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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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