Anniversaries & Anxieties

 

16th June, 2021. Bloom’s Day. I mark the date because it’s my blog-anniversary. This is my space to think aloud without judgment and prudent advice, to ramble my heart out, to find my way as all who wander lost may someday find theirs.

It’s been a strange world, a strange time. Where would you wander when paths were closed? And the people died, without help, without love, without dignity. And the world carried on, in light that was always eight minutes late, as moments turned into memories, as memories faded into dull, half-forgotten heartaches, as all aches blurred into the fog of the blank spaces. And the light was always eight minutes late. We woke, opened our eyes, saw the world in delayed light, tried to make sense of it all, and no wonder we got it all wrong. When the darkness came, we looked up and said our prayers, pinning all our hopes on God. “Move him into the sun”, we said. And God was eight minutes late.

I wonder, if tomorrow, in some moment of inexplicable cosmic mystery, the sun exploded, what would happen to us? Would the earth shift first, or the warmth? Or would we have eight minutes of borrowed light from a dead star? I’m sure the astrophysicists know. Perhaps we would be long gone before the sun. I am just thinking aloud, like I always do.

Someday, this will all be over. We shall pick up the pieces and walk out in the sun, again. Someday again we shall touch each other, letting the wind lift our hair off our faces as we run to embrace long-lost friends. Or maybe, we shall sit down to grieve, in silence, and those of us who survive shall avert our eyes, swallow our words and know the guilt of the living. And then we will move on, because that’s what we do.  We shall live like we have lived before, longing for the stars, dreaming of the skies, and yearning for love. We shall survive. We hope.

Rohit Ghadge via Unsplash.com


17th June, 2021. I have to put down words for the blog, and I have run out of things to say. Not that I don’t have thoughts crawling to come out, but some of it is political with a chance of provoking ugliness, and some of it is perhaps too specific for the general tone of this blog. For instance, my feelings about the approaching series of deadlines for yet another cycle of semester end formalities and the futile pile of paperwork and intense, joyless screen-time that comes with it, feelings I have expressed quite thoroughly in my article about my teaching life for the blog section of the academic journal, Sanglap. As the meetings pile up and the dates advance, I increasingly feel this overwhelming inclination to hide away in a bubble where none of it can reach me, coupled with the slightly paradoxical, mild anxiety to resume my classes and complete my assigned syllabi, something that I have been unable to do for weeks now thanks to a mild visit from the Covid19 virus.

Should I even be writing about this stuff? Do I even have the right to complain when people I know are fighting for their lives? A sort of guilt weighs me down, interwoven with gratitude for my own survival. Gratitude and guilt, guilt and gratitude, fear of what’s to come, anxiety for what might come, turning away from the newsfeed, feeling even greater need for the respite of a bubble.

18th June, 2021. Slept off the whole day. Had cups of hot tea. Coughing bout in the evening after receding for a day. This thing doesn’t seem to go away.

19th June, 2021. I remember looking at the windows of patisseries on happier days, looking at chocolate boats and blueberry muffins with you. I remember the madness of reckless laughter in the stolen weekends of our exhausting schedules. Was that in another lifetime? Then why does the exhaustion remain while the laughter feels so remote?

I remember days that felt like adventures, Sunday afternoons walking through empty by-lanes of an old, sleepy city that felt so different from the rush-hour hustle of our weekday routes that it almost felt like I was someone else, some character in a book I would enjoy reading. We could have found a dragon egg that day, or an infinity stone. I wish we had. Perhaps we did, in an alternate timeline.

30th June, 2021. Ooh, long break! I ended up not marking Blooms Day on the blog this year after all. Part of it was because I had just posted on the 13th and didn’t want to change the link in my Instagram bio so quickly. That’s my second problem with Instagram, they don’t allow links in the posts themselves. (The first one will always be photo-cropping. Ugh!) But the other reason why I didn’t have a Blooms Day post this year was because I didn’t seem to have things to say to warrant an entire post.  I’ve always been afraid of that, that someday I wouldn’t be able to come up with a new blog post, someday I will be all out of poetry, someday I will not know what songs to write. It’s why I announced renewing the blog on Facebook back in 2017. I thought if I made a public declaration of it, I would be compelled to motivate myself to keep on writing. Not that it works that way. Social Media is both distracting and distracted, and it has a rather short term memory. No one would have minded if I had not posted anything in 2017 after the FB announcement, no one did mind when I took a hiatus last year to finish writing my thesis, and no one will mind if I go off again, I think. No one except me.

The voice inside my head that will go crazy trying to figure out the purpose of going on from day to day without making a mark. And when I am done writing, that same voice will ask the point of writing something that nobody reads. But I’ve always found the flow of words a goal in itself, even without a tangible meaning. Terry Pratchett once said we were trying to understand the mystery of the universe with the aid of a system of signs and sounds that was designed to communicate where the best fruits were, and thus we forever fall short of our intended meanings. Who knows the meaning of all that I ramble here? I certainly don’t! Yet words are all we have, to see and understand and love one another, picking a clue here, etching a pattern there, weaving a design. And isn’t that beautiful?

2nd July, 2021. Birthday month. The onset of July brings me mixed feelings these days. One gets old, you see. Old and tired and disillusioned and wondering if one is too late for miracles. But one enjoys feeling special for a day, nevertheless. Chocolates and cakes and birthday greetings. The anticipation for the little wishes that make you feel good, the unexpressed hope for a little sprinkle of miracle from the universe that never comes. Or maybe it does. I am alive, still dreaming, still hoping, and that’s something, isn’t it? City of stars, are you shining just for me? Just a little bit? Could you maybe give me a hint?

Thus I move from one beginning to another, from a blog-anniversary to my own turn round the sun. So many lessons, so many renewals, it’s got to take me somewhere, right?

3rd July, 2021. Back when we travelled, I would sit by the train window and look at little roads disappearing into places I never learned the names of. Where were the roads going? Where could I go, if I followed the road?

Sometimes in strange towns I have crossed twilight streets beneath a magic lamp, half-expecting to run into you. And maybe you were there, just a little early. Or late. Perhaps we were both there, or will be. Wibbly-wobbley, timey-wimey stuff.

Majid Rangraz via unsplash.com 


    … All the immense

images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,

cities, towers, and bridges, and un-suspected turns in the path,

and those powerful lands that were once

pulsing with the life of the gods—all rise within me to mean

you, who forever elude me.- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

My social media handles:

 Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

YouTube

Blogger is doing away with the email subscription system in some months so you might want to consider following this blog on Wordpress.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Perfumes and Lipsticks -friday fiction flash

12 & a ½ Ways to Deal with Writer’s’Block

Meera