this cold, damp weather inspires dark thoughts...

The days slowly bled into months, months growing into years, years that should have at least softened the emotions, but instead worked to sharpen the feelings of dissatisfaction and sadness. The bitter pang of regret remained. A sharp underlying prickle which never quite left her. She had hoped it would go away at some point, and in some sense it did. Days filled with purposeful toil and mindless concerns blunted the edges somehow, quieting the voice inside her head. But sometimes, on cold, dreary days, when even the soul shivered as the body huddled, wrapped tightly in blankets, when her defenses succumbed to the torpor of the season, that sharp prickle would emerge, as though to say, remember me? I am every dream you ever gave up, I am every opportunity you did not seize, I am every potential you wasted, I am the life you should have been living. Was it worth it? Throwing your dreams and every one’s expectations away to live a life half-lived; marked by the flickering shadows of a computer screen; of endlessly stringing and sharpening words for others chasing the same dream or a semblance thereof, that you harbored all those years? Was it worth it? Worth breaking your promise to your mother and father, worth breaking both their hearts, worth desperately trying to make everyone understand that the dream had died far too soon and far too quickly for you to even begin contemplating to attempt to continue? And she thinks, it has to be, it has to be, otherwise the life she’s been living, the fragile house of cards she’s built, could topple down. Then the things she’s told herself, to convince herself everything was fine, would be exposed as a lie. This is the way she’s lived her life. And on cold, dark days, when she is confronted by her regrets, she prays for the sun to chase away the clouds, to shine on the dark corners of her mind and force these sharp honest thoughts back to where she thinks they belong, stuffed into forgotten corners and drowned once more in purposeful toil and mindless concerns.

i thought i saw your face today

Is it possible to miss someone who isn't really gone from you? At odd times, I find myself talking to you and missing the old you, the one whom I could spend hours upon hours talking to, I miss sitting with you quietly and talking of heartbreaks and new loves. As selfish as it sounds, I miss the you who patently needed me, the you who was insecure and slightly immature, just like me. It is not that I am not happy for you, I am truly, except for that small, childish, immature part of me who misses the you that belonged with me, was just like me. As much as I like the grown-up you, I loved the old you, and maybe just maybe, this is one of the reasons why I am not too enthused with you anymore. That perhaps you have grown away from me, and I have allowed myself to grow away from you. So that I find myself missing us, the wide-eyed innocent dreamers that we were, weaving plans and schemes for when we reached this age with an enthusiasm and belief that we had the world laid out at our feet, that all we had to do was work at it and everything will fall into place. I still wish for those things, stronger now than you because you have found a quiet joy in the life you are living, and in what you have achieved. And rightly so. And so I find myself searching for the old you when we are together, as unfair as that may sound. I still catch glimpses of the old you in the same way I catch glimpses of the old me sometimes.

the music of our friendship

Someone to Say Hi To

K's Choice

 Look at you how well you've done so far
look at where you're standing who you are
and all our moments good and bad forever in my head
wish we could go back just once and laugh at things we said

It's been wonderful and crazy knowing you
and I hope that I can always see the teenage girl in you
and I know that you'll be fine but I'll be there every time
you need someone to say hi to late at night

Sometimes when I think of us I'm sad
I miss not knowing anything of what could lie ahead
when mostly now I'm grateful that you're where you want to be
not quite here and not quite there but somewhere in between

L.,

This is how I feel now. It might be corny to say so, but after listening to this song, I realized that this is where we are now. I'll always be your friend and it makes me sad knowing how much we have drifted away from each other, but I understand now. I miss you, I do, I miss talking to you and generally us just being us, but mostly as the song says, I am happy that you're where you want to be.

M.

Loneliness is a state of mind

How is it that you can be surrounded by family and friends yet still feel so achingly alone?

what is essential is hidden

The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity (one is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes) - Ludwig Wittgenstein


And I have to wonder, if this was indeed the case, had I in the narrowness of my vision, allowed so much to pass me by? What chances had I ignored or not noticed because of this?

everything's gonna be alright

There are days when I wish I could write my younger self a letter and tell her not to worry, that although life is going to be one heck of a ride, we were going to be fine. I wish I could infuse her with some of the confidence I have found, I wish I had enjoyed the ride more instead of worrying about what other people might say or think. I am haunted by the thought of the opportunities I must have lost because I was too scared to try. Does confidence come with age, with the experiences we have along the way or has it always been there, and we only need time to find it? As secure as I am with myself now, I wish I was this way when I was younger, especially when I look back on the things I missed hiding from life.

all this wasted longing...

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start, I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods --
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house -- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon, --
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…
                                       -Rainer Maria Rilke

I wonder if you will still arrive, if you are out there; I hope you are...

chocolate makes me happy...

I turned 32 today, and for once I will not whine about how direction-less I feel my life is but instead be thankful for everything that I have. I am grateful that I belong to the family I belong to, that I have a wonderful relationship with my parents ( only my mom now since daddy's gone) and my sisters. That I have an interesting enough job, two in fact that challenge my mind in different ways, I whine and complain about both a lot of times, but I am luckier than most, one job allows me to travel and learn while the other allows me to flex my writing muscles so I can not complain really. I have great friends who tolerate my moods and my lectures and my rantings. And I have my books that keep me occupied along with the fact that my favorite show of all time, The X-Files, is currently running on television five days a week. Life is good really.

coming to terms with grief

I suppose people grieve in different ways, some cry their hearts out and move on, some drown their sorrows in mindless distractions, some choose denial. I have dealt with mine in my own way.

Four months ago, we lost our father to cancer before we even had the chance to fight back against the disease. My sisters and I deal with our loss in our own way, supporting each other and dealing with our grief separately. Mostly, we have tried to move on with our lives and find a semblance of normalcy, and most days, I do just fine. But the tears are always close to the surface, bubbling up at the most odd times, mostly when memory strikes so that I could be sitting at my desk and reading something and would find myself tearing up. As complicated as my relationship was with my father, I have become acutely aware of the rightness of that line I read in a poem somewhere, that  no matter what your relationship was with your parents, you will miss them sorely when they're gone.

I miss my father the most on days when I feel overwhelmed with life, because he always managed to ground me, to make me stop and think, and to gain a better perspective of where my life was going. I miss the fact that I could come home absolutely mad about something from work and he would listen to me rant. I miss the fact that he listened even when I did not. I miss him because he used to let me argue with him till I was blue in the face about whatever topic it was that caught my fancy.

Now that he's gone, I am learning to appreciate all that he has done for me and my sisters. The fact that while he nurtured us and made us believe in ourselves unequivocally, he never allowed us to have an overgrown sense of self-worth, to have airs and feel as though we were better than every one else. Thus, no matter what my insecurities were, about my self, about the way I look, I always, always, knew I had the smarts, that I was good at what I did, and that I could be whatever I wanted to be,  and that he would be proud of me no matter what I do or don't do, no matter how I decide to live my life.

It is not that my relationship with him was ever easy. I was the first born, bequeathed with all the hopes and aspirations and expectations of  first time parents. I suppose I must have disappointed him and mommy with some of the decisions that I have made with my life. But the thing with my father was that he let me decide. I regret that the last years of his life, the ones he spent with me, were tinged with resentment on my part, a fact which still gnaws at my conscience four months after his death. It was not that I neglected him, it was that there were days when I resented the fact that I had to be his sole provider when I was just starting my life.

But despite everything, I miss him and there are still days when the tears are much too near the surface. I guess there will always be days like those because moving on doesn't mean letting go and forgetting, but instead merely a dulling of the pain.