to riches, to the great romantic tragedy, to the valley boy in the big city, but they were all lukewarm; I liked lukewarm, too. At least, when it came to my coffee. You could hold the cup from any side if it was lukewarm. That’s how I held my life too—not too strongly, not too tightly, and not too carefully. I liked it lukewarm.

I didn’t have a burning passion or a story worth telling. I was just a guy who had learned to string two sentences together who took a walk every day. Then, came home and wrote about it. There was nothing to tell, and all I had told already was all I would ever tell anyone, and that meant never telling a story because if there was a story in me, it was in the untold.

I was less than any of those who came before and those who will come after. That was my greatest disappointment—to somewhat know how to write, and have nothing to write about. They had so much to talk about. Everyone around me had an agenda. And here was I, sitting in a café by myself, looking at a cup of coffee and reading a book, thinking about nothing of significance.

That was all I wanted to do, and all I would ever do. I had just learned to put words together. I was the wrong person to have done that. Thousands were better than me. There were millions of them with their stories. I had nothing to tell anyone, and yet, I was the one writing.

When I imagine what the inside of my head looks like, I often imagine a large hall with bookshelves and cupboards filled with neatly filed books and notes. The cupboards and shelves are split into three rows for the three different roles I tend to play in the every day. Each row of cupboards is followed by a dimly lit desk. All three desks are identical. I see myself sitting on any one of those at a given point in time, getting up intermittently to walk around the hall, and referring to the respective cupboards, and through them my notes.

I see a fireplace with a chair to sit on for all the times I’m not sitting at any of the desks. I see myself sitting there a lot. More often than not, though, a sort of haze enters through the window. The hall, usually warm and amber, gets an aura of blue and immediately becomes bleaching and blinding white. Suddenly, the cupboards are invisible and only the cracks of the fire are audible, and I can’t see anything. I’m unable to find the desks and the fireplace; the fog starts to get heavier.

So, I find myself standing in one place when I should be very well sitting at a desk or on the chair. I find myself standing there, stuck, for days. I can’t seem to find the door and window either to fully revel in the cluelessness of the mist. The haze comes and goes on its own but often, it overstays its welcome. The haze leaves eventually as it had arrived—on its own.

It gets a bit tedious to stand there alone for days unable to do, think, record anything; the fog is too thick usually and I feel lost inside my own head. So, while on the outside I’m functioning, I can’t remember what I should for I can’t find my notes, and I can’t find answers for I need my desks for that, and I can’t find solace because my chair isn’t around.

The haze comes without an alarm, and those around me can’t see it, of course. So, to them I appear a bit aloof and uncaring, which is of course different from what has actually happened. While on the outside, it appears as if I’m spacing out, lost in thought a lot, it stands to reason and rightly so, that I’m usually just lost. It is indeed a terrible misunderstanding

I don’t know who you are or whether we’ve met before, but I wanted to talk to you about music. I was walking the other day on the all-too-familiar streets when I found myself listening to the piano in my ears.

Nothing too snobbish, really, just some pieces of the piano playing. I couldn’t care less for the names. While some of it felt all-too-classical and made the streets feel like a slippery slope to pretentiousness, it was mostly grounded to my shallow depth.

You know me, I can pretend to be all deep and introspective. But in truth, I’m just a regular bloke who learned to watch people from afar. They tell you everything if you watch them from afar. It is when they’re close that they have the luxury to lie.

As the tracks played in my ears, I felt a sudden melancholy happiness, as ironic as that sounds, come from within me. I was cheery, but I was also despondent.

I’ve learned that just because some emotions don’t make sense in the language we use, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. I believe when we face such feelings, we must go out of our way to invent new phrases instead of morphing our emotions into those we have handy.

In my experience, those are the only times we truly feel something; the times when we don’t have a word for how we feel is when we don’t jump to the shortcut of calling it something. We have to feel it thoroughly to feel it for the first time.

So, I felt it all, and I let it come. The traffic appeared to be moving at its own speed, but the piano made it go slower. I could hear the horns, the loud conversation, the cacophony, but it wasn’t jarring anymore. If anything, it made me smile.

The city was the piano, and I felt as if I was walking on its keys. Perhaps, that’s what music does, you know? It makes us create a reality of our own, and for me, I can’t not feel what I felt that evening whenever I walk in this city now.

That makes me wonder, though. Maybe I’ll never meet you in the same city, whoever you are. Perhaps, I’ll meet you in the same song someday. I guess, it’s a thought as good as any, and that’s a good place to meet as any. Yes, I’ll meet you in the same song someday.

I wonder, though, whether we’ve already met.

For a lot of people, and for good reasons they had on the tip of their tongues, it was the worst time to be alive. It was scary, and you could die whenever. There was chaos in the air, wafting through the ochre landscape of autumn.

It didn’t matter if it was the year or just life, in itself. Life was as dreary and dry as the brown and orange leaves, but for what it’s worth, they convinced themselves it was the year. It made sense too, for most of us.

For some of us, we had begun this year on a note that was a tad bit higher than our usual. For some of us—for me—I had let go of my cynicism. It was the year I was supposed to fall in love with everything I could possibly fall in love with.

I remember: on a cold January morning, ecstatic and overflowing with warmth, I felt the sun and decided to look for hope. The world had all of us by the throat, but I was going to smile anyway. That is what I had decided, and that is what I was going to do.

People were good. The world was inherently a good place. It was a mess, sure, but it has been messier before. I was done with the heralds and the news and my general belief that everyone was out to get me. Even if they were, they were fewer. There were more of us. I had to believe there were more of us. There ought to be more of us.

Then, the year passed in a blink of an eye as we stayed inside our little boxes in little buildings, given we had a box to be locked up in. Suddenly, it was autumn already, and the leaves turned auburn and started to die.

Another January was around the corner, and they said it was the worst time to be alive, and yet, I couldn’t shake the sun off. I couldn’t help but smile. I couldn’t help but hope. It took me a lot of time to get here, you see, and I couldn’t give that up. No matter what happened, this was the year I recovered from perpetual hopelessness.

You’d know what I mean if you felt it too. Hope digs deeper into those who have forgotten how selflessly the sun shines. Once its roots set in, you can’t give it up that easy. It won’t let you pull itself out, end of the world or otherwise.

You’d know if you knew. You’d know I wasn’t going to give it up that easy. I had felt the sun.

Let me tell you about the city where nothing ever happens. Before it was a city, it was still a town, and I was a boy. When I was a boy, I believed this place to be too small. There was nothing but trees, a handful of people, and going to school was an excursion.

So, I left the town where nothing ever happened. What was I supposed to do here, anyway? If you didn’t like walking in the morning and talking to the neighbours, what would you do?

I left, like most people I knew who were coming of age—I had dreams of my own. I would return, though, every fortnight or so, for the world was too large, and the cities too brutal. The cacophony was overwhelming; the town was a warm hug you could always count on.

So, I needed a place where nothing ever happened. I needed to find a bench in a park all too familiar to most of us, and I needed to sit there, and I needed to sip my coffee and not be bothered anymore.

Until, one day, I came back all grown up, dragging my luggage behind me, and I didn’t see the town. It was a city, alright. Perhaps, as I was growing, the town was growing too. I hadn’t noticed it at all.

So, I found myself broken beyond repair, and for some reason, the town felt broken too. Both of us were yet to be at peace with the tragedies of being cut in places; to learn that while being cut was necessary, it hurt nonetheless. Grown as we were, we parted our ways.

It wasn’t until I decided to come back one day, calmer. It was then that I compared our scars. I found that just like myself, it had found its warm new corners where innocent trees once stood. I realised that the town didn’t hurt anymore, and neither did I.

So, like old days, we spent time together again, and the walks didn’t feel strange, and neither did those you once knew. So, began an inside joke, and we didn’t want anyone to know the truth. I started calling it the city where nothing ever happened—I lied.

True, nothing ever happened here. Well, nothing of significance for the world, perhaps. But for us, it was everything; it was where everything happened. It was where a town became a city, and a boy became a man.

Come to think of it, what else could have happened anyway?

I knew a lot of people who were difficult to understand. I wasn’t like that. I was a simple person, or at least I strove to be one. In my experience, everyone else was extremely convoluted, and so that’s what they sought in others, failing to truly reach any understanding at all.

I was an anomaly then because I said how I felt and I did what I said. Well, I tried to, at least. I was a glitch because I was exactly what sat in front of people. Nothing about me was out of the ordinary because I simply had better things to do than lie or deceive or try to be someone I was not. That made me extremely unlikeable quite often. As I grew, I learnt to be okay with that trade-off.

As fond of conversation as I was, there was a lot I never said. I said what I said because I truly believed it. That didn’t mean I wasn’t wrong often. I was wrong all the time, but not when people said I was, almost never then. If you were to get to know me, you’d have all of the inner workings of my head in these words alone, and for most people, I knew that was enough.

So reading was the best bet for a lot of people who came across me. Even if you read it all, you’d not know everything, but that would be a good place to start. We could talk then, and I’d assume you would come with some sort of understanding about who I was, and then, I would break it all apart. Perhaps, it was one thing to know about me, about how I did things, about how I acted, about who I was, about where I was from.

Maybe it was another to know me. If you wanted to know me, all you’d have to do was ask, and I’d tell you everything. That’s what people never did. They never asked. They were too busy playing around with narratives in their head, and their opinion for how the world worked. They were always wrong.

In any case, to know me, all you’ll have to do is ask, and I’ll smile, then tell you everything there was to know. To know me, all you have to do is look carefully, and I’ll spill it all, without uttering a word. To know me, you’ll first have to have me let you in. Otherwise, you’re stuck with knowing about me, and for that, you have these words and your reasoning for the world.

What then do you need me for?

Nothing mattered you know? Nothing but the proverbial plate, and me putting too much on it, every day. It was who I was as a person, and nothing could change that, and nothing else mattered; nothing but the plate mattered—overflowing, unending, infinite.

“You look exhausted, man,” they’d tell me. “Yeah, I am,” I’d nod a bit and smile. It didn’t matter if I escaped to the sea or to the mountains or even outer space because the plate would go with me, and before I could stop, it would make itself known. It wasn’t the end of the world. It was much more.

Everything I was happy with, everything I was grateful for, everything I despised, everything I wanted to end—it was all on the plate. I just had too much on it. It wasn’t all bad, just too much, all the time. I couldn’t go through it all, and clearing it only made space for new things.

I learned that life was the proverbial plate and that there was always too much on it. It could never be empty—the plate. And not just for me, it was too much for all of us. That was the beauty of it. The plate was everything in itself. We’d keep braving our way through it trying to clear it, hoping for an empty one when we’re done. We were never done. No one was ever done.

Once we accepted that, though, life got easier. It got simpler once we understood that life was about braving the plate and not about clearing it, that we will always have more on our plates than we wanted, and that someday, the plates would eat us alive.

All my life I’ve been leaving you behind, love. I left you on the promenade as the otherwise raging sea lay calm and watched me walk along amidst the crowd, smiling, perhaps for the first time in a long time. I left you as I unboxed a shoebox full of memories and found a dried-up rose in it; I left you as I put the rose into the pile labelled: discarded. I left you as I lost myself in the city of chaos, picking up random fights in bars or sometimes, buying drinks for everyone on the floor. One action not too different from the other, both of them making me feel something again. I left you in a drawer in an otherwise empty apartment: the only thing I left behind as I packed my life together in eleven neat boxes. I left you at the airport as I boarded a flight to a place called home, visiting it for the very first time again. I left you as I sat in a café, staring blankly at a chair that reminded me of the last time I saw you, years ago. As I sipped my coffee and stared out the all familiar window again, I let out a sigh and chuckled. The joke was on me. You see, all these years, I’ve been leaving love behind, love, but tell me: what else could you do when you’re left behind yourself?

I’m often asked why I take things so seriously? Why do I try to find the only song that could fit on a moment? Why do I run around finding the best bits to make a story that I personally believe in? Why do I require everything to be wrapped up so neatly towards the end? Why do I continuously try to close the loop? Why do I look at life in not years but journeys and arcs?

I have just one thing to say about that: why not?

You see, life is terrible and painful for each person. God is dead, if there ever was such a thing, but I don’t think that was ever the case. The point is that it’s all probably pointless. We enter here without a say or choice or volition of our own, and then we’re supposed to carry on? How are we supposed to do that, and why?

So, when everything is pointless, and nothing makes sense, I find a narrative. I find a tune that goes so well with my closing the door on an empty apartment that it has to fit. It would be unjust for it to not do that.

I look at things as if I was lost in a daze—staring—as if I didn’t belong in the scene and was put there, because I was, and all of us were. So, it only makes sense to look at all this as a story someone else wrote. Aren’t we just characters in an epic anthology?

I imagine montages of my friends doing whatever they do when I’m walking outside. It plays like a movie in my head. Me making coffee has to be so precise that it demands to be on canvas. There’s no other way.

That’s what life is all about. There’s nothing else. You do things. You do things well. You make sure you value those things. This is my way of valuing them: I romanticise the fuck out of everything.

I don’t change cities; I go through a journey of transformation. I don’t get my heart broken; I get on a rollercoaster of change. I don’t pack; I selectively leave things which aren’t a part of who I am anymore behind. That’s who I am, and who I’ll be going forward.

My life is my art, and it is for my eyes only. Everything you see is an interpretation. The true piece, the honest work, the magnum opus is in my head: safe and sound.

That’s the only thing I have that I specifically chose in this life, and I’m never going to give it away.

I wonder why it was when something started ending, the way we looked at it changed all of a sudden.

Everything appeared to move in slow motion the minute you realised a relationship was ending, a friend was moving away, a loved one was sick, you were switching cities; as soon as we realised change was afoot, we saw things differently.

Somehow the every day cup of coffee became beautiful, and the songbirds became your best friends, and the laughter that was jarring once became the sweetest song you heard, and the aggravating arguments became things you just smile blankly at, and all the anger turned to mush, and your dying dog’s fur became the softest thing you’ll ever touch, and that last smile in a café became your favourite one for all of eternity.

As if we were programmed to save the most important memories—without knowing which ones are important—as images imprinted in our conscience, forever. As if there’s a switch in our heads that flips and an alert pops up, saying,

Look carefully, and make sure you register that smile, that sunset, that apartment, that sound, just all of it; it’s the last time you’re looking at it and experiencing it for the rest of your life, and even if it feels like the worst thing in the world right now, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.

And we did. We missed it all, once it was all over. The worst parts too. Especially the worst parts—sometimes, overlapped with the thousand good ones, images painted over images, like something out of a Dali painting which shouldn’t make much sense but makes sense nonetheless.

And a collection of “”firsts””, neatly filed into folders, geotagged and timestamped, arranged in the drawers of our personal archives, ready to be opened and make us smile, whenever life seems a bit difficult. It works too. It always works, and it comes on its own.

It’s as if we’re programmed to take the best out of everything, to be optimists. Perhaps, that’s the secret. We are inherently an optimistic species—the reminders to stay so etched in the workings of how we store memories.

Perhaps, that’s why we’ve survived for so long.

Sometimes, I’d wake up and sit up straight on the bed, thinking. I’d be in awe of reality, of life. I’d sit there, eyes wide open, a smile running across my face. I’d sit, dumbfounded and amazed at life and the fact that between all the large questions that we continually pondered over was the everyday.

We were here, we didn’t know why, and that was it. That was the game. It was the best choose-your-own-adventure ever made, and we chose so little, usually. It was our only shot at finding answers, not sitting around in a chair, ruminating over stale, dead-end questions. I could do everything, I thought. I could be anything, and all I had to do was get out of this bed today. That’s it.

I talked to others about it too, and more often than not, they’d look at it with the lens of their own mornings, and they could never see it with that clarity. The clarity I sat in surrounded only by a ruffled blanket, as the sunlight peeked in from between the golden curtains, calling me out to play.

Damn, the opportunities we had to learn from history, to be here right now, to make the future; we could only hope to contribute in some meaningful way for everyone else to ever come, and for everyone else already here. Our legacy was not a gift of a plan or a specific goal; our legacy was in the gift of hindsight, dots connected long after we’re gone.

Was it any lesser of a purpose? To make sure you didn’t waste the day in front of you. To be kind and understanding. To exhibit your inner virtues, whichever they may be, with honesty. It was the greatest purpose of all. That was the best thing you could do, hopefully, for anyone else down the line, anyone who sat upright in their bed, feeling a surge of energy run through them.

And so, I spent my days trying my best to turn those mornings into afternoons and evenings. I talked to others about it too, and they said things like, “You can’t do everything, man, that’s crazy.” And so, I’d nod and look at them. Then, I’d look past them and at the open sky, just so blue and wide and infinite.

Then, I’d tell them: watch me try.

People want so much in life, you know? I’m not like that. I’m the most unambitious man you’ll ever meet. I don’t have a lot of goals. I have one—the café.

I see a misty hill, and the rain pattering, softly. I see the dimly lit street lamps, rusted and trying their best to illuminate the foggy, winding path. I see a wooden door with a bed of flowers nearby, standing between the shivering blue cold and the golden warmth inside.

I can hear the faint music emanating from it; it’s very specific. I see the counter, and I see myself behind it. Tired, somewhat old, slightly dejected with life but also, relaxed and slow and grateful. I see a few people inside—the regulars. Who else would come to that lonely hill?

I watch myself talk to people about life and engage them in conversation about all sorts of ideas. I see my younger self in the boy who visits sometimes, alone yet comfortable. I find myself never missing or forgetting the coffee each person likes… or tea, for that matter.

Then, I watch as I tell everyone it’s closing time. I see myself retiring to my living quarters, right above the café. I clean up and fix myself some sort of dinner. Then, I begin to write—nothing of significance, just musings—irrelevant words, not too different from the ones you’re reading right now.

Why then do I keep running, doing as much as I can right now? It’s precisely because I see the café, vividly. It’s almost as if I travelled ahead in the future and got a peek through the window. But, I don’t know how to get there. I feel life will happen, and I will get there when I do.

So, when I do, I want to be able to talk to those regulars, and I want to be able to share stories, and I want to be able to offer them books and coffee for chump change. I want them to run into the door to seek warmth, and I want them to find it there.

And so, here I am, the most unambitious man you’ll meet today doing everything in his power to remain just that. I need all these stories, and I need this life, and when it’s time for the café to pop up, I’ll know. It has come to my realisation that one always knows when the right time for something arrives.

Anyway, would you like a cup of coffee?

Hey, let me in you on a little secret—I don’t write about everything. Promise me you won’t tell anyone.

You see, I barely write about anything I experience at all. I can’t put words to things I don’t understand, and I understand very little. Everything anyone sees is a glimpse, as if out of a window on a stormy evening.

So, when I recently started to talk about love again, it worried a few friends. Of course, it should. If history is any indication, it doesn’t go well for me when that happens. The funny thing is that they don’t understand because they don’t know our secret.

I can write about it now because I understand what I felt. It’s the pile of considerable paperwork that I’m only beginning to sift through. What have I been doing alone, you ask? That is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been reading between the lines of every moment, finally, and understanding what happened.

So, now, when I think about everything, I spill. I spill like someone who has not spoken for too long. I spill like the glass of wine that once fell out of my hand and smashed against the tiled floor. I spill like the drop that managed to escape the glass as it hit and shattered, thinking it had a better fate for itself, as it landed on the white wall, stuck, forever.

I’ve been moving like a well-oiled complex system of gears which has just started to move, cog-in-cog. As if it was stuck because of a stubborn, broken piece of metal in the corner, hiding away slyly. As if the piece just fell out of its own, exhausted with its pointless mission.

I’ve pumped words about love out lately because I finally managed to patch the little holes on my heart, here and there. It’s all as good as new. So, I will keep the words coming. You see, now that I talk about it all, they’ll know all of it. They’ll know everything that happened years ago.

But I hope you can keep this little secret of ours. That writing is a craft for those who are terribly slow. It’s always running behind life as it happens. I hope I can count on you. Don’t tell them that they don’t know what they don’t know. Maybe, someday I’ll spin words about what’s happening now.

Until then, mum’s the word.

This evening, last year, I wrote about a cup of coffee. I wrote about how I spilt that coffee on myself. You see, we’re sly, those who call ourselves artists or you know, at least try to put out a good metaphor, once in a while. The cup of coffee was a relationship. It was a relationship that had just ended amidst what was, even by the end of last year, the worst couple of weeks.

I was vulnerable, trying to fix things with myself, there was a new health issue, there was persistent pain in my right leg, and goes without saying, the ever-present general overwhelm of life. Honestly, I wasn’t doing so well. So, when I wrote about the cup of coffee, the metaphor, the relationship, I omitted a specific moment. It didn’t fit well with the metaphor.

You see, between spilling the coffee, feeling that intense burn and getting a cab, there was a moment when I stood still. The lid that had become loose and spilt the coffee on me was lying some six steps away from me, my shirt was dripping of hot, scalding coffee, and I stood there. I was sobbing. I stood there for what seemed like a really long time. I lost track, actually. You often do when you lose everything else.

I remember, no one stopped. No one picked the lid. No one asked me why I was crying. So, I did what I had always done — I took six steps. I picked the lid up, I zipped my hoodie up, and I walked outside to get a cab. Then, I came home, and I wrote about it, hoping to put a good one out that day. That was the one thing I knew I could still do.

So, when I was talking to an acquaintance today as I sat in my apartment, doing nothing but sipping coffee and staring outside my window as it drizzled, and when they asked me, “”So, what are you chasing these days?”, answering spontaneously with, “Nothing, man. I’m just… slowing things down for a change” made me smile and remember that moment.

The moment when I took six steps, on my own, picked the lid up, zipped my hoodie up, got a cab, got groceries and came home.

Funnily enough, I lost that cup sometime later, without even realising it had dropped out of my backpack. It was a great cup, but it never seemed to fit just right, you know?

I was taking a walk the other day when it started to rain. I didn’t stop, though. It was drizzling, and I was okay with it. As I walked, I saw society trying its best to revive itself. I saw the neighbourhood coming out for whatever excuse they could manage.

One idea led to another, and before I knew, I was on a train of thought I couldn’t quite grasp. There have always been pandemics. There have always been wars. All of history is the same thing all over again, and again. It’s a terrible cycle. The further back you go, the more you see that it’s all the same.

So, what is it all about? What is it that’s demanded of us? What is the large question?

Perhaps, there’s something terribly wrong that we’ve been doing all this time. Perhaps, none of this matters anyway. Maybe, it’s some simulation where they change just one little thing and check if it works then scrap the attempt again. Who were they?

I kept asking myself all of these questions as I continued walking. Then, it hit me, quite literally too. A vehicle hit me as I crossed the road. I got up, dusting myself off. After an exchange of apologies, I shrugged it off and continued walking. It was then that I realised, though.

Perhaps, the grand answer, whatever it was, wasn’t in the grand questions but was in what’s right next to us. We could ponder over and wrestle with the broader questions as much as we wanted to, convinced we were doing something great. The fact would still be the same: that we’d miss what was right in front of us.

Perhaps, the most significant issues in history have never been about the grand struggle of the human collective but rather how oblivious each one of us was to our blind spots. We never see danger approaching because we’re too distracted, too lost in thought, too busy and full of ourselves, and too great in our heads.

Maybe the answer was in each person being fully aware of themselves by themselves. Perhaps, that’s when we’d become a better collective after all. When all of us know where we’re going, individually, when we don’t get involved in proverbial accidents, and when we don’t commit errors easily avoided.

Maybe it’ll be then that history would stop repeating itself.

I was doing the dishes tonight, and I thought of you for a wee second. That’s how I thought of you now. It just came all of a sudden — no warning, no alarm. Nothing changed at the moment, and I didn’t lose myself like I used to before. It’s been years now so I guess that’s natural. I thought about you and where you were, and for a second I wondered if you thought about me too, sometimes. As the water kept running on my hand, I paused and thought what time it must be there, wherever you are, but I was too tired for all that mental gymnastics. I thought about you and started toying with this idea of whether you think of me like this too. You know, just innocently, when a thought comes and goes all on its own. I scoffed at the idea a second later. The water was running and so I continued doing the dishes.

I guess, that’s what I don’t like about it, you know? The fact that I am alright. That even though it felt like it for a while, the world didn’t end. That even though it felt like it did for a while, time didn’t stop. That even though it felt like I did for a while, I didn’t stop moving. That life went on, and that I am in this apartment now, doing my dishes and listening to the music we once danced to, and not thinking of you because of the song anymore. That, everything is okay. That you’re somewhere else, probably asleep or wide awake or I don’t know doing what, and that I couldn’t care less. That’s what makes it all real, I guess. That’s what says it really happened. That you and I once did dance to that song, and that we don’t anymore. I guess that’s what I’m not a fan of, you know? That’s what bugs me sometimes. That it all really happened.