Dear S,
This is your warning: a baked cherry tomato has steam trapped inside it and you could burn the roof of your mouth. You may loathe to write Dear at the beginning of a journal entry, but you are dear to me, nonetheless. Even if I don’t show it. Even if it has been days and days of sleeping in and not working out. Here’s a thought: maybe you are meant to workout in the evening. Maybe the juice is not meant to be that cold. Maybe you don’t need a coffee frother, because you don’t drink coffee or tea all that much. When you’re overthinking, substitute the thoughts in your mind with this question: what is your go-to drink of choice? I don’t suppose you have one, and it is perfectly okay if you don’t. Not all social constructs are valid. Remember that, please. You see the ledge on the side of the road? It is meant for old couples to sit side-by-side and talk about this-and-that. It is meant for you and him, and I truly hope you will talk more about dreams than about grief. Even with me, talk more about your dreams than your grief, will you?. I know what is upsetting you right now — the persistence of everything. The unmelodious cacophony. And excess. You’re unable to fathom why there is so much of everything, including apathy and austerity. What about that lip burn, though? The cough, and the irregular chipping of nails. They break and so do you. They grow back and so do you. You think about what you would say when you meet Kareem on subwaytakes. Western therapy is making people lonelier, ruining friendships, is one contender. I know you are disappointed that when you called your friend to talk about something, she said she will call back in 15 minutes, but hasn’t done so, and it has been 20 days. Or that when another friend dumped her therapist’s advice on you instead of talking to you about this and that. Sometimes all you want is to talk to your friends instead of being given advice by the barrel. You have repeated Ghalib so often in your head: ye kahāñ kī dostī hai ki bane haiñ dost nāseh / koī chārasāz hotā koī ġham-gusār hota. Ghalib was writing from a place of deep wisdom. You didn’t end up going to Gurgaon recently and wonder if that was a good or a bad thing. It hardly matters, is what I would say. The past is in the past for a reason. I know your reading is slower, but the other day when you sat down with Virginia Woolf in a local cafe, and she was explaining PTSD hundreds of years before PTSD was even coined, was a good day, wasn’t it? It was easier to feel back then without assigning too many labels. You watch over the plants you’ve planted in the flower bed instead of in your window sill. Their timid height, nascent years, and occasional flowering make you wonder if you will be around to see them grow taller and stronger. Then, you think about how much time it has taken the jackfruit tree to grow that large, and once again, the impressions of time and their looming shadow falls upon you. This is a reminder that everything takes a long, long time to grow. Clocks and instant content are antithetical to the inherent, slow march of life. That day, in that Irani Cafe, when you sat down under a canopy of trees, the world slowed down for a bit. The tea was too sweet, the breeze flit in and out, and it was a calming time in an otherwise adrenaline rush of a trip. It does something to your mind — this slowing down — specially when you live so fast. It feels like the brain is breathing after a long time. It feels like a place of rest that you go to, when everyone else has left. What if we could live a little slower, you ask, among other things. There will always be other things.
Love.
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