When Darkness finds me

I can feel you. 

You don't have to shout any louder, run any faster, be any heavier or any more anything, not even lesser. I can see you from the corner of my eye and sense you with every beat of my heart, creeping towards me. 

Your grey vapours only chase me harder when I run so I chose, this time, to brave your wrath, to cross my fingers and wait for you to pass me by. 

I chose to believe the false promises I made myself and I chose to believe the false comfort every disconnected whisper offered me because I was hiding from you in plain sight. I was hiding from the person you are conjured up by the recesses in my mind not deep enough to keep me safe.

I hate that you caught up. I hate that you chose the brightest day, in a room most filled with love in a voice I cherish deeply to wrap your vapourous trail around me and inch your way up to my mind while I stood paralysed- without even a whimper in self defense.

You know your own ugliness. 

You know I will succumb to the power you have over me. You enjoy the chase and it was longer this time than ever before. I didn't miss you. Not one bit. If I could wish you away I would. I let myself believe that is all it would take but you have proved me wrong. I will congratulate you on your victory, ever the graceful loser. You have taught me from practice, I will even thank you, gratitude flowing out of the wounds you stab into me. 

I wonder if this will be my last memory of these months in the rainbow. I stand here immobilized by the crushing weight of the knowledge you bring. 

You call it the truth and I want to believe you but it is difficult to have my mind reconstruct reality to suit a whim while you are twisting your knife deeper into my heart making sure I can see you through the haze of tears I won't shed from pride.

After all that I have sacrificed- laughing little floaty bubbles and flitting through reality, my pride is all I have and if you asked nicely I'm sure I would give you that too, but not while you suffocate me and watch me bleed out so clinically. 

It won't do. I won't give you that satisfaction, not because I don't want to- for you I would give anything, but because my pride is the only oxygen I will find in the dark lonely grave you have dug for me.

I will dream of flight and wine and dancing and sleep through the worst of this. I will wake up in another season having befriended my nightmares again. Companionship more reliable than your promised smiles in the dark- I am blind.

My mother and her surprises

I have strange memories from when I was a child. The sun felt different against my skin and retrospect makes my vision clearer, the dust of wisdom gained from disappointment doesn't cloud my vision in memory.

I was listening to this throwback compilation by U-Penn's desi a Capella band and realised I'm a child of the 90s. I may have come chocking, kicking and screaming into this world in 88- and yet the music that makes my heart melt (unconsciously and embarrassingly) is from what the screen tells me is the 1990s.

Yes, this isn't where I started but I get side tracked by the opening dusty little rooms in my mind and the people who inhabit them, you will forgive me.

The memory I have listening to this compilation is, again, of my mother. Always my mother. She was and continues to be the greatest advocate of surprises. The small things would come gift wrapped in the bubble wrap of happy, the big things would shimmer and shine with a certain dazzle nobody else can conjour. My brother has picked up on this fascinating art but Amma is, without a doubt, the ruling queen of all things surprise.

Now, I was born a morose old soul who felt the weight of the world and lashed out in dark mood swings. It's quite a shame really to be born into a large family that is so energised by the thought of every breath and a life that has given so much, to find that the one dark unpredictable cloud in the room is really- the baby of the family. I like to think that it adds a dollop of the "unexpected" and spices things up in the family. That is far from the truth and I will be the first to admit it, but let's not pay heed to the truth for today, for today we will believe the version my kind family at their patient best will explain to me and I will get on with the memory that drove me back to this blog after so long.

Chennai is a very hot city. For a child with trouble being in a good mood, the heat that wrapped itself like a thick blanket around my mind filled with the worries of the world. This is bad news.
In Madras (yes Chennai now but we ignore that as we do my sullen demeanor) it is inescapable bad news. For a child sitting in the front seat of a navy blue Maruti van powered by an LPG cylinder and cooled by an AC that would only work on being fueled by acceleration... I can't begin to explain the tragedy. Nobody should be subject to such melodramatic tragedy.

Amma would drive us, the world and God knows who else all over the city in this car. We had a music player that I think may have been more important to Amma than the gas tank. I can sing more RD Burman and Mohammed Rafi songs than I can explain to the people who catch me singing along, or in fact myself, thanks to the many car drives to music, dance, tuition, schoool, I-35, birthday parties and everything in between.  

I was just discovering going out with my friends when the film Na Tum Jaano Na Hum released. I can't explain why this was the movie we (and I don't remember who else was part of this group) chose to watch but I remember coming back and announcing that at some point of time we should buy the cassette (yes that is how long a time back this was, we bought cassettes). 
Given the tone of this post so far you get no prize for guessing that a few days later on our way back from somewhere, while we sat baking in our trusty Maruthi Van at the traffic signal in Annanagar's famous Roundtana, I announced that whatever new music was playing on the cassette player royally sucked and Amma had no taste in music.
I have always thought that Amma deserves a Nobel Peace prize for calmly telling me that this was music from Na Tum Jaano Na Hum before gunning the accelerator to cool, I suspect, my head.
I destroyed her little everyday surprise and it wasn't the last time.

The other time I remember with frightening clarity is when I was forced to move with the family out of one house to where we now live. I had my reasons, very many actually,that I continue to think are more than valid. I explained my point of view to my parents over and over again. I think I even went on a hunger strike and some strange version of mouna vrath  that only the two then villains in my life- my parents, were subjected to. The thing about my parents though is that they have never ever given into a tantrum, a lesson I am grateful (now, most certainly not then) to have been taught very early on in life, and we moved to this new house.

Unlike often before I suspect Amma felt guilty about this one. She knew what it meant to me for them to give in just that once and just how alone I felt for not winning. So one day I came back home to find Lalith and Amma working together to set up a Tata Sky Set Top Box. This was the year it was just introduced and Chennai unlike any other city in India could not access cable TV without a digital box. In that world I was one of the few privileged children, who despite my atrocious 10th standard results still had access to cable TV. I couldn't be less impressed. I was too upset, or so I let her believe.

I'm quite sure I'm screwed now. Karma is finally catching up.
Amma I still love the surprises, nobody shall ever know but it is true. Whether it is the surprise of a special dish at dinner, kulfi in the freezer on a hot summer day, a note in my suitcase when I walk into yet another new life, an elaborate party, the not-so-surprising-anymore surprise-birthday-party or a carefully and secretly thought out gift, I will always love all of it not because it is about me (ok, maybe a little) but because it captures who you are- the master happy maker.

If you've ever met my mother you know what I'm talking about.
Tarun Menon, sharpen up those skills, if you've got all the good genes you might as well make the best of them.

Here's the compilation that started this up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lErtjguuvSw

I feel

I wake up some days and feel life bursting out of me. It's like an explosion of colour that has more than the seven of a rainbow and colour the world in shade I want to see. Actually it isn't a morning feeling, it's an anytime feeling. I feel as much sadness as I do happiness but it's a strange world we live in where sadness is celebrated and happiness is frowned upon.

So I can't skip down a street singing my lungs out until my throat is sore and I can't see a colleague on my way to get print outs and hug him and say, "My God, I'm thankful, so thankful that you are healthy and happy and back again. I love you I do!" I can't say it without being seen as so much other than just genuinely happy to have a second chance at making somebody feel the joy they make me feel.

Some days I want to make a gob ball of everything I feel. I think it would feel like the spit gobs we made as children, gross bits of chewed up paper all stuck together with spit and drippy but strangely, oh so strangely alive. I would throw it with a big smile and an open heart to my friends and family and strangers who make me think the sun shines because of them, those days I'm even glad for them to think it shines out of their bottoms because heck, maybe they know more than I do. They would be covered in that spray of emotion and know, just know, that the world for me would suck without them.

I can hear my room-mate sing in the next room. She's a bit crazy. She sees all of my inexplicable highs and my frightening lows and only occasionally makes mention of it. She and this friend of ours put up with my bawling like a baby while blowing out the candles on my birthday cake and laughing hysterically 10 minutes later taking the most ridiculous selfies. I hug them and scream in their years and tickle them as though they really do owe me some debt that they will pay off this lifetime. They bear the weight of all my happiness and misery and they still don't know just how much I want to run down a semi-crowded street singing as though I were in a musical. It's true, sometimes I do.

I swear it bursts out of me some days. All my happiness does. But you see the problem is this- I accept being human because I like feeling despite the numbness I have begged for since August. I like feeling every feeling. It kills me to bottle it up but I feel many kinds of dead without feeling the threat of violence in my anger the failure of exhaustion in my sadness or the buoyant exuberance in my happiness. I feel it all as surely as I feel the raindrops or  smell the clawing stench of an open drain and as surely as my sight sees the children to whom that filth is home.

It is real- every emotion. And yet, it's a funny world I live in- there is only so much emotion us mortals are allowed to admit to.  

For my Faultmate

As I speed down slopes on my bicycle with the cold wind biting into my skin I am transported to dark alleys in a different part of the country. We didn't have a bike then and we certainly weren't in any hurry. I remember then that my mind wasn't filled with questions, a to-do list or a mental inventory of what is in the fridge to fix a meal with, it was filled with the sound of your chatter as we walked down lanes like tributaries off a road that was mistakenly called loafers lane. I still hold the opinion that it should be called rat lane to warn every other 17 year old about what on first sight looks like an earthquake but is actually a rat pack on the same prowl as us.

I haven't forgotten any of it, or maybe my mind reconstructs the portions that I have forgotten. However you see it I will always have a memory of us silly 17 year olds heading out as often as we were hungry looking for the latest to eat in the little shops that dotted Vasanth Nagar. How brave we were setting out into cold, dirty, often dark streets,  looking for meaning on the pretext of finding a good meal. By the end of our year I could navigate the streets better than any auto driver, a habit we carried into the discovery of lanes behind RT Nagar filled with the mouth-watering goodness of fresh kebabs (that come to think of it I never ate!). I wonder if they would be surprised, our 17 year old-full-of-faith-in-the-future selves, that though our lives turned out nothing like we expected, so did our friendship, across geographies that span continents and multiple oceans.

Oh we were silly weren't we, forsaking the surety of a meal every night for our adventures on that little strip of networking hopes. I wouldn't change a thing. Not from that year at least.

We have come a long way from that simpler time where our greatest worries were managing a princely rent of Rs. 3,000 and waking up in time for class, or in your case convincing people that I really wasn't addicted to drugs- that sleep was my poison of choice. They wouldn't believe the horrors we now tell each other of or the depth of anger we can feel for other people who caused those stories to be each others' truth.

I still have our book of meticulously kept accounts. They remind me of a happier if frugal time, times that neither of us would have sought to add a descriptor to, consider a benchmark.

We're so pretty I couldn't pick just one picture :P

I can still hear your voice when you sent me that message- "His loss. He has
nothing. No spine, no you". It was the first time I had laughed since that great tragedy that we let seep into our lives then. I remember you telling me later about you, my all consuming worry that you laughed at and even got mad at me about. I worry because I can't confuse you with the anger I feel on your behalf, I worry because you will walk into structures with your heart on your sleeve making friends with people whom you love more than yourself- with people who love themselves more than they appreciate you and your distinct brand of care. I wonder if you remember that time on the terrace. I had just walked in and saw you crying about somebody who wasn't fair to you and took off in a range about just what would be done to that person. What I remember most bout that night, other than the biting cold, is your confusion at my anger and how that night turned into you calming me down instead of the other way around.

We have our memories don't we, that nobody else would understand; The very best and the very worst. So here's to you dear flatmate/faultmate and our plan of retiring at 30 to explore Africa as we did once Karnataka.
You bloody well make it that far if I will, we have vineyards to explore and men to heap hate on.

The last 24 hours of being 24

I turn twenty five soon. In a matter of a few minutes I will officially cross the line I drew myself to find all my dreams and make them real, and at that line I will look back to the 8 year old me, convinced of happiness and success and say, “I’m sorry love, life didn’t turn out like we planned and I haven’t found what we are looking for, but what a journey!”

It all starts with a ridiculous plan to travel ten hours for a hair and one ridiculous friend who decided to make that journey with me.

24 has been many years put together. I have seen myself succeed well beyond my expectations, or anybody’s for that matter and then watch everything crumble. It was April and I had decided life could not get more perfect. I had almost everything I wanted and what I didn’t have was tied up in ribbons to arrive soon. I was as happy as I have ever been and thanking the universe for aligning the stars just for me. 2 months later life caught up with me and bitch-slapped me like never before.

I hit my lowest yesterday over something as stupid as speeding over a speed-breaker and crashing near a sewer. I stood up gathering the shreds of my dignity, my bicycle and phone (that I shouldn’t have been using while riding) and resigned myself to the life I now found myself living. Every single thing had the unpleasant odor of failure, even something as seemingly trivial as riding a bicycle home. I wasn’t looking forward to the stupid trip to Delhi. Given the course my life had run since June-July I just couldn’t bring myself to believe things could be anything but rotten.

But Nivi had booked our tickets and it seemed more of a pain to live with my ridiculous hair and cancel my tickets than just suck it up and go. So go I did and how very glad I am, I can now see that it might just get better, my faith in humanity is restored and I have the best bloody hair cut I have had since leaving Bombay.

Today, things just worked. We found an auto to take us to the station-easy peasy. We got the best damn seats on that beautiful double decker train- the one across a table with ample leg room. As if that wasn’t good enough there were army jawans on the other side of the table. I will apologise at this point for not doing anything special to show them the gratitude I feel for all they are willing to do to make sure I’m safe. I hope they know, I wish I had, in some way, let them know. I’ll forgive myself knowing I woke up at 5.45 (thank you Anju) after a late night.

I reached Delhi and realized the man I wanted to cut my hair (the entire purpose of this 5 hour journey, remember) was on holiday. Given how I am now used to having things not go my way I made my way to option two- this place called Looks in Khan market where Deepak (man number 2) had taken the day off. It doesn’t help that I didn’t have an appointment but then the guys at the counter suggested Nicky, and thank God they did.

They say a hair cut can change your view of the world, Nicky seems to have worked his magic on my day. A brilliant hair cut, cinnamon roll and a few book purchases later we walked around Khan market to some random place called Mamagoto because we weren’t in the mood to travel to where I wanted to eat lunch. Oh Mamagoto… how happy you made two girls craving sea food in faraway land-locked places. I love you.

Ne, Sashaa and Kaka… it was so blood good to see you despite the madness of Sarojini Nagar market. Ne and Sash, you were absolutely right- bad call, we should have just stayed in Khan market’s blissful laziness, but now I have a beautiful lamp, you’ve met Kaka and I have discovered his cool Ninaja skills. I’ll be sure to recruit you if I’m ever on a manhunt Kakkey. 

I will now take the time to thank the strangers who made this day everything it was.

1. Strangers on the road who told us three times to not listen to an auto man. They told us (three times I remind you) to get into the auto and then tell him where to go and insist on going to the police station if the meter wasn’t turned on. You had no reason to help two very lots very adult women but we thank you. I love how happy you looked when we got into the auto and I stuck my head out to flash you a thumbs up sign.
2. The auto man. We didn’t need to pick a fight.. You took us where we wanted, without driving around Delhi. I know because I turned on my Map-app expecting to be over charged. I love how you joined in when Nivi and I were sounding excited like every other tourist about how gorgeous the Rashtapati Bhavan and India gate look. I love how you then showed us every sight there was without a single detour. When we got off at Khan market at 11 something you even cautioned us about not being disappointed about seeing the shops shut because everything only opens at 12.
3. Auto man 2: You made zero drama outside Khan market when I insisted you drive us through an absurd route to pick up Ne befor heading to Sarojini Nagar. I didn’t put on my app but honestly, auto man 1 and you are part of the same brother-hood, and you were so patient even reversing on a road you knew better than to simply because we asked.
4. Bubble gun man: We were at a signal racing to the station when this man selling the coolest bubble making device ever passed our auto. I saw Anju gift even before I saw you. I thank you for giving us a new bottle of the funny liquid we need pointing out the leak. We wouldn’t have known and were very confused till you told us why. Nivi and I love you even more for telling us there was time enough to show us that it worked fine- clearly you know what can be done in 40 seconds better than either of us.
5. Uncle on the road: We came back to Jaipur and with very little sense sat in an auto despite suspecting our driver was drunk. He was pulled up by a cop, sped away after an argument and like stupid ducks we continued sitting in the auto all the way home. Drunk auto-man and his friend then picked a fight with us about how much to pay him and we saw you walking towards us. I was sure you wanted the auto or were walking to the shop until you came up and asked us if we were ok. I love you even more for turning back around and walking home as soon as you found out we were safe. Thank you, in this lonely city that shuts down at 8 and can’t be bothered with strangers (other than stare at them like aliens) I love you for going out of your way to make sure we were safe. You didn’t need to- you and I both know that and that is precisely why your gesture meant so much.

My faith in humanity is restored.

Bring it on 25, I’m ready. Could you though, make an effort to beat 24’s highs and never ever drag me down as low as your predecessor?

Lots of love and the happy bubbly feeling of the world not being such a shit-hole,
Me.  

Reposted from: http://sitaramenon.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/the-last-24-hours-of-24/

A complete life

Today a certain social media site, filled with advertisements that have no connection to me whatsoever, makes my life look complete.

I have a picture up that announces professional recognition- from speaking knowledgeably at a public gathering, many others that announce personal fulfillment- from travels across the country from different times, a new profile picture that make me look beautiful in the funny sort of way that only pretty people can manage.

There are congratulations and declarations of a brightly shinning future. Words I'm soaking in while laughing at the truth that I know- that there are smaller details that make me up- details scattered so far and wide I can't put them together yet.

But today I will believe what everybody is telling me, I will believe the illusion of myself that I find so easy to believe of everybody else. Today I will convince myself of having a full life and laugh secretly at everybody who will believe that illusion like me.
--

I'm listening to Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone

Some days

Some days I wake up convinced I will be fine.

I'm woken up by the ring of my alarm instead of another dream of you. I'm chained to no memories- not good nor bad. My clothes- washed over and over again since you last saw them, bare no smell of you on this morning. I don't feel the phantom of your touch every time I feel the wind on my skin nor hear your sigh in every rustle of leaves.

I know for certain on days like this that I will be fine; that it will get better. I have reason to believe that with time I will find every shard of my crushed soul and glue it together transforming into somebody more breathtaking and complete than you ever knew.

On days like these I'm told there's a skip in my step and a tune to my laugh.Nobody asks about the colour of my eyes or why I won't smile. They ask instead of my childhood- whether I climbed trees and pulled pranks. I laugh in response, my love for the universe bursting out of every pore of my being- gratitude for the many gifts I have received that I haven't earned, the many opportunities that seemed gift wrapped with my name on the label. The world is perfect under the bandage I've plastered on and I feel the mile deep gashes in my soul begin the slow process of healing.

Just as I settle into my peace, a corner of my mind unlocks- I see an image of the inevitable future. A future I want with all my heart for you to have of happiness, success, joy and most of all, of peace. I see that future without me and that isn't what reminds me I will never heal, it is seeing somebody else in every dream we shared. And so I begin again, from the very bottom, tying again to forget, not hope, not believe and to stop praying to Gods who won't listen anyway.
---

I'm listening to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

To be ugly

When I was a child, I was a professional dancer. I don't think anybody who has seen my stiff response to music in the last few years would believe me but it's true. I was a professional jazz dancer, or something like that anyway.

I was part of a group called the <insert famous dancer whom I will not embarrass'name>'s Junior Dance Company. Stage shows, music videos and dancing with South India celebrities was part of my everyday as a 10-11 year old. We wore shiny sequinned clothes, spent endless hours every week perfecting choreography and even left school early every once in a while.

I guess I was living the dream. There was a purpose to my life, however trivial, before most people discovered there was even need for one. I didn't grow up with social media, I wonder if it even existed then, but there are pictures in a trunk somewhere of a group of 15 awkward adolescents, our faces full of make up posing with confidence that only comes from being a child.

It wasn't such a happy run though. In a world that demands perfection- manufactured or otherwise, it doesn't matter how young or innocent you are. I knew I was ugly before I even knew that was the word to describe me.
I loved dancing. Every bones in my body would thrill at the sound of music and I would dance because it was my natural reaction to music but when you're a professional dancer, that is not enough. The popular girls, the pretty ones would always get to dance in the center where they weren't tripping over cables or breathing in smoke from "smoke machines". Us uglie-s tuned out of the world, tuned into the music and filled space.

I didn't hate it. I don't remember ever realizing I was being slightest despite family and friends asking all the time why I wasn't dancing in front. Truth be told, I was glad to dance in the second row. I didn't have to remember any of the steps really.
But it was upsetting when people would walk into rehearsal asking to "audition" for something or the other and the instructors would only point to a few people. It isn't nice, knowing as a child, that you're ugly. That you- because you are too skinny, too dark, have weird hair and buck teeth, don't deserve every opportunity to shine.

I stopped dancing in the eighth standard. I can't remember if I missed it, I was too busy sailing to notice. I can't remember if I felt different for being seen for more than my scrawny adolescent body.

I wish I could still dance. I wish I could forget I'm ugly but more than anything I wish I could erase my ability to see people as ugly and pretty.    

Sadness

When my heart is cracked and bleeding, a rainbow forms in the sky. You look at it and smile not knowing the pain that painted the sky.
When I cry, big drops of rain quench the thirsty, baked red mud and little children run out from under tin shades to dance with smiles.

I will be happy again and the sun will shine again. It will happen but not soon.

Fear

I wonder what it is like to live in fear, to bind yourself  to that devil and make it you. How do you cope with every day knowing no decision you make fearlessly is even worthy of discussion? How do you cope with being so scared of your own thoughts that you won;t say them out loud?

I want to pity you. 

I want to teach you to be brave. I want you to love every thought of yours like I do. To be brave for the person you are. To encourage your honesty. To teach you the exhilaration in fighting a battle you believe in. The independence in believing in your decisions.

I loaned you my wings to fly but you lost them in your paralyzing fear. Now I don’t fly either and you’re sorry.

You sacrificed me to your fears and in my mind I’m now dead. In yours my throat is slit a million times with every apology you don’t mean. 

I want to wish you unhappiness but I can’t. I don’t know what is more foolish, your fear of everything or my all consuming love for a weakling. Your fears have shattered my world as much as my bravery has alienated me from everybody. I spent my whole life waiting and now I don't have wings. 

I wish I could live without hope, it would be less painful if I didn't hope you would gather your courage and find my wings.

My mother

I sometimes smell that particularly flowery smell of sunshine- I can be in a sweaty compartment of the train, in a restaurant, in the canteen- and I feel like I've been thrown into another world. Time stops, my body is independent of my mind and I can do nothing but let fragments of a memory that I can barely remember take over.

There is a strange comfort in things that don't change. At 24 there is very little that hasn't changed and yet when I smell that mix of sunshine, starch and flowers I'm transported to a warm cocoon. I feel four again. I watch as my beautiful mother wears make up and combs her hair, watch as she stands in the middle of what looks like reams and reams of beautiful silk. I feel the cool breeze of the air cooler and the magic in the air as the puddle of silk on the floor rapidly disappears. Amma was always impatient dressing up, she would click her heals and swear at safety pins. I hardly blame her, there is a bewildering ritual in wearing grown up clothes. The click of heals, the touch of rouge, the right shade of lipstick and the precise fold of every pleat.

I watch as she carefully combs her hair and snaps at me for getting in her way or bringing food into the room- I'm a clumsy child and in my jaw dropping wonder I can't seem to balance my plate. Sometimes, and these were prize days, I would be called on to to be part of the enchanting ceremony. I would sit on the floor and yank on pleats so that Amma could tuck them in just right. She would then spray on that perfume- it was never the same perfume, I could tell by the bottles being of different colours- and yet it would be that same ambrosial bliss.

When I was a child I dreamed of growing up, of dressing to Naval balls just like my mother did, of being as pretty, as perfect. It's amusing how childhood dreams turn out. I don't yearn so much for any of that anymore, we live lives that are of mutual pride and yet so cosmically different; but sometimes, on that rare special evening I'll walk into my mothers room and pretend to watch TV as I take in the unchanged present and revel in the permanence of that smell.

I have "borrowed" a tidy sum of perfumes from Amma in the hope that I can conjure that moment on demand but it's never the same without my mother, her boxes of make up and those magical reams of silk.  

Of parks, bubbles and the life you deny yourself

There should be a word for it, somebody should make it up, the word to use when you can sell sorrow for companionship.

We live in an ugly world. What we see around us- the greed, the selfishness, the need to protect nobody but oneself- doesn't help cover the aesthetic flaws of the broken pavements with hungry crying children on it. We are so numb to every human suffering we see that, now, one feels worse for the dead rat being torn apart by a hungry crow than an old woman too old to lie on a bed, crying into her own naked shoulder begging for a morsel to eat.

We grow less patient and more numb with every day living the busy lives we do. We feel protected by the bubble we build locking out anybody who doesn't seem right. There is a sadistic joy in differentiating between the us and them; the them can be anybody- that boy who won't take the nail paint off his little finger, the woman on the train who can't contain her excitement about a new day. But that bubble gets empty. The people you surround yourself with echo the hollowness you build into your life and so you reach out, you let one hand slip out of the bubble and your wandering nervous hand has many takers. The ears in that hand are filled suddenly by those stories you chose to ignore, those wails you tuned out of.

Everybody has a sad story and suddenly everybody wants to tell you what it is. You pat yourself on the back for building a life free of such suffering and yet you watch doing nothing while that somebody will tell you of the horrors he suffers. You will watch every gesture he makes, listen to every changing tone in his voice, you analyse, critically, the truth of his story- the value it will bring to your next drinking session. You let your cold heart thaw and take in his suffering putting the colour back in your cheeks while beginning to realise that to this man, his suffering is his ticket into your bubble; a space you know you will not share with anybody who is not an echo of you.

You hand slips back into the bubble. Some disinfectant and a walk into a park with children who can count out money but can't do arithmetic drains out that story you heard, there is a babble of discontent that is so loud, it drowns out any truth you learnt. You laugh at the prospect of a person as broken as him finding his way into your everyday until you realise just how broken you are. You realise you traded your pain with him. You suffered his agonies as much as he suffered yours and your bubble is not safe anymore, fragile and easily shattered by the tears you fill it with.
------

I'm listening to Jee Le Zaraa