The Anatomy of Waiting

 

I’ve been looking for things to say.  I have been afraid of staring at blank pages. What if someday I have nothing to say anymore? What if nothing I say interests anyone anymore? What if no one hears me? What if they hear me and laugh at my naiveté? So what am I going to write about?

Like most of my recent posts, this too has been weeks and months in the making. I’ve been running away from saying the things I want to say. What if I say too much? Share too much? What if they laugh and roll their eyes, muttering about my presumptions? What if no one says a damn thing and I fall through the rabbit-hole of silence once again?

On some days, I listen to one song on loop, willing it to weave a story in my head that transports me from my present. On other days, I run through my playlists, discarding old favourites like a moody teenager picking at food, too distracted to allow for the distraction of music and rhythm. Somebody perhaps I’ll sit down and write songs again, feel the words coming for me like old friends. Someday I’ll break this cycle of distraction and disappointment.

All this is nothing but the disconsolate ravings of a heart craving for stories. For in stories we find somewhere to go home to, to someone to go home to, direction, a purpose, a narrative fulfillment where things happen for a reason and nothing is ever caught in the mire of nothingness and stasis. Unless you are Beckett, of course. Then nothing happens twice, and keeps happening over and over again as bicycle wheels go out of wind and hills grow steeper and no one knows where the windows are anymore.

If I thought less, perhaps it would be quieter inside my head. But we can’t all be existentialist philosophers. If I roll my stone up the hill, there will be music in the sound of the friction. It may not be much, but it carries my heart in its notes. And maybe that’s reason enough to do it again. “Tomorrow night, if the dreams come along, I’ll catch them all and spin up a song…”

A part of me wants to rail against the unfairness of nothing ever changing. The other part chides me to remember all the changes within me, of the little steps I have learned to take, and how different that makes me from who I used to be. The first part quietens down, but not quite. But what’s the point, it whines, if nothing changes on the outside? Did you make a sound in the forest? What is more important, the tree or the one who saw it fall?

I wake up every morning expecting a miracle that never comes. And the hands of the clocks tick away, day rolling into another night of praying, leading to another morning of hope, and days into weeks into months into years. Yet I never stop, because without hope, what would be the point? And we carry on the days of sameness shaping up into our ordinary lives. Yet the extraordinary happens, and when you look back through the lens of years you see how today’s ordinary had seemed impossible five years ago. Perhaps the external circumstances of your life hasn’t changed so much, but you learned something, you failed at something, you did it again, hey at least you tried! Isn’t that a miracle?

For the longest time, I’ve been living and repeating a cycle of hope and heartbreak. It used to be my friends, movies, planned outings: waiting for something good to happen, counting down to weeks and days to one afternoon of miraculous escape from routine, only to return alone in the cold light of dusk, upstream in a street of happy crowds, amongst people who all had somewhere to go, someone to be with. There were books by beloved authors, but stories end as sure as they begin, leaving you starved for more and more and more. Until you breathe, close your eyes and take a leap of faith. And start creating your own stories.

I remember the heady feeling of elation when my first poem was published. I remember too, when my first story was published. The world, as they say, was an oyster, and I wanted to do it again. I did too, a couple of times. And then the cycle started. Attempt, hope, rejection, void. I remember pinning all my faith and all my desires on one piece of submission, for weeks and months, only for it all to end in nothing again. Then I decided that perhaps I didn’t have what it took in me to write. Perhaps I wasn’t a poet after all. I didn’t sound like the poets who were published in these journals, yet my language was my own and I could not fake a voice that did not belong to me. And so, I didn’t have it in me to be a poet. Old Man Eliot had talked about how the true poets were the ones who continued to be poets beyond their twenty-fifth years, and I was giving up, taking those words as further proof of what I didn’t have.

My love for writing started when I was fairly young, springing perhaps from my love of reading and of stories, but also from the simple pleasure of putting words together and watching something grow. Recognizing this, my mother entered me into an essay contest when I was in Junior High School. The contest was in Bengali, and the topic was the generic ‘Your Aim in Life’. While my mother meant well, there were two problems with this situation. First, we hadn’t started essay-writing in school yet so I knew nothing of the philosophical paraphernalia about rudders and ships that was expected in this essay. Second, I wasn’t shaped yet, not bothered by the relentless thoughts of significance and the truth of life, so how could I write about my aim in life? It was a simpler time, not having to think, not knowing to think, and the very thought of continuing through life like that makes me gasp for air. Nevertheless, young, clueless me stared around the room and clutched on the one thought that landed, and I wrote about how I wanted to be a singer and how I needed to practice hard for that. So the good thing that came out of that debacle was that my parents signed me for music classes.

I continued to go those classes for around thirteen years, once a week, making friends, learning things, but sometime during those years, I learned to hide in the corners, recognized there were better singers than me and shifted my ambitions back into expected academic lines. Thus when I quit my music lessons some six years back because I couldn’t cope with adjusting the demands of my job and showing up in class every week, I did so only with the slight regret of letting go of a hobby that had overstayed anyway. It wasn’t as if I was going to be a singer, I remember telling myself. I had a clearly defined career path as a young academic, I loved my job and I was still yet to experience all the existential questions about purpose and meaning.

It took about a year more for that rosy tint to fade. Then in the middle of 2017, I had a breakdown of sorts. I functioned adequately on the outside so nobody really saw how I had to drag myself out of bed every morning because I couldn’t bear to go through another day but I did it anyway because the possibility of having to explain was even more exhausting. I felt absolutely disconnected from everyone. My life had run into a tight little box that was choking me out. And I couldn’t bear to imagine the future stretching out before me, like the deserts of futility. I only had a couple of temporary escapes, sleep and the book (series) I was then reading- Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

I had then recently rediscovered Gaiman and fallen in love in the second attempt. His first work that I read was ‘The Problem of Susan’, probably in 2012 and while I loved the story from Susan’s perspective, the end always creeped me out. But then in early 2017, thanks to a book review of American Gods by a Facebook friend, I went to the kindle store and looked up the novel. And I think it changed my life. Not on the outside, perhaps, but that single decision helped to widen my world just a little bit. That review was by Alex, who had only become my friend because we were both in a Percy Jackson fan group. I had only got into Percy Jackson (and A Song of Ice and Fire, for that matter) because I wanted to expand my reading of fantasy literature for my MPhil research. I had only got into MPhil without any sort of planning because a friend called me out of the blue and asked me if I was going to apply because a couple of universities had their forms out. Funny how life leads you, sometimes. And that is why I am a big believer of synchronicity, and of little things adding up.

But anyway, one evening in June 2017, in the middle of a silent breakdown I was pacing in my room and I heard myself humming a song that I hadn’t heard before. Just a couple of lines that went- ‘Give me tomorrow night/I’ll make things all right/Sweet Lady Death, give me tomorrow night.’ I have no idea where that came from, except for the Lady Death part, which certainly came from Sandman. I had not planned on a songwriting career, ever. Even back in Junior High when I had casually written an essay about becoming a singer, I didn’t think that singers could write their own songs. The singers I had grown up listening to were not songwriters. In my head, the singer was one person and the lyricist was a different person and the music composer was a different person, names I had read in all the inlay cards inside cassette cases. But I sat down and wrote that song, now called ‘Tomorrow Night’, the third song of my debut EP, Timeline, released just a couple of weeks ago. And since I didn’t know what to do with my new song, I started doing a couple of other things. First, I told myself, if nobody would publish me, I’ll write on my own blog. And second, I started doing vocal workouts again. Thus my then defunct blog, Ruchira’s Ramblings started its second innings on 16^th June, 2017, and by the end of the year, I had created my own YouTube channel, uploading cover versions with the aim of ultimately singing my own songs. Blogging led me to other friends, and in early 2018, inspired by one such friend, I signed up for Airplane Poetry Movement’s ‘Write 100 Poems in a Year’ challenge in 2018, and a few weeks in, I started believing that I was a poet after all. And last year, APM brought out its anthology titled ‘A Letter, A Poem, A Home’ and I found a place in it, right next to Rudy Francisco, no less. I know there are better poets out there, and sometimes I read stuff I love so much that I almost regret that I didn’t write it myself, but then, sometimes I revisit a poem of my own, and I think, hey, I’m okay too.

Last year, Taylor Swift released not one but two albums, the second one, Evermore coming right after I had (finally!!!) submitted my PhD thesis and what with the resultant vacuum, the lyrics about feeling unmoored in December somewhat hit home. And I very, very naively thought, what does it take to make an album? How many songs? How do you release them? By the end of 2020, I had written around six songs in bits and pieces, only two of which- Timeline and Flying are actually in the current EP. By January, I had my research completed. I knew how many minutes it took to make an EP and how to get your songs distributed. And then I waited. I recorded and deleted songs because I hated how I sounded. I couldn’t figure out what to do about the music because I did not have an orchestra or even a keyboard or a guitar and I knew my ukulele strumming was less than perfect. I wrote another song called ‘Everybody Gets a Little Tired’, decided to dig ‘Tomorrow Night’ out of the archives and shelved some of the songs I had originally written for Timeline. Recorded and deleted again. Then I had covid at the end of May. It was pretty mild, but it put my voice out of action for a couple of months. From mid-July to the end of August we were dealing with the online examinations of five different semesters and I could probably write a whole different blog post (or several posts) on that subject except the thought of it makes me want to curl up and cry. By early September, classes for the new semesters had begun. I was growing increasingly desperate, frustrated and furious at my own failure. More recordings were made and deleted. The last song, ‘Thinking of You’ was written on a whim just a week before the final recordings, and I thought, bugger it, I am not going to make a perfect album with my current time and resources, so let’s just get on with it, shall we?

If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Depends on how the tree feels about it, doesn’t it? Okay, wrong analogy there. If nobody watches a hatchling take its first flight, the wind still rushes beneath its wings. My point is, sometimes we are chasing dreams not for the world but for ourselves. To tell ourselves we can do it. To teach ourselves we can do it. And those are our little miracles.

I keep listening to tarot readings hoping they will tell me something new. I keep falling asleep hoping the world will be different in the morning. I keep scrolling through my timeline searching for something I’m not quite sure of. I keep weaving symbols into thin air and meanings unto symbols. Perhaps I am becoming a mad woman. Someone once told me I’d die a crazy cat lady. I don’t have cats. I’ve never been drunk except on joy, on little moments and words I could relive for eternity. 60 streams become 71 in a day, then 74, 78, and then another leap to 90, and I look at listeners from Philippines, Vietnam, Germany, the USA and count my little blessings. Thank you.

Someday in the future all of this will make sense. The waiting for magic, the anxiety and the disappointment and the steady slipping away of time–it will all lead to a magnificent homecoming. Isn’t that what all the stories say? The stories we bond over, the stories we kill for, the stories we define ourselves by, the stories that make us who we are: they all promise a reward at the tunnel’s end, a happy ending.

If I refresh my feed enough times, will it be already time for the new episode, the new movie, the new-whatever-I-use-to-fill-up-the-pages-of-my-days? My hours slip away like I’m constantly crossing time zones to the East, trying to create sunrises out of despair. What next? What now?

And in desperation for an answer, I’ve put my imperfect but honest songs into an EP (I learned this term while researching album technicalities) and sent them out into the world. My heart and my voice are all I have.

Wishing a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you. May 2022 bring out the magic within us. Happy Holidays.

Timeline: EP is now streaming on Spotify, Apple, iTunes, Amazon Prime, Tidal, Gaana, Anghami, and a bunch of other places, available on my Linktree page. Let me know what you think.