Untitled

There are times when I wonder if I'll get over feeling a certain way. The weight of emotions become too much to actually believe that they'd one day go away and it will all be as if what went before never was.
There are times like today when washing my face over the sink before going to bed, I'm suddenly overcome and I need to stop and catch my breath. Sleep flees and I'm left wide awake trying to breathe through the pain. A friend told me once that's all that I'd have to do. Just breathe through the pain.
But what do you do when the pain overwhelms even breath? What do you do when you can barely stand up and what do you do when you feel tears pushing at you and threatening to break every barrier you have managed to erect?
I feel some days I can lower a veil of indifference over all that I truly feel.Someone said to me recently in the middle of a conversation in the dark, that maybe if the veil stayed in place long enough it'll become a skin. I thought I'd had that mastered. At least in the dark at that time, it felt plausible.And then I awoke to the bright light of day and realized that I was afraid of one day not feeling the things I feel as deeply as I feel them. What if when I stop feeling I lose everything forever? How do I live then?
There are some losses that will break me. I am sure of it. I am afraid of them. I do not know how I will live through them. And in the strange way that life has, I am made aware everyday that I am completely helpless in the face of them. How will I do it? Writing to faceless strangers in the middle of the night...and hoping for just one chance...just one more chance...to see and to hear and to talk... just one more... and then maybe more than just one more...

For one moment today

For one mad moment today I thought I'd tell you everything. In that one mad moment I was understood completely. In that one moment there was perfection. In that one moment there were no doubts.

The moment passed.

Now it is stored away. I will go back to it another day.

Musings at dawn...

It's 4 a.m and I'm wide awake. A cock crows somewhere. A distant door shuts timidly.My television emits sounds that are wholly alien to the hour - canned laughter, happy music- the volume is low and yet these sounds are alien to the hour.
In other time zones, people sit - people I once knew- or at least thought that I knew- their realities vastly different from mine. Some part of me resists the difference. And the more practical , "grown up " side, knows that this is what must be in the end.
Do I mourn the "loss" ? Honestly , no. But there is a discomfort. There is a sense of weight. Distances grow. Geography is the least of it.
After the weight, comes the weightlessness. The floating away of bits that once mattered more than life itself. Or perhaps that was only a feeling. In the end what matters really?
I remember an evening from a very long time ago when I sat on a low bench overlooking a valley , a friend by my side. We watched a full moon rise. In that moment , there was magic in the air. There was magic and that indefinable certainty of endless possibilities. I do not remember the words spoken.But there were dreams and hopes. All that remains now of that moment is a memory of the ethereal space we gazed upon. Life occupied the time between then and now.
I remember too a spray of purple flowers with drops of rain on them.I remember them resting in a little glass on a window sill. Their simple breathtaking beauty remains in my mind's eye to be retrieved in the in between times like these.
The constants...

Interlude

There is a place I can go and be myself. No pretenses . No fear. There I can go and say , this is I. This is exactly who I am. There is nothing else.
But that place now seems so far away. Now, I pretend so many things. I feign interest. I fake happiness that I don't truly feel.
My yearning for that other truer place is something I try to ignore every minute of every day. I know I'll go back. But it seems now to take forever.
I bury myself in the minutiae of a life that I have no stake in- not really.
I wait for my other life to begin. It feels just within reach- it feels just a little out of reach.
And I wait. I wait and wait.

Fear

I was taught fear. At an early age , it became part of my diet. The food came from every quarter. It came from all those who nurtured me. It would help me survive , they said. I had to be afraid. I had to learn to not trust. At least, not trust the first time. I was warned of dangers in every corner. I was warned of temptations waiting to jump out at me at every turn. These named and unnamed fears were written out on my heart , wired into the circuits in my brain.
Then came a day, now erased from memory or perhaps not erased but simply that it was a day like every other save for one thing. I decided not to be afraid. I decided fear had no place. I decided I did not want to merely survive or exist. I decided I wanted to live. An author , a very long time ago, wrote that he wanted to experience life.He said that he did not want to live the unexamined life. I have no such intense ambition. I do have the desire , though, to live and succumb to the temptations. I have found that the temptations hold no danger. At least not those that they meant.I have decided to trust until it should prove otherwise. I anticipate no danger until I can see it.
The landscapes of my heart were re-drawn that day. The circuits in my brain were re-wired.
I , to use a cliche, spread my wings.
There is one thing I replaced with fear - love.

And those who fed me fear- what of them? I hear they still survive.

Memories of silence

When I was a little girl living in Oman, there were certain weekend and holiday rituals. These invariably involved dad driving us out into the desert , sometimes to Dubai or other places or sometimes just into the always intriguing interior regions of Oman. My sister and I would sit in the back seat and invariably at some point during the drive, a fist fight would break out over things that simply had to be resolved just then and which in all probability wouldn't be remembered a couple of hours later .
What does remain in my memory vividly are the trips back home at the end of the weekend. These took place as the sun was setting. In my mind there are a couple of magical moments in any desert.One is that time just before the sun sets completely. Not quite twilight. The sun goes down in one last blazing burst of glorious blood red/orange against a deep blue sky and a dark ochre desert floor and black mountains. A hush settles that can be felt even in the climate-controlled interior of the car gliding along the super-smooth highways.A stillness that seems in strange contrast to the quiet whizzing by of the motorists. I'm quite sure my seven or eight year old self never thought of the antiquity of that land. But my adult self cannot help but wonder at it. The history, the fables, the myths...and mostly the emphatic emptiness...and silence.
And then, the sun disappears completely. In those days large sections of the highway in the interior were yet to be lit up. Imagine then the absolute darkness that enveloped the landscape relieved only by the lights of the cars and other vehicles that intermittently passed by. Brilliant silver dots would start appearing. I'm sure each of those stars had a name and I'm sure now that at some point in the distant past those very stars showed the way to many a traveler. To us they were merely brilliant points of illumination at distances we could scarcely imagine. Then slowly, the unrelieved blackness of the sky would start seeming a deep, deep shade of midnight blue sequined as it were with the silvery stars and sometimes, at the right time of month , a crescent or full moon.
My father, I suspect, always had a romantic streak in him. I remember it was at these times , that he would invariably put on music quite appropriate to the mood. Songs from the film Umrao Jaan were a favourite I remember as were other " ghazals" , for want of a better word. I remember some of them vaguely. Be that as it may, what remains now , in all its vividness in memory are those brilliant landscapes.
Years later when I was working in Oman and I had to commute nearly 40 plus kilometers each way to work, my adult self reveled in those drives . I loved my sunrise/sunset drives and night time drives after a day at the hospital. The highways were better lit. But the desert remained unchanged. I almost always regretted the arrival in the city proper. It was a rude awakening almost.
In some ways I think I imbibed some of that silence and then lost it somewhere along the way. At times like today, I think back to that silence and imagine recapturing it and if I listen carefully enough, I realize it isn't lost at all- just waiting for me to find it...

Unchanged and changed

I have had many homes and yet have remained homeless. I have traveled to many places and yet remained strangely still. The people I have met, the people I am yet to meet- I have been involved with them ; I have been taken in- into fragments of lives, loves , joys and sadnesses.
I have tasted the joy of several homecomings and I have tasted the sadness of many a leave-taking.
I have loved and I have lost.
I have been loved and lost that too.
The many skies and the many roofs that have sheltered me ,
They have stolen from me too.
The seas I have crossed and the paths I have traversed-
Ancient cities , older deserts,
Towering skyscrapers ,immense mountains,
Noisy bustle,profound silences,
They have all become a part of me .
And yet,I remain still-
Unchanged and changed.