The Persistence of the Present

I woke up today with a few messages on my phone. One from one of my oldest and dearest friends, stating he was going to MOMA to see his favourite painting.

I reflected, as I am wont to whilst languidly taking in the sunshine-spackled view of my French garden through my bay windows; I remember that Dali was one of my all-time favourite artists, how Persistence of Memory was my the one painting that called out to me, watching the slideshow my art teacher was presenting when I was 11.

And yet, now I realize the difference in me. Whereas the old me, the one who is mostly all over this blog and my poetry blog, was so very much deeply entrenched in memory—the idea of living, reliving, not forgetting, cherishing, not relinquishing—the me today is so much more content to simply be here now.

In fact, I am so actively propelled into the moment I am living by my sheer joy in rediscovering what it means to do so. No more wallowing in old memories, no more wishing for times long gone. There is a very high-energy happiness that goes into rediscovering this very moment for exactly what it is. It is the spirit of simply being.

Be happy for this moment; this moment is your life.

Expectations of Empathy

This morning at work, I was returning from a meeting and passed a colleague. As she passed, I sensed it.

She was asking someone on my team a question when I sidled up to her and waited for her to finish her query. As she turned, I simply put my arms around her. 

"Hi Nadia," I said quietly, "I think you need a hug right now."

And she just started crying. There in my arms, she held on and sobbed. 

I think it's because I know what it's like to hold in so much pain, and contain all the grief in a very tight vessel that you think you've buried deep inside that I am able to sense it so acutely and tangibly in others.

I recall recently talking to someone very important to me and we were discussing our lives, and also that thing about being empaths. I recall pondering the idea that I sometimes tell myself that I am able to absorb all the pain that is out there in the world and perhaps help mitigate the anguish and despair that is out there, if perhaps somehow, even a little bit, it makes the world we live in a better place.

I don't know. Maybe it's a way of surviving for me. I've done my share of locking out people and pushing away those who care simply from a deeply entrenched emotional claustrophobia that maybe everything that comes my way is just a way of me getting my share.

Then again, just the way I spotted Nadia throughout the day chatting with colleagues, making jokes, cackling to her own surprise, I can smile to myself to know that perhaps just by my own small gestures I can provide comfort to others and help lighten the loads they are carrying just by acknowledging that I care.

There'll always be the people who will make sure you know that they care, not by assuming you know, but by their behaviour. It's also ok to let go of the naive idea that you can ever be so important to be someone's #1. Be your own #1. 

Crossroads

I woke up today with a dull, but intimately familiar, sense of melancholy. I am feeling the twinge, that effervescent strumming of heartstrings that resound in a song of hope yet with an underlying whisper of torment.

I find myself once again at a crossroads, or rather, in one of my favourite spaces: a state of liminality. I've broken free of the cage that has held me from fully stretching my wings to its utmost to truly soar. And still there is something that makes me hesitate; for I have flown beyond expectations and broken ceilings...nevertheless, I still find myself as guarded as ever with this strange feeling that's so familiar and yet so different in the best of ways.

I've wished that I had been able to return here - my comfort zone where I can pen my feelings and thoughts in the comfort of my words. But in the last several years, this too has been tainted with that disconcerting sense of peering eyes; watching and prying. It's a feeling that has prevented me from truly returning to writing the way I have before.

I wish, as always, that I had been able to record those moments that were less melancholic. I've put myself more into living in the moment - and in doing so, I've detached myself from dwelling. Dwelling in the form of sitting here and writing, dwelling in nostalgia, or perhaps running away from the possibility of hope. Perhaps I've been running from myself even whilst saying that I've focused on the now, at the cost of sacrificing the one vehicle that has always been my sanctuary. It's now the stirring in the air, coupled with this strange stirring that I find within that's yet again spurring me to write.

I recognize that I am now on a threshold. I'm trying to pace myself in enjoying things at a slower pace even while experience a crazy rush of strange emotions coming at me all at once. It's driving me crazy but I think it's safe to say that underneath it all I am enjoying every moment of it.

Entropy

What will it take for us to understand that love will resist all definition. It exists beyond our attempts to mold it into form, names and time. We try to claim it and conquer it, to find answers and meanings when it exists in a void beyond questions.

Love laughs in the face of our nets and snares; it answers to noone. Love is imperturbable chaos, it is reckless calm.

What will it take for us to understand? We will lose ourselves again and again, to drown and surface in this same murky ocean, and float adrift in the vast cosmos of love, until the very end of time.

Vavavoom

This morning I stood at my garden door, in the sunlit quiet, just enjoying the peace and serenity that comes with that feeling of being alone in a world that's still slumbering. As I stood there watching, I realized in front of me, almost camouflaged, was a huge monarch butterfly. It's wings were like a fine etched stain-glassed window, all gemstone oranges and gold and black.

As it quietly fed off my geraniums, I held my breath. I realized there was a part of me that itched to grab my camera and capture that moment for perpetuity. But for some reason I resisted, and let myself let go of that feeling of wanting to keep something for the future, and instead simply watched the butterfly as it nuzzled the flowers with its wings opening and closing in rapture.

I felt my breathe slow down, as I let myself simply enjoy the moment. Let the contentment and thrill of miracles wash through me. Sometimes it's okay to know that what you have now will soon flit away, maybe just be a nugget of doubt of "did I really experience that?" in memory..

But then again, perhaps simply letting yourself open yourself to the moment in the here, now and today, without worrying about what will come next, is what life is about.

Circles

Sometimes the best gift you can give yourself is to take that gift you thought was everything you every wanted and carefully wrap it back up, typing a perfect ribbon on top of where the old ribbon lay--and give it away.

and even though hurts you, still smile.

Slowing it down

Just because you have one plate doesn't mean you have to fill it up with just one dish at a time. It's okay to take just some at a time, putting a little of this and that, or a little of everything—allowing you to savour your favourite bit that much more.

Sea Glass: There's No Place Like

He’s sprawled on the couch, watching his latest favourite show while I am sprawled upside down, head on his lap and feet up on the back of the couch. Ostensibly reading, but really at this moment I am watching him from under my eyelashes, watching him upside down. It is a favourite place to be for me: not just there beside him or head on his lap but upside down, too. There is a infinite realism to experiencing the world this way, head over heels, or heels over head (...).

Life, I find, is sometimes too often experienced the way physics and biology, allegedly, designated us to do. But then if we didn’t let ourselves break rules, break hearts, break and fall over, trip, tumble, somersault or even get stuck when turned inside out and upside down, maybe we couldn’t really appreciate all there is to experience.

I can hear his heartbeat, the slow, steady and solid rhythm that’s often put me to sleep, has calmed me on nights when I’m wide awake and blinking in the dark. Same rhythm that has lulled me into a slow, lazy and content slumber. His face is a mask of ferocious grimace as he stares at the screen, inscrutable.

And yet, I watch and read so much. Not watchful as maybe an older, albeit younger, me would have done. There’s a peace in this place. Sometimes it is quiet, and not a word needs to pass. Sometimes, it is full of chatter, of giggles, hiccups, murmurs and sighs. A lot of times the peace of pure friendship, companionship, is cut through with a lightning bolt of electrical frisson as hairs spark on fire and emotions rage. This, to me, is the calmest place. This rocking ball of fire, topically rearranged as sensitivity, despair, uneasiness and anger, is sanctuary.

There once was a time and place when I wouldn’t have thought so. But edges of things broken have smoothed away. Sometimes it was time that did that smoothing, and sometimes I had to sequester myself in a dark closet armed with a nail file to metaphorically chisel away at those sharp broken edges to make them easier to live with. There once was a time when this left me bleeding and in puddles, ponds, oceans of tears. But a broken shard of glass lost in the sea returns to the shore as a smooth gemstone reflecting a million colours.

Now when we rage, I feel at home. Because that is the security of unconditional love. No matter how much you lambast the other, no matter how much you throw plates, books or grenades, you know that this is a safety net, an ever-expanding sanctuary that can contain all of that, can withstand all the flames and blasts. Boundaries of a certain brand of companionship that is far more elastic and accommodating than that of any other. That is home.

Even when we go quiet for days. Me in my place, he in his. Even when time just keeps going on its journey, the sanctuary of home exists.

It is this peace, this quintessence of love, that permeates the space of infinity. A place I continue to poke and prod, questioning its existence.  Sometimes it whispers back an inscrutable answer: I don’t need to understand it for it to happen.

Conditioned

There's been this weird thing happening. Whenever I go to the washroom, there is something behind the shower curtains. I find my eyes returning to a certain spot inside the bathtub.  Often, it stays with me, what I've seen. I leave half-absentmindedly, mind absorbed with what I just witnessed.

Eraser. There's a physicality in the word, a beautiful sense of closure, perhaps, in the way the word rolls around inside my head.

I find myself wondering about the word. About how little it is used today. Instead we use "delete" -- an easy tap on a button to remove something unwanted. But erase, there is something physical about it, a manual act almost, summoning memories of rolled up bits of indian rubber on old canvases. Maybe it's sepia-hued. Sometimes, it's not.

Memory sometimes makes one feel that things cannot be erased. Old hurts, broken hearts, things that seem like even if they mend, they leave cracks, shatter lines ... they seem almost un-erasable. And yet, time is supposed to be that healer. Does healing equal erasure, is what I want to ask, yet I already have my answer.

Sometimes this act of erasing is a physical, conscious act. You can erase someone out of your life. Sometimes you have to, in order to clear out what isn't needed, in order to make space for the things that are important. Sometimes erasing is forgiveness. Sometimes forgiveness is the same act as erasing a person from your life.

And then this act of erasure means erasing regrets, erasing those things you cannot change. Erasing words exchanged, erasing kisses exchanged, erasing promises exchanged. And the strangest thing about this is that for someone so immersed in memories and holding on to dreams, the act of erasure is so damn fulfilling.

It is fulfilling to just let go of weighted sentences, of words riddled with meaning. Fulfillment can also come in living in this moment, in shooting out a smile to those who matter. Even to those who don't. It's in falling in love again when you don't expect it. In extending a hand to hold another person's hand, and also in retracting it without having any expectations whatsoever.

Damage eraser. That's what I keep seeing inside the washroom, behind the shower curtains. It isn't a ghost, or a supernatural phenomenon. Just two simple words on my Garnier hair conditioner, "damage eraser."

Damage, maybe it's sepia-hued. Sometimes, it's not.


music accompaniment: ben howard - empty corridors

That Feeling

When your eyes meet across a crowded room and the second you lock eyes the smiles are already exchanged before facial muscles can even move. The feeling of a warm, snug hug that is simultaneously full of care and yet so nonchalant because it is ready to give more. Or when you're sending messages to each other on the way to meet each other and you turn the corner to see him smiling at his phone while reading your last text and already responding. When he's drunk and spends the night talking to you while you're halfway drunk on the way to fully on what he's telling you because all he can talk about is you.  When you meet again after what feels like ages though is only days or even hours and you both start talking at superspeed to share and catch up with what the other has to say. When he asks you for songs even though he can't understand a word of the language and you start to fall in love with the songs you thought you wouldn't listen to again. When

The Quandary of Survival

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel. — Junot Diaz, This is How You Lose Her

Sometimes when I look at the kitten who followed me home, I wonder what brought us together. She was starved, half-alive, having survived a harsh subzero winter yet she still battled each day and one day followed me across 20 minutes of frozen terrain.She was — is — a wild one. A ferocious, independent, and keenly intelligent creature. Maybe, in this way, she is only myself in animal form.

At times, though, I cannot help but look at her and wonder if it is possible for a human to come back as an animal. Often, when she plays soccer with her bell-ball for hours on end, I am reminded of the brother I lost so many years ago. He, too, was a dark and quiet creature, and spent hours playing solitaire foot hockey with a tennis ball.

Or, at those times when I feel her jagged tongue scratching away at my cheek, licking away my tears, I wonder if she is my mother; watching over me while I sleep.

In this way, I often find telling traits for many of those I have lost, and perhaps this is all transference of various internal feelings and thoughts that I do not dare allow myself to dwell on.

It is around this time that I observe the loss of the most important person in my life. The pain of that loss is as ever crippling, even 25 years later.  This is a pain I once felt was, if not healed completely, absolved through the nurturing care of another person I believed was my soul mate. But that person too, for reasons of his own, decided that I had weathered so many losses that one more didn’t make a difference; I was already stained and blemished from the wounds of the past and having risen each time I fell, of course I would rise again. Once, a few months ago, when I tried to communicate the destruction wreaked, I was told, by this person, disinterestedly, that it gets better with time.

I have wondered each day how it gets better with time. Does the ability to rise and go forth as opposed to wither away in a dark room mean that it is better? Does the impact of internalizing this pain and not expressing it mean that it is better? Does laughing and making other people happy, therefore the self happy, mean that it is better? Because happiness itself is so transient, and does not exactly correlate to that other pain so well hidden.

I feel sometimes that we are only given a certain amount of time with other people as they become a mirror or window, depending on the lessons learnt. As I observe one person grow into the cold, hurtful and distanced parent they never wanted to be, I realize that I should take heed and learn not to do the same. I am learning to detach myself from the emotions that have haunted me in the past, those of others and the emotions that have caused me to act out irrationally. I have ceased to abhor loss and struggle against aligning myself with pain. Instead I have acceded in the realization that this too is part of my identity. This is not necessarily better, but this is how I survive:

I rise each day ready to go forth and conquer, not because the pains of yesteryear have healed, but because I have come to accept them as part of who I am.  I continue to fight with broken ribs and open wounds because these wounds are the very things which have caused the biological heart to ragingly pump blood to these wounds in the hope that the delivery of oxygen and nutrients will one day heal them. Once healed, the heart would cease to beat so ferociously.

The Sublimity of Reunification

One of the best ways of recovering from anything is through friendship.

Time had passed like a blink of an eye, and yet the very moment I reconnected with one of my best friends it was as if no time at all had passed. And the funny thing is that both of us voiced that very thought, as the penultimate and long-overdue reunion finally happened.

We regressed to those same younger selves that we once were, and yet I reflected on the many ways we had transformed. We returned to the same hallowed halls where we once spent hours and days, and blanketed with memories and time and experience shared everything that has passed since we had went our own ways.

It is fascinating to realize how we were just children at that time we thought we were conquering the world. Perhaps in another ten years again, this realization will happen, looking at ourselves as we are today.

All the "remember when"s of nostalgia, of recounting old escapades as if it were just yesterday, of opening up about failed relationships and worries for the future — and realizing how much we have changed. Him more gentle, me more poised. If anything, I realized we had both survived a long weary journey, and were more laidback, calmer, and steadier from the experience.

I pointed out the full moon as we walked our last moments. "It's giving us its blessing," I joked.

Maybe blessings don't need to really have a point or outcome, maybe they are just appreciating the moments when you have them.

What is This Season

Sometimes, on days like this, when the coolness holds hands with warmth, all I want to do is lay back on the earth, and smile at the sky. 

Sometimes, I can almost pretend that every cloud out there holds the answers, holds the secrets to unleashing my dreams.

Sometimes, as I loll in the grass, with the smell of the undomesticated ground surrounding me like a new perfume, I feel as if I could almost become one with the raw warm fertile soil.

Sometimes, I stretch my hand up to the sky, and it almost seems as if I can catch hold of the great blue above me.

Sometimes, I wonder how much of this Mother Earth is made of the dust of all her children, and how it might be to be that way too, fragmented ash flying around the world free.

Sometimes, I feel as if I could take these unfulfilled parts of me, my dreams and desires, and throw them back up at the sky to rejoin that great emptiness, like caged white doves set free.

Sometimes, on days like this, the earth warm on my back, the sun warm on my face, I smile and feel maybe yes, it is fine to be alone; yet the wind smoothly blows over my cheek like a warm, sweet-smelling caress.

artwork: pascal campion

Ma

"Really yummy. How did you manage to get the paneer so crispy and still so soft and flavourful?"

And I smiled to myself, because while making the dish I remembered his mother's tip, and lost in that special world in the kitchen, my dish became infused with a hint of love mixed with bittersweet loss.

Cooking has always been an independent venture for me. From the age of 6, on a makeshift stool comprised of random pieces of wood stuck together, I was making roti—rolling away with the belan as well as I was able to with my little hands, patting the dough primly with a dusting of flour and carefully shifting it onto the hot tawa.

To date, I still have a faint scar on my chest from where the edge of the tawa burnt me as I leant over. The symbolism of the act, the pain, and the scar, is as succinct as it could be.

Making roti is the one thing that has ties with that Other World. It's one of the very few memories that I have with her: standing on a chair and rolling a small glob from the big portion of dough in the bowl, and happily rolling it, flattening it, making my very first roti, only for it to come out in a very strange misshapen triangular form. But that memory is so much more than the detail. It is adorned with her gentle grace, her loving patience, more that overwhelming warmth than the accuracy of her face. She praised me for my Christmas Tree roti and commended me for my creativity. "Let's make it green!" she suggested, and got out the food colouring, so that when my father finally returned from work that evening, there among all the well-formed round rotis was a special little green Christmas Tree roti.

Things changed drastically soon after, and our family, smaller by one number now, moved to a new neighbourhood. I began a new life at a new school in a totally alien landscape. At home, I soon learnt to do the chores and cooking. I was in first grade.

When it was warm enough, we played in the streets. It was a way of getting out of our father's way. 

"She has no mommy," I overheard another little girl tell the other kids on the street. And that information made them all avoid me, as if it was a contagious form of a shameful disease. 

In those young years I became the object of passively aggressive bullying. I didn't realize that was what it was, but for some reason, my newfound tendency to cry easily seemed to be a point of amusement for the other kids. I cried every single day in school in those years. That the other kids thought that mocking me for not having a mother seemed the best joke did not help. I remember being completely ostracized in 5th grade as a clique of 'popular' girls chose to disparage me on my lack of femininity, loud gossip and meant taunts of not being able to go shopping with a mom. As we grew up into the pre-teen part of elementary school, I shied away from the female teachers' attentions and stayed aloof from other children's mothers who volunteered at school events or joined us on trips. If another kid's mother was extra kind to me, I had to shoulder the additional grief of that particular kid's glares at the perceived invasion of territory.

When I started high-school, I was just as aloof. This was a new start and I kept these secrets of my history  to myself. I became one of the class clowns, tomboy Jane, the go-to girl for crazy antics and hyperness, all in the most geeky ways. And I made friends. Friends who after a few years eventually complained that I was too secretive; that I kept my feelings to myself. By then I had told them a bit about my family life, but only enough so that the very deep and dark bits would not scare anyone away. But keeping such things to oneself has its own psychological consequences too.

That particular loss is one that has never been healed. And it continues to hurt, almost every single day. It is the one thing that I can never articulate to anyone, because the depth of that loss is absolutely endless. I don't want anyone's pity or sympathy, and yet, through most of my life, that is the one thing I crave instinctively: some form of maternal love.

The problem is that when I became close to anyone else, they sooner or later shared in this nugget of loss (as is natural in exchanges of personal data with close friends) but the problem is that soon, they too extended that holy grail: aw, it's okay you can share mine! Certainly, the offer was always made with the best of intentions, with a good heart and full of warmth and kindness. But somehow, time or other events seemed to break down the very structure of that relationship and along with the friendship went that maternal gift.

More than that, often the rational for the breakdown of friendships happened contingent to the nature of the maternal bond. Somehow, there still remained that sinister whisper of contagion which I first overheard on the streets as a child. One of the most defining milestones was being explicitly shunned and kicked out of a tight-knit circle of friends—at that time the only friends I had—like a dirty untouchable. 

You never think that people can have this kind of cruelty.  And perhaps they simply do not realize the extent of their behaviour, maybe because they do not know what this kind of experience is like. But it hurts more than I could say when you are given a taste of what it is like, when a friend says that their mother is there for you too, and then so easily take it away without even recognizing the emotional destruction they cause.

After these experiences I became a little more hardened. I remembered how to be aloof again. When visiting friends at their homes, I was pleasant and polite but always reserved and never opened up my heart again for a surrogate mother.

And then he happened. You could not talk to him—really talk to him—or get to know him, without him talking about his mother. His love for her is probably his quintessential defining characteristic. It absolutely shines. And you cannot help falling in love with her. So I fell for both of them. They both made me laugh like I never laughed before. This was a new kind of bond and relationship that I had never experienced or witnessed. I was in awe, and yet was head over heels in being blessed with her love, too. I felt like a geeky fan being bestowed with the attention of a mega celebrity. But it was more for me. So much more.

Sometimes out of the blue, her voice pops up on my headphones. An old saved voice message wishing me a happy birthday and telling me that innocent unknown lie: I will always be there for you. These are those times when I need to rush out of the room, or rush off the train, and hide. Sometimes, it is so hard to figure this out. You think it is just another heartbreak, but it isn't. It's much more. When I cry for him, I cry for her too.


What is loss? I could never figure it out, only feel it, again and again, in louder explosions, each time. 


I type the question, and pause, as my adopted feral kitten stares at me in consternation as I cry, trying to finish this. I am so sorry, baby, I will never kick you back out in the streets motherless for I know what that feels like. Is that why you followed me home?

Thought of the Day

Quietly sometimes, and loudly at times, I try to infuse as 

many moments of my memory into life before I am gone.

Safekeeping

One of the hardest things is piecing yourself back together again after breaking into a million pieces. 

Trust.

You can trust someone with information, or trust them to get a job done. Trust someone to have your back, trust someone to be there, no matter what. Or trust someone to keep you safe. 

The worst part in misplaced trust in a person is that when you give that trust to another being, that trust is completely contingent in your very own personal trust of the self. You are trusting yourself, your sense of judgement, in being able to believe that this other person is worthy of keeping your trust.

So, when they decide they no longer want that burden, when they decide that hurting another person to relieve their own stress in life is OK, because they have already done the calculations and decided you will be OK even if your trust in them was wrong all along, they forget that the implications lie on a much grander scale. Because, even after the damage is done, and they have moved on, that huge earthquake is only the start of an avalanche of aftershocks: you are left stranded in a place where you cannot even trust yourself.

When you have moved from a space of casual acquaintance, slowly and systematically ingraining everything inside of you with this person's aura, their function in your life slowly becoming part of the very equation of who you are, so much that you would bet your life in that trust, nevermind your own sense of identity and trust, it goes without saying that once that little piece of trust is removed like a Jenga piece down there below the other million pieces which comprise you, of course everything, absolutely everything, collapses.

But it is all inside of you. And not any other person ever could imagine what it is like beyond that outer shell.  Inside, you are juggling the pieces that have not yet fallen, and yet you are trying to pick up, and catch, the other falling pieces which are sharp, fatal, piercing you with pain. Inside, you are slipping trying to escape falling completely and utterly to that bottomless pit where your sense of self can never be resuscitated, and yet you are slipping on the shards which make up the slopes you are trying to keep a grip on with the soles of your already-ripped and bleeding feet, and mutilated palms, slipping on the blood, bringing you to your knees, on which you continue to struggle up. Inside you are suffocating, as the atmosphere around you is a vacuum-sealed vessel of building pressure, toxic fumes of self-hatred, green gaseous canisters of laughter assaulting you with no remorse. Inside, you don't even know which part of you is really you, and inside, you don't even know who you are anymore, not really. 

Can you ever really—really—trust another person to keep you safe?

Enduring

"Now, just turn your head a little to the left...Yes! Gorgeous!"

The photographer beamed at me from behind his camera, while I wondered if I was allowed to scratch my nose. He was quite particular about his subjects.

***

After having met him and having a little chat while we settled on my outfit, he had positioned me in my chair and fidgeted around me while I told him to make sure my hair looked good—because I knew my face was quite excellent already, just, my hair needed a little loving care because of medical conditions—but he instead started paying more attention, strangely enough, to my necklace.

"Just need to make sure it's captured perfectly in the picture," He mumbled as he adjusted it, then stepped back, examining it from different angles.

Umm. What about my hair? I thought. What about, you know, me? I need to be captured perfectly too!

"Just got to get it right," He said, stepping behind the camera to see how it looked behind the lens, then again stepping quickly to the window to check how it looked in the light.

"Hmm, just a...yes, that might be it," He said, again, brushing my hair behind my shoulders so that the precious necklace got to be center of attention.

"Um, it's okay," I said. "It's just a necklace..."

"Just a little bit more this way..." He was totally focused on the silver necklace with two hearts intertwined (ostensibly forever) together.

"No really," I said a little more forcefully. "Just take the damn picture, leave the necklace. The...the man who gave it to me dumped me," I said as bluntly as I could, verbalizing in the very words I could never bring myself to say until then that most private of information now being proffered to this stranger, hoping the the shock value would stun him into retreating behind the camera and taking the goddamn pictures.

"Oh," He looked up, yes, stunned. He looked balefully at the offending piece of jewelry, now, as if it had broken his heart.

"Yeah, so it's okay," I nodded at him.

"But you still love him," He said, looking at it sitting in that hollow above my heart. It wasn't a question.

"Of course I do." Definitely not up for debate.

He nodded, briskly, somberly, understandingly. There really was no need for anything else to be said.

"So! Then, will you be taking your photos with smile, or no smile?"

"What are you, crazy? Of course a smile!" I beamed a 100-watt at him.

"That's a girl," He said, somewhat admiringly. "You keep that attitude!"


Honestly, though? I was secretly glad, deep down inside, that it got that much attention; it felt sort of right: that in trying to capture whoever I was, that one thing, this emblem, was made to shine brightly.


So, of course I smiled.



~in memoriam of a breaking heart, 6 months to the day.~

Photomemorphosis

Kodak moment? But what if it is not what it seems to be? Photography? No, I mean, well, yes, photography. Photographs. The idea behind it, the science. What are you saying? I'm saying, what if photography isn't what our memory is. What if, in the act of trying to record something forever, that phenomenon is actually what causes everything as we know it, to actually change? What the goddamn hell are you saying? No, listen. What if, as soon as we take that photograph, the image that we thought we were preserving actually changes so that what comes out, the virtual image, is an altered reality and our memory, too, is altered, and we don't even know that anything even changed? That's freaking scary. What if the people we were—Stop, you're freaking me out—before that photo was taken are left behind in a different world and the people we are after the click have been changed? Whoa, why are you aiming that at me, is the camera on, hey sto--

Goodbye, Hippopotamus

Just the other day, my kitten pulled it out from under my bed. I looked down, absentmindedly, to where she had deposited it at my feet, meowing at me to praise her achievement or thank her for her gift, or both. Its grey fur was matted as it lay there on its side, and its empty, lifeless eyes stared up at me, even as my own eyes rolled.

Since my move earlier this year, the two plastic bags of stuffed plush toys had resided under my bed, because I could not bring myself to get rid of them and yet, there was no place for them anymore in my minimalistified, and "grown up", life. But since the little one had arrived and since my room was designated her HQ from the first night she arrived home, she had developed a habit of disappearing under my bed and, after making lots of mrowling purrs and scuffling sounds, would re-emerge with one plushy or other firmly clasped in her mouth, carrying the spoils of her hunt around proudly. Soon the house became decorated with odd mementos of my stowed-away childhood as Tiggles, Cutums, Squeakums, Eek, Zoey, Chocolate et al, found themselves rescued from the abyss of the black garbage bag.

But this time, she had overdone herself. I looked down, shaking my head in disgust at the grey hippo that was given to me a long, long time ago by the goddamn self-obsessed jerk who spent more time admiring his reflection in his phone than he did in the hours we spent hanging out. Thankfully, he never made it to actual "boyfriend" material. Indeed, he was just a few weeks long "thing", if it could be called that, because really, both of us just were kiling time even as we pretended to exchange flirtations in the time we spent together after or between work.

I had a few moments myself, when one night, driving home with one of my best friends I would put the question out in the air whether it's weird for a girl to be a bit older than the guy, and my friend, who himself was a few months younger than his girlfriend, would look over at me and ask me, sort of surprised and amused, "What? Are you serious about him? I thought you were waiting to be serious about..."

I wasn't, and yet, there was something still inside of me that always felt that romance, whatever form it took, should have a deeper significance or should really mean something. This ideological Hopeless Romantic within me would be the reason why most of my relationships could not really get to the "official" stage. For some reason or other, I always had this prophetic epiphany that the relationship in question at the time just was not the one. And as my friend noted, I was in fact waiting for that someone else to wake up and smell the coffee.

It's a weird place to be stuck in, because at once, you want to "know" things in a very clear, logical way, and yet, when you have a very certain sensation that at the same time seems vague, brought to you by presaging dreams, no less, it is hard to really let go of your intuition, if that is what it is called.

But hey, intuition was so not needed with it came to the Giver of the Grey Hippo. I am not even sure why he even went to the extent of gifting it to me, in the first place. Especially when I kicked it down the length of the mall soon after as if it were the FIFA final game scoring kick.

But the weirdest part is that, even after my kitten dropped the thing at my feet, guess who, out of the blue, pops up on my social media—with his shirtless six-pack, bicep-flexing selfie in his display picture. OF COURSE it was a shirtless picture.

The very first time I even saw him, he was walking down the middle of the mall with his shirt off, strutting through like he was George Clooney. And I had laughed. Out loud. And he had turned, annoyed, to see me—who the hell is that girl— laughing at him.

But now he was back. WHY?

"Hey," his shirtless picture stated.

"You stole my calamine lotion," I replied.

"What? You want it back?"

"Considering that was more years than you have IQ points ago, no."

"Oh yeah, I forgot you were the smart one. I remember now, you always had a book!"

"Which you always took and threw on the floor."

"You were supposed to pay attention to me, not the book."

"I pay attention to whatever is more interesting."

"Yeah I remember that attitude. Now I remember your last text message too! It was so mean but damn it was a classic."

"Lol," I typed, looking up from my book. "I don't remember."

"You said, 'We cannot see eye to eye because your head is stuck too far up your ass' LOL"

Palliative Care Therapy

"If you died.."

"When, you mean..."

"Well. When, but let's stick with if, OK?"

"OK."

"If you die, what do you think he would say?"



"Nothing."



"Hmm. Nothing at all?"

"Yeah."

"Why do you feel that?"


"I just know. What is there to say? I... hmm, I don't know. Yeah. "

"What are you thinking?"

"What's the point? If there was anything to say, why not, you know... when I could listen?"

"Would you listen? Or react, though? From what we talked about last session, I mean."

"I don't know."

"But you think he wouldn't say anything."

"Yeah. Because he doesn't say stuff, anyways."

"Then, let's ask this: what do you think he would think?"

"He.. would ... think ... I don't know, he would probably think 'Oh well' and go on with his life."

"Do you really feel that? Or are you transferring feelings again?"


"There are no feelings in this case."

"You seem to be feeling a lot, right now. Hey, it's OK, take a breather."


"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ..."

"You don't have to apologize. Come on, have some water."

"Yes."

"Yes to what?"

"I really feel that."