Tag: pain

and that’s pretty much everything you want to know about change.

Every time you step into the woods, the breeze encircles you and bares your gasps, loud into the presence and absence of everything.

At first, you flinch, you waver, you look back for a return.

But then you walk further and feel the earth digging into your toes. Whatever direction you walk, becomes ‘the’ path.

You watch the sun filter in, through the canopy of trees. Nothing, however wild, could hold it back.

Ans so it dawns on you.

Every small step, an undaunting of you.

Every dare, your metamorphosis.

With every rise of the foot, a newer you.

the fumble for a path.

Tripping yet again upon a choice, you fear a trap. Unable to view the choice for the gift it is, you frown at the privilege, of having possibilities to pick from.

But no, you are not being ungrateful.

Rather, you know yourself. Your indecisiveness. Your impulsive decisions. Your sudden quirks. Your weird whims. Your idiosyncracies. Your screwed sense of direction. Your ambiguity. Your failed sense of judgement. It’s all happened in the past!

So, fear paralyzes you at the crossroads.

It’s funny when you get lost on your way and accuse the GPS of betrayal every time. But alarming when you have no idea what you’re doing, where you’re heading. In life.

Wedged between what to do and what not to do, you are scuttling through cities, flipping over jobs, tipping on the edge of aspirations and apprehensions.

But then, you have never been a calculative one.  You would never weigh the pros and cons in and out.  You wouldn’t tread lightly over gunpowder.

You have always been this frivolous, this turbulent, whose impulse would flutter like butterflies refusing to be bottled up, who would shrug all conscious rationale, at one bend of intuition, at one slant prick of psyche.

And so, even knowing the magnitude of impending change that will rock your world, may be, even upend it, you turn the page to the next chapter of the book, and watch anxiety melt into excitement!

Okay, you might be clueless. But you are not naive.

You attempt to sketch your own path.

You realize that, you yourself are the anchor to your chaos. You might be the epicenter of your quakes but you yourself are your recovery guide too.

You have this storm raging inside you.  And you use it to arm yourself to meet the one brewing in the outside world.

And even if it churns you to dust, and you end up gutted under the rubble, you would not fold your cards. You would rather choose to learn from your mistakes.

It’s hard, daring to defy the odds. But you have this thing knotted in your memory that you can’t forego.

This moment is all that’s there to live, and whatever you choose to do right now will become what you will have ever done at all.

 

when you unbottle to unbother.

you watch the stars parcel you an invite into a night

so perfectly pinned to the sky at its fuzzy dark corners

that you don’t want to dim its beauty with your inhibition

or dissipate its magic with your fear

or ruin its romance with your indefinite whys and why nots

so you ask reason to pack its bag and leave

and tell responsibility to stop weighing down its burden on you

and as the duo give in and walk away

you lean over the parapet

into the glass in your hand

and roll your head an inch back

and exhale

what had been asphyxiating you since eons

tonight, you let this roof become your salvation ground

and as you sprint around the terrace

and giggle into the moonlight

and dance without watching your step

you realize that you are capable of seeing beauty

even in the darkest nights

that you are capable of being happy on an unfamiliar roof

when the roads leading home seem illusory

you had been feeling unreasonably displaced

or rather like a misplaced LEGO piece

made to fit into blocks

that bulge and dip at all the wrong places

only if you had realized any sooner

that your universe is different

that you cannot fill, with what you don’t have

so you stop caring anymore

about anything at all

and from among the billions dotting this night sky

you point your finger at a random star

wish upon it, a countless fantasies

then unclench your fist in sudden keen

and let all go.

15 days.

You realize in 15 days, what you never could, in all those 120 days of working.

15 days of not having a job or rent money or a backup or any kind of plan and still choosing to stay rather than giving it up all and running back where you started from.

14 days of feeling a searing helplessness inside yourself as your bank account stares at you with a fat zero in your face.

13 days of trying to sell yourself out on a piece of paper which fails to identify with you as closely as it rather should.

12 days of taking rejections in your face and not bending the knee.

11 days of clinging on to a tiny voice inside you that keeps reiterating, everything will fall back in place.

10 days of drowning in your own mess, while trying to breathe through your sudden seizures and emotional downpours. Additionally, you learn what insomnia feels like.

9 days of having forgotten, how looking up at the sky and guzzling the sun, felt like.

8 days of not knowing where you’re going, not knowing where you’ve come.

7 days of nurturing your grit and learning to believe in yourself, though learning it the hard way.

6 days of making wild acceptances of your truth and making peace with what now is, rather than regretting what then used to be.

5 days of working hard, chasing opportunities and decoding your self worth all along the way.

4 days of catching new possibilities blossom while you stand at a crossroads yet again, wrestling with your indecisiveness, bubbling with a hunger to leap in all of the directions beckoning you to explore them.

3 days of setting foot in new shoes and walking on, though knowing inside that they are the same old feet who will wander off, wherever they want, and not where they are made to.

2 days of relearning to look at the sky the same way again, and  flashing the sun, an overwhelming smile, across all those lightyears in between.

1 day of buzzing overwhelmingly with new expectations, standing at the plinth of your new beginnings, not afraid of the fall, now that you’ve already uncovered what the bottom feels like.

hanging in there.

It is difficult to unsee it once you see it, this magic beaded into your nerves, this power that stems from your soul, and once you do, you feel like you are high on your own depths. You have been called out ‘unproductive’ and ‘incapable’ and ‘undeserving’ of love, but you have also been called irrevocably strong and a go-getter and easily-blending-in-with-anyone lovely, so may be you are a labyrinth of opposites that melt into each other and you cannot perfectly label yourself on who you are and what you are because may be, you really belong only to the betwixt and between of everything.

It doesn’t matter, you don’t want to be caught up in this mesh anymore, you want to be no-thing, nothing. It is what makes you feel above and beyond all the tyrannizing mess, anyway. It is what makes you feel akin to the birds, gliding above the rest, watching the world from a distance.

You think, may be, you were not cut for being categorized and put into boxes depending on your skillsets, possibly because you don’t have many (or any!). To be blatantly honest, if at all you were asked to recount your skillsets because your life depended on it, you would say, you excel in laughing out loudly, you are at times clumsy, at all times non-elegant, you hold high honors in not being able to keep things from people, and that you know to draw yourself a line to tell apart your intrinsic parts from the extrinsic ones so that you bare out only the extrinsics but over time, everything just bubbles up to the surface and exposes itself and you, to the world.

You are learning to go from ‘terrible’ to ‘tolerable’ at your job. You are bumping into deadlines more than ever now. Meeting them offguard like that, you feel stupefied, your past-self would have never thought its future-self could upgrade so high.

You gather, it can always be learnt, what is expected of you, to learn. But what they don’t tell you is, it cannot always be found, what you don’t even realize, is missing in the first place. You know what you long for. Openness. Clarity. Liberation.

You don’t see a clear path ahead, but you do see a path. You decide to take that anyway. How lost will you be?! Your innateness will catch up with you soon enough. After all, no matter how much you try to blend in, you are never able to contain all of yourself, inside yourself, somehow the essence always spills out and every path you walk on, starts reeking of you, becomes home. May be, there never is a sureshot destination for real, and whatever it looks like, exists only in your head. May be, the path in itself is magic, strewn with signs for you to pick on, and carry on from there, but to nowhere really, the journey is all the magic that is there to unfold.

You have this memory, ringing constantly at the back of your head and though you have been trying so hard, for days now, to wipe it out clean, you actually haven’t been able to erase it quite completely. You have often desperately wished it were material so that you could get rid of it, the way clean out your closet. You have tried to rearrange your thoughts around it just like you reorganize your clothes on the shelf, but now you are howling for change so bad and there’s no point in repositioning the clothes when what you really want to do is throw away the closet.

You have got problems, and so everyone has. But you are unique in your own way not everyone is. You learn to stop generalizing every thing around you, every trait of yours inside you. You learn to replace the word “everyone” with “I”. You learn, no boulders are big enough, no muck is grimy enough, no wind is bristly enough, and no cold is biting down enough on you, because you are a different protoplasm, there’s stubbornness mired into all of it, into all of you, in disproportionate inconsistencies, disproportionately aplenty.

This is your canvas, you planted the easel here and you will finish your painting, replete with the exact grace that you had wished upon it. 

And if you run out of acrylic, you pick up your bottle of water color and start brushing in and if all those bottles break and spill out, you smudge pastels over the piece and if you lose your pastels, you fill crayon inside those lines and if you exhaust your crayons, you pencil your sketch with insane undertones of graphite and if you misplace your pencil, you ink your heart out and if you drain all ink, you glaze oil over the sheet and if you have burnt out all the oil, you claw into the magnificent white space with your fingernails but you bring out that damn picture that you have always wanted to see. Means or no means, you don’t shy away even if it comes down to your own blood to evoke the scene in the painting you had set out on arriving at. After all, you got only this one canvas to sport.

toppled utopia.

You watch the steam rising from the coffee, and you are not sure if it is trying to defy the rain, or dissolve into it. You clutch the cup harder, raise it closer to your lips, allow the warmth to permeate all your senses, unspool every thread of thought inside you, assault every cell of your being to the core, untangle every knot inside your head. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. This is that kind of moment. You don’t bother to think right now. You just be.

The next minute, there are a thousand thoughts jostling for space inside your head. You have been looking for a job which can make your days decently bearable, you miss him, you need to pay the bills, you have to update that resume, you miss him even more, you have to finish reading that book, you have to save for the trip to Pune, you have to buy your mom glasses, you are missing him terribly! Nobody ever told you, the most beautiful thing about you is your transparency, he said that, and you fell in love.

You have been pretty confused, lately. You could not make out the difference between what’s real and what just seems to be. Your relationship of four years (FOUR years!) fell apart like a house of sand. You wonder if it had always been this weak, this brittle, this sensitive. You had met someone and it unsettled your world. You meet people everyday and nobody moves a single brick in the wall. This time, it was different. Intoxicating-different. You had never felt this magnitude of pull before. You got so torn apart between love and liking that you mistook the fling to be more tangible than it was. You feel, it is a blessing and a curse, all at once, to feel so deeply about anything and everything. It was not your fault. You had been duped by the moment. The moment turned out to be stronger than you are.

You say it all out loud, you tell them how you feel felt about them. No matter how embarrassing it gets or how much afraid you are about baring your heart to people, you say it right to their face (or into  phone!), and stomp out. You clear your head, you do it for your own contentment. You don’t expect any response, neither do you get one (sadly!), but you hardly bother anymore. Ironically, it turns out, saying it out loud diminishes the very feeling itself, and that too, very substantially. May be, it seemed stronger before because it had been reverberating all day, every day, inside your head.

You look down the balcony, and it is a riot of color outside. Raindrops are pattering against your roof, popping into ripples on the road ,dripping down the trees, encroaching upon everything, like they own the skies, the streets. You smell wet earth in the air. It gets you higher than vodka, gets you best tuned in, with your inner self. You watch a drop, streak across the glass window, knocking off dust particles in its way, the ones that had invested months into making the panes, their home. Everything is temporary. Headlights of cars make soggy roads, glisten golden in the dark. Rain is painting the streets brown and muddy all over and yet, it looks eerily beautiful.

Breakups are hard. Liking someone and not getting reciprocated in the same proportion (or not even in the slightest proportion!) is hard. Rejections are hard! Not getting what you want from your job, is hard. Not knowing what you want from anything, for that matter, is hard. Not being able to give back to your family in the way or capacity they had expected, is hard. Feeling empathy for people, things, situations and not being able to fix them is hard. Not being able to fix yourself, is hard. Life is hard. But it is beautiful too. Not constant-beautiful. But intermittently, yes, it is. May be you just need to look for it, in the right places. Outside. And inside. Inside yourself.

You are fine. You are messy, confused and sickeningly unreasonable at times. Or most of the time! But oddity doesn’t really translate into weirdness. You are an anomaly, a rare beautiful anomaly.

May be, people don’t stick around, but love never goes away. The moments you have lived already, nobody can take them away from you, they are yours to claim, to keep, to cherish, for perpetuity. So you can get by life, pricking yourself at your pain-points all the time, or you can live your life neglecting them.

You are bigger than this, than all of this. You are flawed, yes, but you have a voice strumming inside you. Follow that and you will be just fine. You might be neck-deep into this mess you have got yourself into, but this is your mess, and nobody knows you better than you yourself do. You are well acquainted with all your patterns (and unpatterned eccentricities !).

You found a way in, you will figure one out too.