Currents

There’s a golden rule they tell us writers — the longer you don’t write, the harder it becomes to even put out a sentence on the page — and it’s as good as gospel truth. A quiet sort of dread settles inside you and you’re scared of what words you’re going to say, how bad they’re going to be, or worse, what truth they’re carrying.

Sometimes, I get scared to write because I feel like I will tell the truth, the whole truth. Of course, that’s just delusional nonsense, most times it’s because I feel like the words aren’t good enough. Though it must be admitted, there are times when words fail. Of late, life has been full of these moments. Of late, I am content with just living, the expression of it can wait. For I have come to believe that you have to wait to have the vocabulary to express an emotion already felt, a thought already had. What this does though, is that it brings a certain amount of belatedness to expression and colours one’s memory in whatever impression we have had of our past. Not to say that that is a bad thing. For distance, even in self-expression, is vital. But what if everything I write these days is an echo of my past-self marinated and coated in untruths that I made up on the way?

Maybe it is. Who knows?

The other day, I woke up missing ‘This is Us’ and it’s not even due for a season return anytime soon. I concluded that it was because someone asked me when was the last time I cried. Or maybe not. Maybe I dreamt about someone asking me that. That morning, I had this memory of myself returning home after work, cuddling up with my laptop, and silently sobbing to the point of choking as I watched episode after episode of this monstrously beautiful, full of unabashed love, and heartbreaking show. Then I felt like I was thinking about some other girl, someone who lived in a different time than I did. I’m not that person anymore.

I wonder how easy it is to convince yourself that this present life is the one you’ve been living ever since you can remember. How easy it is to forget that you have been other versions of yourself before this and how you’re going to be even more iterations of who you are. Once someone told me, it’s so easy to ‘myth-ify’ the past. I now realise it’s also very easy to ‘myth-ify’ the present, to be so wholly consumed by it that we forget it’s going to be all over too soon and we’re going to be different people again. The imperpanence of our selves and our lives is not omnipresent enough or maybe it is so obvious that it is terrifying. After all I get the feeling that the actual act of living is not as exhausting as it is to live inside one’s head. The inside of the mind can be a terrifying place and I get the feeling that with the Internet, we spend all our time inside our heads not saying words aloud, not hearing our own voices, not knowing what we really want to say. There’s must be a word for it, this constant living inside the suffocation of our own thoughts.

Anyhoo.

In other news, I haven’t blogged in two months, so there may be an update or two about the poetry I am in love with, new characters that I can’t wait to introduce on this blog, and some beautiful stories I have read. And just so it is out there, I won’t be writing about NYC because there isn’t a ding dang thing I can say about the city that hasn’t already been said. Everything they say about NYC is true. It’s every bit as fantastic as the hype has made it out to be. And just so we’re clear, Mumbai has the best people in the world. So, you can water zumba your way to fitness with hot bods in NYC but only in Mumbai will even a stranger be able to make you feel less alone.

I have a lot to write about, I do. Some of it is uncomfortable. Some of it is about his eyes. And some, about the nature of things and how I’ve come to believe in circles. I’ve got it all, I’ve to just rearrage the words.

Meanwhile, for posterity, it bears saying that this entire phase is like ‘This is Us’; full of gargantuan joy and immeasurable love that breaks my heart on a daily basis, and flanked by the serrated grief that punctuates these sunlit corridors of living.

It’s all good.