It's a Sunday evening and invariably all Sunday evenings leave me a little sad. They don;t have the promise of a Friday evening, when you are looking forward to two days of uninterrupted laziness and bliss. Or the relief of a Saturday evening, where even though you've spent half of your weekend, you still have the other half to look forward to. Sunday evenings, unless they are showing a Shah movie, are just plain boring. I got a lot done this Sunday though. Slept, cooked, read (a lot), and now with this post, would have written as well. Thanks to no eggs in the fridge, I haven't been able to bake. And maybe that's why there is this incomplete feeling to this Sunday. Or maybe because life took me back a few months for a few hours yesterday, I feel like I am living this dream, or nightmare, that might get over anytime soon, propelling me without prior warning to the predictable routine that life has now become.
Yesterday I went out with a friend for Christmas shopping and then went to see the new house that his wife and he have moved into. The house was beautiful, with the view of a garden, where children, cats and dogs played in the evening. I'm not a huge fan of kids, of all sizes, but there is something about watching them play that takes me back to my childhood and that is what the scene yesterday did to me. Then there is a pond with fish that is visible from the living room. It is just beautiful, exactly the kind of place and locality that your house should be in. Not a high rise building, but small 3-4 stories high, apartment complex with 2 houses on each floor, cordial and friendly neighbours, who talk to you. It should feel like a home. A place that you look forward to coming back to after a tiring day at work. I could so imagine living there and being happy. It was a little far away from work, but it is worth the extra 20 minute commute. Trust me. It was a different part of Singapore, the kind that i hadn't explored in my one year here. So beautiful, almost reminded me of residential areas of Bangalore. Green, with houses on both sides of the street, not much traffic, and just general quietness.
Off late, I feel like my head is working non stop. Even when I'm supposed to be sleeping, i can hear it buzz. But if someone were to ask me or I were to ask myself, what am I thinking, I wouldn't know the answer. It's like what Anne Sexton said: a good mixture of everything and nothing is eating up my head alive. Yea, that is how I feel like.
The next one week in office is going to be completely empty. If I could, I would have gone home to Jaipur, for the nice cold dewy and foggy winters and for time with family. But alas, I am out of money and vacation leaves and that means, I'll be here alone for all the festivities. This year has been kind of lonely like that. Christmas and New Year don't mean too much to me. Christmas because I don't really celebrate it, it's nice to indulge in the gaiety and happiness going around, but it is not a festival I look forward to. And New Year is just a day/event in the calendar, and it is important to me because of my Dad's birthday on Jan 1st, but nothing more. Diwali is my festival. I wait for it in the year, like I wait for my birthday. And like my birthday, it comes and it goes. And then I feel like there is nothing more to look forward to in the year. I was weirdly lonely on both those occasions this year. Yes, the second half of 2013 has indeed been lonely.
I feel like I am on an unending quest for something. As though, a time will arrive, when I will look up and say, ah now it all makes sense, it's all fitting in. Or this is what I've wanted and been waiting for. Life is seeming like that weird wait, for what, I don't know. I try and make sense of my dreams, but they mostly slide away from under my fingers teasing me, mocking me, almost like they are saying, catch me if you can, and I shall reveal to you, what I am. When I am trying to box myself as a certain kind of person that neatly fits into the category I have for people, I feel like I don't properly fit in anywhere. I then start dissecting the being that I am, and nothing can more aptly describe my feeling than this Beatrice Sparks quote : I am not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.
Sometimes, it's like I am beginning to get my life back in order and sometimes I feel like, no I am just beginning to crack.The tricks that the mind plays on you are worse than the ones the heart puts you through. Or maybe not. I try to put what I'm feeling into words or stories or songs, but there is a song deep inside me which is wanting to burst out, it just doesn't have the proper words. Maybe it can't be put into words, because it's at most a feeling, a pain, the delicate balance between insanity and sanity, where you think, you can take over the world one minute and then suddenly you also feel too afraid to live. But there is definitely a song inside me. Khalil Gibran once said : Among the depths of my soul, there is wordless song. Yes, that has to be what I think this feeling inside of me is.
It's led to me questioning my dreams and expectations from life. Like what I'm waiting for doesn't exist. Like who I am looking for will never come. W.B Yeats has to be my favorite poet and he once wrote "It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of-kind, that is not in the world." I don't even know if I am seeking love. I am seeking peace maybe, friendship maybe. Or maybe, I am just seeking the reality, that I ran away from sometime back. Maybe once that reality hits me, I will know what to do with life. Because reality like pain is something you need to confront, you can't run away from it. Right now, I feel like there is this other being, that is me, and I am in a different plane watching her go through life and for the lack of a better word, live. Even though, live is exactly what she is not doing. I know, the key to my happiness is in my own hands, but I still see myself reaching out to people. And when they disappoint me, I crawl back in the shell that I was living in. So I have these phases of offering myself to this reality, once it has inflicted enough pain, I withdraw myself back, trying to heal those wounds, until it's time again to test my strength against the harshness that this life has become.
Pain, is the one that has been eternally triumphant in this battle between reality and dreams. Sometimes it is brief and elusive and sometimes, it stares at you demanding to to be felt. This pain then translates itself into memories. Memories that you hold in containers inside your head and heart. Sometimes, that container is full of ecstasy, which are happy memories and sometimes those containers are waiting to rupture with eons of pain flooding out, affecting your ability to think and function, it takes you to the point where you are lost, and then makes you struggle your way back home.
Sometimes, all I want to do is go home. Home, whatever that means. But in my head, it definitely looked like my friend's house I saw on Saturday. I think that cracked me, shattered me. There are tiny pieces of me all around now. Last night, all I did is sit in one corner of my room. Silent and alone. Have I said this before? Alone has to be the saddest word there is. But then it is also something you bring upon yourself. So you have nothing and no one but yourself to blame. Sometimes, I feel like I want another person to be next to me and just sit, while I cry my heart out, just so that I am not alone when I am crying.
I watched this movie yesterday Aakash Vani. It's a very cute movie, slightly exaggerated, but not something that can absolutely not happen in life. There is a scene in that movie, which is brilliantly shot and so close to real life. When I watched it yesterday, I could immediately identify with it. Like all good scenes in Bollywood movies, this one is on a bench in the New Delhi railway station. The protagonists, Aakash and Vani, loved each other since college and were together for 4 years, and one day Vani calls Aakash to tell him that she can't be with him, because her parents won't allow it and then goes and gets married to someone else and leads a miserable life. They meet again at their college reunion, which happens to be at St. Stephens, in Delhi and he accuses her of screwing up his life. Unable to take it, she packs her bag and goes to the railway station, to go away from him and from their memories. He comes and sits next to her, there is distance between them. And for the next 5 minutes, they just sit there and cry. Cry for what they had, for the past, for what they had lost, they just cry. It is a beautifully shot scene, and so natural. For a second i felt almost exactly what the characters were feeling. Nothing, no words, could have made the scene more meaningful than that silent crying. And then, when everything, all that pain and hopelessness, that they had inside them is spent in crying, the tears suddenly stop and they just sit together alone, on that bench, looking ahead.
One of my favorite books in the world, or THE most favorite, has to be Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. There are many heartbreaking scenes in that book, that have made me sob. But the most painfully beautiful scene and chapter has to be the last one, when Scarlett realises, that all the while, the home, the hearth, the love and the man she has been searching for, is none other than Rhett. Melanie Wilkes has just died and she comes running home after the realisation hits her that all this while, she has loved Rhett. He is in the dining room. She thought him to be drinking, but he is actually sober. And all the while she is trying to tell him that she loves him and no one else and everything will be okay now and that they had each other. But he has made up his mind on leaving her. And that piece of information crushes her and she prays to God for him to pick her up in his arms and kiss her, because "her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words" It is just absolutely beautiful, that book. Rhett leaves, and that is the point in the book that made me cry the most. Scarlett is in pain, pain that she is trying to push back. She is full of regret for not understanding Rhett and her feelings and love for him before. And in her indefatigable spirit, she rises up, and says "I'll think of it all tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back, after all tomorrow is another day"
Oh what a book.
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