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.

Serendipity

Sometimes you find a $20 bill in the pocket of an old coat.

If you were broke or hungry, it feels like a miracle. It can feel like a miracle just simply by the mere serendipity of finding it when you didn't expect to. Maybe all this time you've missed it, or maybe all this time you didn't really know it was gone or what you'd lost.

It was always with you—until that moment you've found it again.

Whether you decide keep it forever as a memento or decide to spend it, you've already lost it.

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?

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?

Accumulation

Memories linger. They haunt me, and I have grown comforted by their company. More so than the company of those whom the memories encapsulate. I am so often overwhelmed by them; sometimes the smallest elements of very tangible reality tick off a box in a long shopping list of memories, nudging my mind off-track and suddenly tipping me over into a huge, gaping, vast abyss. 

A sudden lull in the surrounding noise, momentarily hushing to a certain frequency that complete retrogrades time to another moment where I remember a certain person talking to me; their words full of mirth or solicitude, and while their words are coming out into the air, the intertwining moments seem to slow down, slower, slower, as I am no longer in that memory but watching it, watching them, watching their words, floating, the feeling of togetherness, a moment that is now an infinite ways altered by the knowledge of it becoming only that: a memory. 

A sudden whiff of an odour as I am walking through a corridor, and my whole being stops, unable to move, and yet I am inhaling deeply, lost to time again, as I spiral through a warp hole taking me to another memory filled with warmth; tantalizing aromas or sensual colognes, around me or under pillows, memory trailing itself seductively, insistently, deep, and deeper inside me, as it goes down my nasal passage, deep into my lungs, and back out again, but different. 

And again, a thrilling sense of forbidden, as I find myself tasting something sweet—catapulting me into a bittersweet memory of finding sugar on my lips with the tip of my tongue; the memory of a voice again telling me, persuading me, to try sugar on toast: illicit moments in the dark light of twilight as on a whim remembering that voice I reach for the sugar canister and sprinkle a dose on the still warm surface, the slow sinking sensation of teeth, crispy and yet soft, and that aftermath, licking that sugary stickiness off my lips.

Memories cannot leave me alone, and yet in a strange way, maybe I am leaving them behind, as I find myself grasping more and more for a certain word, a certain warmth, a certain colour, a certain shade of green, a certain way that my name was spoken by a certain person, a certain time, a certain person I myself used to be, all lost in an uncertain quagmire of memories.

Splinters

"It gets easier with time," you assured me. And maybe it does. Only thing is what is this 'it'? The way you look at it is a completely different way I see it. More and more, every day that passes, I am overwhelmed with so many lessons. They say it's dangerous to keep looking back, and I see the logic in that. Only thing is, the more I look back, the more I am apart from it yet the same. I see the tiniest little moments where all that emotion hid. Where your heart was breaking and you kept quiet. When we were so in that particular moment, that we couldn't possibly comprehend the many ways that our souls were becoming latched together and how the strength of that attachment could somehow render it apart.

The more I step forward, each day, the more I embrace the many million moments with the world, the more I am overcome with the absolute realization that no one could ever be you. The infinite ways that each individual interaction would have been different if it had been you. The ways that home was and could only be completely and utterly you.

My moments are interspersed simultaneously with the infinite boundless joy of this knowledge and the abyss of destruction in its loss. A certain green will remind me of your eyes, a certain line in the clouds the snug curve of your rare smile. An abstracted feeling of exhaustion reminds me, like a phantom limb, of the strength of your arms. It is in this way that I am constantly reminded of the splinters, planks, bricks, the scaffolding and shelter that make up home.

Starved

Isn't love a bit like parenting? Especially a love like ours; a relationship that came into the world without really knowing of its own existence. That could not tell, not in words for the longest time, what exactly was its place and function—it simply was. And it was in that newborn joy of exploration and discovery that it shone ever more. The way it was nurtured, the many falls and skinned shins, the many tears, the yearning for something that wasn't explicable in any language, and the quick appeasement in putting our heads down, holding each other, in peace, together.

These days, I wonder about you. Every little thing makes me pause. I've cooked this meal; maybe he would like it. Maybe he would remember, for example, the way he learnt to cook alongside me. The encouragement and sidelong support that went both ways, not only one. I'm not sure if it is too late to say this now.

But there were things that were thought impossible, but I believed and then so did he. Maybe, like his greatest relished dish, this belief would also come to be. I don't know how to mourn this loss—is there even a proper way?

I have no appetite these days. Yet I am almost perpetually hungry. But I can't eat. I pause at each morsel, wondering what you're eating, if you're eating, what you're cooking, if you are. Instead, I reward myself with something more than my usual ration on the rare days I hear your voice. It's not what you want to hear. It's not what you want to know. But this is how it is, and I can't help it—maybe not more than you can.

But even as it's a child, love, it too is a parent. This love held me up when I wasn't too steady on my feet. It drove me to places that I didn't think I had the effort to go. It stood on the sidelines and cheered me on, motivating me to keep running even when I was hurting so much inside.

The way I am hurting now—angrily, anguished, forlorn, hopeful. And starved.

Wingspan

Yesterday I finally looked at the sky, and realized there was a moon up there. As obvious as it may sound, the fact that I had to notice at all told me a lot about myself; mostly that I have forgotten to recognize the things that have always mattered to me when I was most alone.

The very long treks I have made this winter had been accompanied with a deeply internalized grief, so internalized that I failed to look outward, at my immediate surroundings. The cold, the uniform white and gray which melded so seamlessly with the uniform gray sky surrounded me like a cocoon. I was suffocating and choking, and my breathe froze almost before it had even left me. Sometimes I was frozen dry, brittle and ready to shatter, and sometimes I discovered rivulets of tears joining the falling fat snowflakes that fell, the way I had fallen.

Nevertheless, the moon had remained aloft, the way it had always been, and the way it always will be, high above, it, too, was alone. Maybe it took the rays of a setting sun, or the blowing gales of snow from roofs, or even the glint of shards of moon to adorn a cloudy, starless sky, but I remembered.

Even from the cocoon, the butterfly eventually emerges.

"Hmph"

His love was a quiet one. He did not say much; that wasn't his way. He sniffed and sighed, muttered and huffed. He whispered and drawled. But somehow, it was enough.

I never knew what this ambiguous, arbitrary capacity for enough was. Not until the measure I had dwindled to nothing and then, relatively, that little enough became it all.

His love was a quiet one, and it was not about words. Though it was silent for the most part, once you had it you could not doubt it was there.

Until it was gone.

Soar

As much as I strive to absorb all the knowledge that is out there, however much as I revel in how this knowledge makes me here with my feet on the earth, the more I learn the more I realize that there is that one thing I could never really know: the measure of 'how much' there is to love. Even the oceans start and end. Even the sky starts here on this very earth and expands to a certain distances above before it ends. But this...even I don't know how to start to comprehend it, I don't know where to place the ruler to its beginning - how could I know where the end is?

Bereft

I hid in darkness for fear of tainting the world with my poison for as long as I could. I felt it almost tangibly, a black inkiness extending its tentacles glibly and fluidly in all dimensions, temporal and spatial. The hooks embedded inside of me tugged me apart violently yet still holding me together. Pain had no realm, dancing over physical and emotional and blurring the lines so much I no longer felt the pain because of the sheer numbing agony.

There were too many people who cared. Who shook their heads sadly. Offering tissues. I don't need help.

I have gotten off the train before its left behind the past for too long, just so I dont break down in the crushing claustrophia of the scant crowds. It didn't matter if it was one or a thousand. It was too much. Instead, I walked the two hour commute back, lost and rambling, and in the newly arrived cold.

A child patting my hand to tell me it's OK only reminds me of the child we have lost. It's not safe to talk to strangers I tell her with my eyes. She's just learnt to walk, how has she leant to decipher pain?

Small steps, he said. Small steps. But I've fallen. I'm down. I'm walking. But where is home?

Caryatid

Love: a feeling, promise, or contract?

At the very simplest form, we understand love to be a feeling. What else is love if it weren’t for feelings; what is felt; experienced?

But it isn’t just quite that exactly. The feelings itself is exclusive to the other party: it’s all about the personal experience even if stimulated by an externalizing factor.

As a promise, love takes a step up: it could be still purely personal and isolated in giving all to the sentiments of the feeling, but more often than not this signifies a transfer of something from one to another.

And yet a promise - could that also be a contract? A contract implies an agreement between two (or more) parties, and somehow there is something being exchanged – a two-way connection is developed.

But what happens when circumstances alter the very entity of that love? When things cannot be the same, when the exchange of that something isn’t exactly as dynamic as it once was? Is that still love?

Does love mean you abide and adhere to that something no matter what? That you hang on just because of something that existed in the past, and in anticipation of a tomorrow that would provide rational for simply hanging on today?

But what if every today keeps adding up, and soon all the weight of the past todays accumulated suddenly outweigh what once used to be the past? What if every today is hanging on, alone?

Suddenly this contract, be it signed in blood or tears, seems null and void. Even promises break. Feelings disperse. Even blood and tears dissipate into nothingness once again. Maybe love does too.

Grief

What do you do when the one you thought was your lifelong companion forsakes you? Had swept away without a backward glance, dropping you like a fragile glass to smash into infinites shards, and in leaving you behind, trods upon everything that once was: hope, honour, dignity, consolation, love.

When you are left with echoes of your own voice calling and calling them, only to return to you empty and cold...what do you do?

When this love that once filled every thing so much that gold could not outweigh its riches, why now do I feel like a homeless begger sitting on the street, craving, hungry and thirsty for one ounce of your notice?

Originally posted on my private personal blog on Friday, 21 August 2015. Re-posted with my own heart's permission. 

Summer or Love

Sometimes I forget that it is summer. I keep waiting, but it's an ambiguous wait. A wait for something that is not yet definitive and without definition remains unfulfilled for the very reason that when it is had it will not be recognized.


Instead, time tiptoes by. The clouds hover low and whisper winds that deny warmth. We hide away in our darkened rooms, backs turned to the glaring brightness of heat outside. We hop tentatively into air conditioned units thwarting away what we spend most of our year craving. And suddenly, we turn it off. We are perplexed to find that we don't need it. That suddenly, summer passed, but it was as if summer never came. The leaves change colour, die, and fall.


What were we waiting for? Why did we not embrace it while it was there? Why did we fix our gazes to our futures and ignore the moment that we actually had? How was it possible that we keep waiting for something that was in a future that we had already trodden on and left in the past?


Everything we are waiting for, maybe we already have it. Maybe it's there and has started before we even knew it begun. Maybe we should stop waiting for something that will never be because in waiting we forget that it is here now.

Enduring

Sometimes in the middle of this everyday life, while everything is bustling about, carrying on, a pause comes over me, and I remember.

When you've been with someone so long, things tend to settle. Settle down, settle in place... less of the tremulous, less of the hovering and less of the unknown.

It peeks out at me sometimes, a memory of the thrill of falling. When things were new, and unknown, when the merest presence, the sensation of meeting, was beyond words to describe.

Feelings relegated to memories. And yet, not entirely gone. Sometimes in the middle of looking across the room to you, something stirs. It's partly memory and yet partly something still new.

Sometimes my breath stops, and my heart quickens. And that's when my mind tells me this is so familiar and yet --- when I inhale it feels as if it is not air that is filling me up but everything that is you.

Why should I write a story? A different story, that's not you and me?
Why shouldn't I just let down the gates and let the words flow; so much more that has yet to be told
What more would there be in fictional characters, giving them a happily ever after
Giving them a story that's something we wish we had
But we have it all.
This is our story, our story we keep waiting to happen
When things are finally better and when things are finally calm
This is our story; a story of waiting for our story to start
But in the meantime we have been apart
If I can open my eyes today and you can close yours
If my sun sets to your sunrise, and the distance remains this far
With the hours stacked up and yet clocked in synchronity
The world keeps turning   And the heart keeps beating
Your heart
Then mine
Your heart
My heart
This is no silence. What are we waiting for?
Our story has already begun.

Free

I have found myself wrapping myself around the idea of you. Around the idea of us. Why, I am not really sure. Yet; because suddenly I have only realized this. Perhaps it is to wrap up close what this you and I is, so that nothing escapes, nothing floats away.

But in this I have become so molded in the frame of you, in the grooves, valleys, chasms, hills that are your landscape. Have I changed my own to better fit to yours? Have I lost something that was myself in becoming myself-with-you?


Why has it become my responsibility to wrap us up and protect, why has it been me that has settled to walking a steady pace instead of flying, soaring wildly, to ease your fear of heights? And it is true, you did not ask:

Maybe it is my fear that has always been at fault. A fear of losing what may be lost. Maybe holding on so tight is already the cause of having now lost so much.

What will happen if I unwrap this gift? Let the air flow, and let us fly free. What if I make you stand on the edge and open your arms and fall; maybe you too will fly with me.

I Am Dying

In these countless moments so many tears and fears have been, and so many have they fallen and arose that I have lost myself. So deeply the tears have rendered me apart, gaping wounds so raw and rot. So disfigured my visage upon reflection blurred in shattered glass that sightless I have also become. Inward this gaze, total oblivion yet pulsing pulsing a pain undeterred. So often have these sorrows breathed that they have burrowed deeply embedded under my skin. Deep in the marrow, in the breast, these sorrows keen softly, yet growing, growing. Oh mother these lumps have lost you to. If I don't die of these too, I shall die of my sorrows.

The Conditions of the Sun Shining

Out from my palms my blood flowed, but it was without pain I had let the wound open for you; it was after all straight and genuinely from the heart.

This was the heart that beat quietly in pursuit of you, in the rhythm fulfilled by the existence of you. And so the constant flow dripped off my fingertips to give and give and give.

I lived this far with the knowledge that you would be mine. Somehow and someday. And to do so I have navigated these uncharted paths by living as good a person I could have tried to be, all things considered, because somehow, someday I had to be worthy of my desires.

My desire was you, and to love you the way ki have alwaysmdone, before I even knew you and before we had ever met. Constantly and unconditionally.

My belief in you existing solely for me has been tried and tested in more ways than even you could know. Even in the knowledge that everything was shared as we became one, I shrugged off the layers of scar tissue and scabs to better embrace you and be stronger for you. And though I has hurt to attempt to remove, these same scars were blessed with my gratitude if only because my strong belief that they had to exist as a test of fire in order to endure and experience the obtainment of you.

My belief is that you are for me and I am for you. But stronger still is that you be eased of all pains and burdens, and at peace of mind; with or without me. Because, this my love, is without condition.

But you don't want my beliefs until they safeguard yours.

If i have asked of you to alter or amend, this too is in belief that you would be better off. Health and emotion so intertwined they have fed off each other, eating and eating until nothing was left except the raw, rotting and bleeding. To prevent and heal, I have asked of you may things which my prayers alone have no been enough to assuage. And my belief in you recognizing the goodness of my requests for the sake of our love had to withstand the powerful resistance to change.

My heart has waited, in all the heartbeats it had lost in waiting, and with each beat sighed the unwavering prayer that was you. Then to spend each moment in fervent hope that each moment of yours was better. To give each waking moment to praying for your state if being, instead of mine.

How is it that this blood, pouring steadfastly from my palms has started to turn from red to black? That this snow upon which I have tread so as not to stain it from its purity now betrays my footsteps, seeping cold and unmercifully into my skin, burning my beliefs with icy cold acidity? Why now, the fulfillment of loving you comes at the precipice of your rejecting the very same power which brought me to you?

Perhaps from henceforth I will not pray that your every moment is fulfilled to your own wishes, perhaps now I will not pray that you hardships ease and that the sun will shine upon you in you on darkness or for the things you yourself want for you. I will pray that you learn to believe in your own stead and believe with as much as I did in you, that you learn to believe in yourself without me so that you own prayers will come true with the same faith we had in mine. Instead of the amount of energy I have spent in your smaller things coming true, I will pray that you own come true, so that you will no longer need mine, nor me.

The blood will continue to flow. Black or red. It will not abate, nor is it possible that I can stop it. It flowing for you has become the definition of my being, so much that to press down on the wound, to stitch in up, will sooner choke me as if my breath itself has stopped. But thus, my beliefs, they have crippled. I continue to walk despite the frostbitten soles, but only so in a direction far away from where I had left my heart.