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Do people ever think about the absurdity of life?

Photo by Rae Angela on Unsplash

We meet hundreds of people in our lifetime. Most of them drift away but a few remain close by as they resonate some part of our life. But do we ever find someone who is the same person as us but in a different guise? Would it fit like yin yang or be like two peas in a pod type of situation? Why is it that we meet them or what if we never get to meet them? Do we live our life as one-half? What if we lose them?

Sometimes we try to find our people by forcing the wrong people to be the right pieces of a puzzle, but they don’t fit do they? There is always a feeling that something is missing. Even if all the things that go wrong or mistakes that were made are undone, there would’ve been something missing. It’s like you find the perfect squash partner but they aren’t someone you can open a business with. Do we settle with the thought that you can’t have everything or do we look for more?

And why do we meet those people? As examples of friends, we don’t want? As examples of people that we never want to be in life? Some damaged, some damaging, some simply too different to be accepted into our versions of reality? Are we that person to other people? Do we become that damaged person because of all the damaged people we meet?

Do people ever wonder what would’ve become of them if all the bad things that happened to them didn’t happen? Is it our fault if we remain damaged by those things? If we carry them with us? Sometimes they’re just reminders of what was once beautiful. Sometimes they haunt us even though we don’t want them to. What if we pass the damage on to other people? What do we do then? How do we undo it?

Does it not make life feel like a never-ending ballet recital? No matter what you do, you never get off the stage. Sometimes you are surrounded by other people, but not necessarily in coordination with them. Mostly you are the main character. Maybe you feel like you’re someone who is watching the recital. Alone in the back, possibly relating to the protagonist on the stage. But you never get to go home then, do you? You’re stuck watching the same story happen again and again with different characters. When does it end? When does the happy ending come? Is there even any such thing as a happy ending? Do we know what it looks like? Or is it only destined for the precious few? Do they get to meet their people and we don’t? How does it work? And where do I stand?

Featured

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t brought up like how I was

Photo by Ali Karimiboroujeni on Unsplash

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t brought up like how I was
Sometimes I wish I didn’t know how to love
What are all these feelings good for
When eventually they must kneel before the mind

My mother raised me to believe that the world is cruel
And therefore your home will never be
but what do I do when all the evil creeps inside my home
It pretends to be my friend but it takes away my everything
My sense of purpose, my worth, my everything
What if I run out of all my happiness

It took away my happiness, my love for the world, my compassion
And now I am not myself anymore
And if I am not myself
What is even the point of being anything

I was told that the world is at least half terrible
But I wish I never had the hope to change it
To see the good
The good that conceals the bad
But the concealer comes off
And then what do you do
How do I fight it all alone

Featured

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to be her

Photo by John Mark Arnold on Unsplash

I have a vision
Of someone who is smart and logical
Like a spy in a thriller movie

She doesn’t let the world shake her
She is not haunted by her worst fears
She doesn’t feel the weight of her emotions in her lungs
But she’s not me

She knows all the right moves
She is calm and she is collected
Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to be her

To not let my heart dominate my actions
To kill my empathy; to kill my kindness; to kill my compassion
To see clearly even amidst storms
To know that everything is going to be okay
To know the risks of a double edged sword
And to choose to never hold it again 

Once upon a time I was her
But in this moment 
I wonder
If I should ever be her

Airports

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

aaaaaaaaaaaaaah

I hate airports.

For some people traveling is everything. The rush of entering a new atmosphere. The change in weather. The different faces in a new crowd.

For me it sucks.

Well, I don’t particularly hate all the parts of an airport. Only departures.

It’s a sign that I am leaving something and someone behind. People who hate seeing me go but still wish that I make it through okay. They become selfless for my happiness, and I am so selfish to leave. Makes me believe I am a bad person. But would a bad person ever care about being a bad person?

Sometimes, my brain knows that leaving is the most logical thing to do, but my heart does not always agree. My heart never agrees. This is why I always cry at airports. No matter where I am going, I feel like if I leave the place, I also leave the good memories and the potential of making more of those.

But I love arrivals.

I hate leaving people, but I love coming back to them. I like knowing that someone at the arrivals terminal is waiting for me. Someone that truly cares about me. Not because of what I brought through customs or duty-free, but simply because I made it safely through the flight. Someone who tracked my entire flight to see which countries I flew over. Someone, who wanted to know everything about my trip. Someone I kept texting throughout my flight. Someone who was so excited to see me that they started making plans a month ago. I miss that feeling of a someone or some people.

I miss the people I left behind and people that don’t exist anymore. The safety and love of whom I willingly left to make something out of myself in the United States. But sometimes I wonder if it was even worth it. Is this true freedom or loneliness?

In either case, now that I see it, I would give it all up any day for what I left behind on my first one-way flight. All I book now are round trips. A return ticket with an expiration date of the memories. I hate return tickets. One day whether I like it or not, I have to go back. And I’ll have to leave everyone I loved, everything I ate, and all the fun I had. Life is going to be different now and different is uncertain. The not knowing makes me anxious and terrified. And this is why sometimes I wish my flight gets canceled. So, I get to stay. A little more time with people I love. That is all I want. Is that only comfort or true happiness?

I took 17 flights last year and thought about the same thing on each and every one of them. Hours and hours of pure contemplation along with the same Disney movie collection on every airline and I still do not know the answer. I wonder when will I stop wondering. When will I stop leaving and just stay?

An ode to my best friend

Oh well you might just be
a kind stranger to many but me
to me, you are sunshine on a cold winter day
the smell of coffee in a fall kind of way
the sensation of getting into a freshly made hotel bed
or something as satisfying as butter and bread
to me, you are my home in a person
and my guiding light even when I am dark and uncertain
to me, you are drunk nights leading to a 4pm Sunday brunch
and I love you without an expiry date
which I truly hope is more than just a hunch

the sun will shine again

When something bad happens to you, you want to believe that the worst is over. Like you have some kind of free pass from the world. It’s just inner you trying to find a sense of stability again.

Time passes and you gain that stability again. Nothing bad happens for a while but nothing good also happens. You keep waiting as if you’re still recovering from a disease and the doctor has ordered you plenty of rest.

But that’s not how the world works.

A lot of people say ‘this is all a part of life’, ‘you’re so strong’, ‘at least the worst is over’, ‘everyone has their own things to deal with’. And while all of this is factually true, it doesn’t make any sense to a human mind and it shouldn’t for good reason.

This is your life. You are allowed to think whatever you want in it. Good or bad you have full control over it. And by full control, I mean not what happens to you but how you deal with it.

Circling back to the previous discussion. If you want to be sad about something that happened five minutes or five years ago you have every right to be. Don’t let anyone tell how you should and how you shouldn’t feel. It is not their place.

As humans, we all have a fundamental sliver of hope in us. Hope that life will be better. Happier. But we often transfer that responsibility onto people around us. Sometimes those people take that responsibility because they love you unconditionally even though you’re being a pain in the ass. Sometimes they don’t.

To save ourselves the embarrassment of the latter happening, the best solution is to not depend on people around unless you’re sure that they love you not because you are their friend, their partner, or their whatever but simply because you exist. It sounds painful because not all of us have those kinds of people around us and that’s okay too. You just gotta support yourself till you find someone who loves you like that.

And how do you keep holding up your head on days when your boss yells at you, you’re still wearing yesterday’s socks, and the rain wets your hair, while you’re hungry and still trying to complete homework for a class you’re sure you’re gonna fail? You find hope.

Hope. A word that can save millions of lives. You find it in the form of one good thing. Maybe you get your favorite food in the dining court unexpectedly and it makes your day. Maybe a stranger leaves you an uplifting note. Maybe you have dinner with your friend for two hours while laughing your heart out. Maybe you call your best friend and you gossip about some random person you’ve never met but you just want to diss them because if your best friend doesn’t like them then you don’t too. Maybe you see an amazing movie like all the bright places. Maybe you wear the cutest outfit ever and five strangers on the street compliment you.

That’s a lot of maybe but it does not even come to the possibilities of good things that can happen to you. Sometimes pain can engulf you so much that all you see is darkness. All you need is to see the light. If someone else can’t see it then see it for yourself.

You don’t have to have a flashlight shoved in your face. Just a little twinkle is enough to see the silver lining.

This Diwali be that light for someone you love.

Fathers & Daughters

I opened my eyes and saw my mother waking up beside me for the first time in six months. Enthusiastically, I asked her, “Mom, is Dad going to be okay now?”, startled, she looked at me and nodded her head in hesitation. My 10-year-old heart bounced with joy but my brain questioned the reason behind her answer. “How could this happen all of a sudden?”, I thought to myself. As I began my descent into the living room, my eyes met a variety of familiar faces. The salty tears rolling down their faces were no match for my new found hope. I calculated the logic behind their behaviour and before I knew, I became a part of the group.

October 2nd 2011: It was the day that turned around the life that I had known.

Crying myself to sleep every night for six months, I had prayed for this day to not come.

In March, my father was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart infection. While my mother cared for my ailing father, in a completely different city, me and my sister were living with our grandparents. Although our grandparents tried their level best to not let us feel the absence of our parents, the void was evident at every PTA meeting, school drop offs and functions when people would ask why our parents could not make it.

Coming back to half a year later, my grief was giving birth to so many emotions. I was sad all the time, so much so that my chest physically hurt like someone punched a hole in my heart. When I was not sad, I was angry thinking about the classic ‘why me?’ question. I blamed everyone, including myself, for not trying more. When I was not angry, I was jealous of others. Except my sister, I had never really met anyone who did not have a father. My heart crumpled when my friends mentioned their father buying them things or taking them to places, because I knew that, that could never be me. I missed my father and more importantly, I missed the idea of him.


The pain inside of me continued to grow and forced me to become emotionally shut. As I moved to a new school in a new city, making friends was always accompanied by the fear of being abandoned again. On the other side, the aftermath was demanding me to be more mature. I still had feelings but so did others around me and so mine started to feel less important. I had to pull myself together. Everyone in my life was trying their hardest to make things better so why could not I do so? School was all I had left and so I began focusing all of my energy on it in the hope of a stable, secure, financially independent but most importantly – better future.

For the next eight years my education became my first priority, consuming thousands of hours’ worth of hard work and yielding promising results. I was not so sad anymore but I was not completely happy either.

Nothing could ever fill that void inside of me. But maybe I could learn to live with it. It did not take me days or months, but rather years to find this truth. I was so focused on his absence that I forgot about his memories. So, what if he was not there anymore? I could still learn from the time when he was actually alive. He was one of the greatest minds I had ever seen, one of the most hard working people and yet so humble and happy.


His death taught me the value of being credible and independent but his life taught me to still be open to love, because no matter how many difficulties you face in the end it will always be worth it for the people you love.

Dear Janet

Photo by Ben Weber on Unsplash

Dear Janet,

I hope this is your name! Because if it’s not, then this was a terrible way to start the letter. Anyways Janet, Welcome to Me!

Hold on, before we start, cue Jailhouse Rock!

Now, I could go on and on about things that I use and my peculiar way of using them but then again, that’s just surface-level information, like ingredients on a shampoo label. And if you are gonna live with someone for at least a year, then you deserve to know more, like – is the shampoo vegan and cruelty free?

So, without further ado, let’s go ahead:

I love change and trying new things because how do I know what I want if I don’t know what I don’t want. This is probably why I have been experimenting these last few months with my lifestyle, my environment, my social circle, my everyday routine and, most interestingly, my hair. From pink to blonde to ash – I’ve been there. To me it says – keep experimenting; if you don’t like where you’re standing, then move, you’re not a tree. The most important lesson it has taught me is that even if everything goes wrong, I can still pull myself back up and start again.

I cannot stress on this enough, when I say that learning and teaching go hand in hand for me. Unusual facts about the cosmos or things like, how the universe was made, keep me awake at night. So, don’t feel weird if I share a random fact about ramen or ask you to teach me basic entrepreneurship.

Also, on a side note, Gina Linetti from Brooklyn Nine-Nine is my favourite fictional character. She’s like the Paris of people, the human form of the hundred emoji.

If you ever get back from a math lecture with a severe migraine, fear not, for I will be here for you. 15 mins with my hands on your head and you’ll feel the blood gushing through your veins again. The secret you may ask, is recognising the intense pain points from my own experience, and trying to transfer all of my positive energy to those areas.

Imagine you coming back from studying late at the library and you hear a loud scream coming from our room. You enter the room and you see me: the victim, hiding behind the bed paralysed with fear and the culprit on the windowsill acting all innocent: a pigeon. So, my word of advice: please don’t leave open windows unattended.

Assuming you’ve seen my profile, you know that I’m from India. This means, I love eating butter chicken, dancing to Punjabi songs at midnight, and wearing kurtas and skirts. Feel free to join in on the fun during Diwali and Holi.

Lastly, despite all my strange qualities, I am still the person you can count on for Netflix recommendations, midnight super market runs or matching outfits.

So, tell me, am I good bargain?

Your roommate,

Anusha

The Garden

Photo by Timothy Tarasov on Unsplash

The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just have to find the ones worth suffering for.

— Bob Marley

18 years. 

For 18 years I’ve lived in a garden. A secret paradise. There are flowers: roses, Lillies, sunflowers, and dandelions. The softest breeze touches my face as I smile in the sun-kissed field. My white midi lace dress fills up with air as I dance around to the beats of ‘The night we met’. It appeared as if everything was imperfectly curated to be perfectly magnificent. 

But everything comes with a price. One too high. North of this garden was a wall: higher than vision, covered with grey stones. To keep the ugliness out. You know, the kind that would’ve killed all of my flowers. It kept the pests out but also the bees and the butterflies. 

I would often stare at the wall. It was hard not to imagine what the other side was like. Maybe there were other kinds of flowers too? and other gardens. I wanted to tear down the wall so many times. But then it would strike me, what if there was that demon again? The type that snatched my brightness: my vision, my light.

The fear in my mind and the curiosity in my heart were constantly at war. Solitude was nice but so was companionship. I was afraid of the unseen evil but also aroused by the murmurs that would sometimes creep into my ear as I cup my hands and place my ear on the wall. So, I decided to let the other side also tell their side of the story.

I wanted more people to take a walk with me. It would’ve been a crime to reserve such a beauty. Occasionally, I let people in who took a stroll and admired its beauty. They would tell me stories of places I’ve never been, people I haven’t met yet and foods I must taste. I had smiled on my own but I laughed with them. A few even dared to bring me gifts, mostly flowers, to decorate my home. 

Eventually, they would leave when the sun came down and I would be alone again. The only sounds now were, the slow winds and my humming. Everything was quiet again. Sometimes, it was scary but the stars were always there for me: twinkling, emitting hope and unconditional love. 

Then there were times when my visitors stomped on my roses. I couldn’t understand what harm did the sweet scent do to them? I had been sad before but they made me cry. Angry tears flowing down my cheeks blamed the wall for letting them in. Why couldn’t it just be stone cold?

The reply halted my tears. It wasn’t words but rather pictures and videos. Pictures that captured my candid chuckle, only because I had been crying before. And videos that witnessed all that people had told me and how they left a mark. Someone made me laugh loudly because someone else made me cry deeply. 

I was not alone in my garden now. They were people who toured it even at nights. Some caused damage and some healed it. I was surrounded by new saplings and insects that shared my home with me.

The garden, the wall, and the flowers all made me feel strong and loved. But my travelers taught me something more: how to feel deeply and, in a nutshell, how to accept anything that comes attached with love to be truly happy.

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