"Resurrection" is not an amusing word, but I keep the strange company that chooses to laugh...

Almost an entire year living in the same city. It's almost as if my deeply tumultuous relationship with the concept called nostalgia is maturing. Or... I've successfully averted the risk of making memories here. I float through this place as if only one of us really exists, and neither will ever find out which one. 

Not all has changed though. Yesterday, a colleague who comes with the rare built-in features of great spirit and genuinely solid character, pulled the most overworked amongst us together and took us to a shooting range at the end of a particularly demanding day. Merrily, we rode a golf-cart. The gentle hum of its engine harmonising with the distant gunshots, as he described telling our co-workers about the plan earlier. Everyone he spoke to, made the same joke about the many perils of putting me and ammunition together. I may have had my sunniest impersonation of a smile on for the last 10 months, but there's more truth to my advertising than there are holes in my targets.

***

This here is a place that was made with great, great love 10 years ago. Angst and rage and bewilderment and wonder, sure... all the elemental constituents of a great love. 2009 was when I came here to find a vat I designed to pour the excesses of my personality into. 2019 is the year I come here, to find parts of myself that were too heavy and non-aerodynamic to carry into the hyper-optimised adulthood I've designed to usually move at a slightly punishing pace.

***

I turned thirty this year. I've lived in fourteen houses. I've attended seven schools. I've lived in seven cities, but cycled between them thirteen times. I've fallen in love thrice. I've fallen out of it once. I've simplified my story by enumerating parts, often. 

I've lived completely by myself under solitary-confinement levels of isolation for months at a time. I've socialised till my knees buckled and collapsed into a pile of friends sleeping like puppies, and stayed motionless through the night. I have taken intercontinental flights to unfamiliar lands by myself for no particular reason, and walked the length and breadth of the cities I found myself in. I've traveled 17 hours to see my favourite people and crammed enough "living" in those few days than I would otherwise live in a lifetime. I've won over my critics, and been terribly negligent with what were the kindest of my people. I have given (and received) great measures of fondness and gratitude.  I've traveled miles and eons into the unknown with strangers, but sometimes failed to find a familiar bone in my proverbial tribe. I've seen, heard, tasted, and felt things the intensity and perfection of which I cannot - on most days and in good sense - deem possible. I've romanticised my story by preserving snapshots like pressed flowers, often.

***

The dinkus (three-asterisk punctuation used liberally in this post) reminds me of the formaldehyde smell of freshly-printed grade-school examination sheets. All printed in thin, unsettling Courier New. The kind that were imperfectly punched and scattered tiny white paper circles on your uniform. The kind that used extremely thin paper, seemingly designed to self-destruct after the school year is buried under a thick layer of awkwardness, social trauma, teenage anxiety, and regrets. I got excellent grades in school, but this memory makes me nervous. I grew up in the format of a shuddering ball comprised almost entirely of nerves, and my childhood was a panic attack that lasted 9 years. Now I'm a Type A, ENTJ professional "fixer" with a reputation for taking no prisoners, so life sure ensures balance and symmetry in creatively cruel fashion. The many successes of overcompensation may have taught me some questionable lessons. 

***

My heroes have grown old and some are dying. This is a variety of heartbreak I was unprepared for, which makes me question the necessity of linear time and madly lust after the power of infinite memory. Knowing fully well that that which is my deepest desire is very clearly and predictably my ultimate downfall. 

The heart wants what it wants; and this heart has been known to hold a lifelong grudge against Newtonian physics.

So... you don't have any plans for the New Year? 

Don't worry, I've got you covered. 

Step 1: Buy Benadryl. 

Step 2: Watch the new season of Black Mirror. 

Step 3: Read David Foster Wallace. 

Step 4: Curl up in a ball on the floor and stay there till it's 2018. 

Step 5: Take solace in having almost ensured an upward trajectory to the start of the year. 

Boom. At your service, is the one-stop solution to all of life's happiness. 

Teach me how to dent time.

They say that hindsight is 20/20.

Pithy aphorisms don't make it any less infuriating, do they?

It's not easy when your one true misgiving with the world is the linearity of time. For 2018, it is this hearts' earnest desire to have problems slightly more pliable than the laws of Newtonian physics.

That. Just that.

Aftermath.

After the battlefield is finally cold, and the sun has set on the massacre it witnessed, it is memory that poisons those who survive. No matter which side you pledged, dwelling on each blow will kill even the victor. Eventually... and indiscriminately. 

Lessons That Came Too Late - Part 1

"A nature that does not sue for happiness, often receives it in large measure"

Listen Without Prejudice.

Given enough time, everything decays into rage. It courses through the veins, thicker than blood. It burns brighter than most fires you and I have known. It lives. 

Burning out is a gift, a blown fuse being the final line of defense before the carnage. The limit of human capacity for enduring pain protects not itself, but the source. 

But there are those who don't burn out. Those misguided into striving for invincibility, can only come burning and blazing, or not come at all. They forget how to half-live, they know not how to half-love. Run enough pain through them, and they become live wires; obliterating everything they touch, knowing neither peace nor loss. The current, it's possible, would never stop.

"In a fine country, in a sunny country,

Among the hills I knew,

I built a house for the wren that lives in the orchard,

And a house for you.

The house I built for the wren had a round entrance,

Neat and very small;

But the house I built for you had a great doorway,

For a lady proud and tall.

You came from a country where the shrubby sweet lavender

Lives the mild winter through;

The lavender died each winter in the garden

Of the house I built for you.

You were troubled and came to me because the farmer

Called the autumn "the fall";

You thought that a country where the lavender died in the winter

Was not a country at all.

The wrens return each year to the house in the orchard;

They have lived, they have seen the world, they know what's best

For a wren and his wife; in the handsome house I gave them

They build their twiggy nest.

But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home

To a leaky castle across the sea,-

To lie awake in linen smelling of lavender

And hear the nightingale, and long for me."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

"There are things I have wanted so much and for so long, I would only consent to have them if I could keep wanting them."

Top of the list of things I would have said eventually, had they not already been said in a manner so faultless.

The sky is no man's land.

Fulcrum

One doesn't play with fire, without expecting to get burnt. 

In doing so, the objective of the game is not to avoid damage. The whole point of the exercise, is to balance ones' instinct for survival against the predilection for self-destruction, and discover which one wins. The war, after all, is always internal.

On identity and the passage of time.

Cut to 10 years later, and the goth kid in me:
1. has the most corporate of corporate day jobs.
2. wears dark lace under button-up pastel shirts and business suits.
3. grins at her painted-black toenails when things get too... insipid.
4. reads Poe and prowls derelict, banyan-lined streets post-midnight.
5. lights a candle to stare at contemplatively, every time it rains.
6. definitely listens to The Cure secretly, between presentations and when no one is looking.

This Is Not A Pipe.

It is when people come to a point where they think they know you, they stop noticing you. When that moment is reached, you could simply keep feeding their illusions and self-serving need to believe that they understand and are in control of much more than reality would have it be. 

It becomes so terribly easy to step behind a curtain of their own making, cast mere shadows on the cloth, and let mere assumptions vivify the act right into real life. The audience will love it so dearly, so completely (for narcissistic love of one's own creation is convenient enough), that every contradictory truth in the field of vision becomes immaterial. 

Surely, evolution has done the world a great disservice. 

Breaking silences and gentler things.

I often wake up wanting nothing more than to strip the world bare. 

Pull little parts off with my own hands, crumble them like clay, observe the texture of every slice, the cross-section of every joint, and somehow come closer to making sense of all these events that are entirely unlikely but painfully predictable, all at the same time. Instead of just watching them unfold before me, just as I imagined them a thousand hours, weeks, or years ago. Just as I could never really believe they would. It's the ultimate existential conflict. Subjective optimism is up against objective reality. The crazy, stupid things we do to keep the little flame of hope alive. 

I'd like to crumble every bit under the tips of my fingers, smudge them with the friction of the ridges that make up my fingerprints, and re-engineer reality to be little less obvious. To be a little more kind.

"If you entreat me with your loveliest lie

I will protest you with my favorite vow.

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

And vows were not so brittle as they are,

But so it is, and nature has contrived

To struggle on without a break thus far,--

Whether or not we find what we are seeking

Is idle, biologically speaking."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

spin the roulette  love
whatever the odds
let's play this game again
chalk down an ode to the gods
of psychological warfare

Rise.

Chock-full of sentiment is the air. Heavy and opaque, it settles down and crawls near the floor. Forever shifting, never spreading. At least, not until a gust of wind creeps in and whips around the remains of a day or a life strung together like pearls on a painfully delicate gossamer thread. I see more valour in fragility than anything else now; the mere fact of an existence being an affront to probability, odds or fate. There's a fire in me that continues to rise. I stand beneath this dark sky and feel it course through my veins. I stand at the edge, my body steeped in a heady brew otherwise known as thrill, and prepare to take flight. 

I've seen enough change now to know that given enough time, even this world stops disguising its narcissistic need to repeat itself. 

Appendix A
A list of the fictional characters I have recently been likened to:

1. Xena
2. Irene Adler
3. Donna Pinciotti

Appendix B
A list of the fictional characters that I actually embody:

1. The Incredible Hulk

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Close enough.

Some general and (honestly, rather dull) artless updates.

It's been a good run so far, I suppose. Two years since I escaped the many traps of formal education. Two years since the last time the walls came crashing down. A year and three quarters since the jerk from a metaphorical bungee rope. A year and a half, since control was seized, and things turned around. Eight months since the last remaining brick was tossed away. Seven, since I found something I'd been looking for, far longer than I can bring myself to admit. Two months since I was perched on that tiny, perfect little spot that marks the peak between the juxtaposed slopes of ambition and complacency, where everything was in equilibrium. Balanced, synchronised, and accounted for. It's been a month since I began walking down the wrong side of the mountain, and a week since I decided it was time for change. Again. 

Choices lie ahead of me. Two very good ones, because things work out that well sometimes. So what do I choose? On one hand lies the life of a more-than-well-to-do, stereotypical white-collared corporate monkey; while on the other, there is a world of great possibility, steep and rather trying intellectual challenges, the world to turn into my own quirkily-decorated little oyster, and equal measure of risk that comes along with all of this. Not one to err on the side of caution, I'm having a lot of trouble giving due weightage to both halves of the idea of "should want". Perhaps the decision was made long before the question presented itself. 

Perhaps. 

In other news, I am deeply concerned about a few facts that seem to have ganged up against me in recent times, also further urging me to "err on the side of caution". The adrenalin junkie in me is at danger of being slaughtered by nothing more than mere intraocular pressure, and a four year old memory of inopportune surgery for retinal detachment. The zest associated with a list featuring the words scuba, sky-diving, roller-coasters, weightlifting, and taekwondo is now accompanied by an unsettling fear of blindness. Adding to the aforesaid, there is a busted knee, the curse of the desk-job(weakened spine), unusually high myopia, and suspected tachycardia. How I wish this body I came with a part-replacement warranty policy. 

Meanwhile, in the last eighteen months or so, I've been making a place for myself in the world (with more success than I had dared to anticipate), moving out of my parent's house, dealing with the extremely painful job of apartment hunting in Gurgaon, living in three different houses, travelling to four new cities, witnessing quaint beachside sunset drum-circles, partying like nobody's business, catching up with friends I hadn't run into in over a decade or so, realising exactly how much our lives and the times change us even if we all started out at the exact same starting line, reading some of the best pieces of literature I've ever laid my hands on, trekking in the hills, and meeting, knowing, hating and liking a few hundred new people. And learning. Learning and experiencing so much in such little time that it blows my mind a little just bit, collating it all together into this modest time-frame. I'm pretty sure that sometime in the past this was exactly the life I had dreamt of. But there's got to be more. 

I want so much more. 

pentagram-heart.

Beanstalk, at the Galaxy Hotel in Gurgaon has much to its credit; the cinnamon and caramel latte, the artwork on display, the grand piano and live music. Delightful pleasures, certainly, but none as charming as the latte art I encountered at a recent coffee date. 

As if the barista started out innocently enough with creating a chocolate heart, decided that it was too much of a cliche, thence attempted to turn it into a pentagram, shortly before panic struck and resulted in the tangled mess you see in the picture. 

Like a testament, to deliciously dysfunctional romance. 

On (the obligatory nature of) charity.

Random chance is neither fair, nor unfair. No one has a moral obligation to compensate for it. Why must charity be forced upon a person, or he be ostracized for not following suit because he finds it to be an absurd ideal? The privileged aren't automatically indebted to the universe, and the underprivileged don't get a karmic trust fund. If one chooses to subscribe to such fancies out of selflessness, goodwill or guilt, then it is entirely a matter of belief. By all means, one is free go ahead and rid oneself of the perceived debt or obligation he finds himself carrying(the question of perceptual error notwithstanding). One needn't waste empathy on a generalization as gross as a specie. If you give to those you take from, are not frivolous with your compassion, and your unfaltering devotion lies with the few things and people you pledge it to, for reasons more logical than the basis of blanket-term charity; then you must, at the very least, be spared the quasi-self righteousness. Constancy of purpose over moral convenience, always.