Ruchira's Ramblings

    Photo by Author. All rights reserved. The world breaks down into faraway islands. Yesterday I could have found you in a chance meeting, a couple of wrong turns or an unexpected phone call. Today you are on a different planet. And I am hiding out in my little bubble. It is peaceful, I admit. I haven’t had such a luxury of solitude in a while. But when you pull down the shutters against the world, you don’t expect the world to shut you out as well. Funny things, islands. One gets tired of all the noise from the busy ports, and one gets tired of the sound of water lapping against the stone. People are the same way. They want to run and they want to stay still. They want adventures without things changing, and when things change too much, or stop changing at all, they wonder why they’re still standing where they were. And sometimes, it’s not the world standing still or the world spinning too fast that is the problem. We are, to use a cliché and a curse, living in interesting times.

I don’t know who I am anymore. Who I once thought I was has been dead for years, who I want to be is nowhere to be found, and I seem to falter at every step I take towards that elusive self. Projects fail. Hours of toil amount to nothingness. The last remaining egg fails to hatch. The world breaks your heart. And meanwhile the past you want to leave behind keeps intruding. Photo by Dan Grinwis via Unsplash This blog isn’t going anywhere, is it? I know all the advice. Have read them all a hundred times. I know I don’t offer a service here, nothing that a reader may gain for spending their precious minutes reading through my ramblings. But that’s not why I started. I started because I needed to hear out my thoughts before they imploded inside my head. I write here because I can’t speak my madness and my fury and my melancholy out in person, and I don’t know who to talk to. Oh I have friends. Perhaps you are one of them. And I know you would listen. But what do I tell you? Sho

Pre-Script: If you came over from my Instagram , my YouTube channel is here . ... By Kaique Rocha via Pexels Another Bloomsday gone. It has been three years since I announced the intention to revive my blog on Facebook. The aching sense of lack that drove me to that decision back then still exists. Of course a lot has happened since then. A lot has changed, a lot has been done. But sometimes, in the middle of the doings and keeping busy and ticking boxes, you ask yourself, what has really changed? Why are you here, anyway? Leopold Bloom walked the streets on a meandering search for purpose. Sounds like a fairytale in the middle of this lockdown. Still, we’re all making our ways through our daily schedules through the meandering signposts that keep us reassured that we’re doing it right, that we’re doing something, at any rate. Online, offline, or inside our heads. Perhaps it’s selfish to talk about personal ennui at a time like this. So let me ask instead, where do

In the spirit of National Poetry Writing Month, I thought of doing a prose-poem for the blog. But before that, a small announcement. I have a song up on an episode of the London Theatre Podcast- episode titled –We Need to Talk –New Writing Showcase Part 1. It’s only 11 minutes long and you can listen to it on Spotify , iTunes , SoundCloud , PlayerFM or Podbean . Let me know what you think. Longings What does a love story look like? What shape is it? What are the ingredients you need to make one, and most important, where can you find them? I feel like there is space in me for a story, if I could only write one. Or does it get written for you? How does this work? Does an island long for a ship? Do the walls of a little room long for rain to break in? Does a river raging in the rain forest feels incomplete for the space by your side? How does this work? When you speak your words, and no one hears them, were you alive? If you spoke at all, and nobody else spoke your lan

Photo by Engina Kyurt via Pexels.com  There’s a certain type of sadness you fear in those you love. A sadness you can’t name, can’t put your finger on, can’t even properly describe. It comes out in flickers of petty, domestic discontent. The tele-soaps have all got it wrong. All those grand conspiracies, lofty heartbreaks come with an end-goal. Unhappy homes are made of smaller stuff- things misplaced, little forgettings, rotten fruits in the refrigerator, an unclicked switch, a harmless question. Even a shared anecdote. For a while, I have been watching. Counting. What breaks the ceasefire? What disrupts the peace? It is, as the saying goes, always the little things.  Truth is, nobody cares about the little things. The little things only reveal an absence. Most of human history isn’t about momentous matters, and thereby lies the discontent. There are no great goals for most of us, so we find our goals in others. A leader, a hero, a loved one. We are told to be a certain wa

“If it has passed from the high and beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; that was of old the fate of Arda Marred…” J.R.R.Tolkien, The Silmarillion I don’t believe we pass from necessarily from beauty to darkness, but something in that last sentence from The Silmarillion awakes a heartache within me for something I don’t even recall longing for. It is in our nature to long for the past, not simply because things often appear golden in retrospect, but also because innocence has its own charm. The first time you read a new book is magic. You can return later and discover the things you missed of course, but that first magic is something else. When I read the first Harry Potter book for the very first time at fifteen, when I read The Sandman at thirty, I knew as the pages turned that something wondrous and enchanting and beautiful was drawing to a close, and it would never be the same again. Others have their own magic. That first time yo

I write a poem. Scratch it out. I write it because I am angry. I scratch it out because it is futile. I see the fissure on the earth, but I don’t know the magic words to close it. Every word that is said, mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, ours seem to widen and widen the gap. I am angry because I don’t have the right words. I am angry because I don’t matter. I am angry because we seem to be all tumbling down together, clawing and lashing and bleeding to a point of no return. An old acquaintance says we ought to listen. Learn why they hate. Try not to convert. Does it help? If I know I am right and they know they are right and if everybody is right and if we understand why they hate but if my words don’t reach far enough if my words don’t mean enough are not strong enough if their words only tell me I do not belong if I do not conform- what good does listening do? Someone I really like says both sides- there should be both sides of the views. No more fake news or biased views, see it a