I posted my newest essay at Small Heresies today on women-only spaces, and it got very few views. I looked at the dashboard with trepidation because I did not want to ascribe a statistical value to the point of view I expressed. I work on these essays through the month, reading books around the topic, skewing my algorithm for it, and making notes upon notes. This labour of love is my reward, or so I like to think. I write these essays because I sincerely believe they need to exist. That I have to market them, ride the trend wave, and optimise SEO is a gig I am not wholly up for.
While I was driving to college for my photography class today, I was thinking about my dreams for my writing. How do I want to mould my writing? What stories do I want to tell? I searched my mind for the reasons why I wanted to write in the first place, and while my memories were hazy, I realised that I need to chisel out a vision of where I want my writing to take me, where I want to go along with it. In this way, I went through my childhood dreams one-by-one like an inventory of the past, now accounted by someone who has agency, a little more privilege, and a little less fear.
After all, I wasn’t put on this Earth to climb a corporate ladder, nor to sacrifice my hours to pay taxes. A consistent question I ask myself now — what will I account for in my hereafter?
A feeble response I get is that I want to feel my heart again, follow its unorganised rhythms, and see what can happen. The best thing about growing older as a woman is that you can be as crazy as you want. The allegations have been made, the jury has presided over your case. You might as well go awry. You might as well walk around with yellow butterflies in your hair, and a glint in your eye. It is this glint that I am trying to find.
Speaking of which, when The Guardian posted its list of top 100 books as voted by authors, critics, and academics, I was so taken in by the User Interface of the list that it drove me to my old book cupboard scouring for the books that I had started, but did not finish. The user interface of this book list felt human — specially in the age of AI — as if someone who loved books had stacked them neatly, designed them to open and close like the blinds of a window through which you see the seasons change. I picked up my unfinished copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and read it right until the end; finding inside it delirium, dazzling colour, vagabond love, and inventiveness. I felt like I had gone back into the past when reading was an act of love, of submission to the world of the novel without question*.
I read this yesteryear book in spaces that were very quiet. I realised that coffee shops are too loud for reading, and so is almost every other place whether it be a park, the cafeteria, or even home. I bought a pair of passive acoustic ear plugs to lower the noise outside without any technology interference inside my ear canal. My Pisces-self which craved to be alone from time-to-time found respite in lowered noises, and closed quiet spaces that I stole from my own life. When I was reading in almost-silence, I could hear the words, feel them inside my brain, and be present in the moment. It was surreal as if, I had rinsed myself off of the world for a while.
Now, I consciously try to spend time alone, lower the sounds around me, finish old books that I left unread (current read: The Master and the Margarita), and pick out old dreams from the drawers of my childhood.
In these quiet synapses of time that I find for myself, I try to hear my breathing, at first laborious, and then, at a pace of its own. I can hear thudding of my heart, and yet, it seems as if I have not reckoned with it in a while, not consulted it. What do you have to say? Many a times there is no response, as if the answer does not exist. As if I have entered a cave and called out to its inhabitant, and I wait for someone to answer, and I wait and wait, in the hope that the voice is still travelling. In the hope that someone is in there. In the hope that I am not alone out here. I wish for my heart to not be alone, to know that I am here, calling out to it. I am trying to lower the noise of the outside so I can hear the sounds inside me. I am walking into its cave, and tip toeing inside, but more importantly, I am waiting for a response.
What do you have to say?
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*This is the feeling I have been chasing ever since I wrote Reading, Interrupted published in The Bombay Literary Magazine.
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