I wore your shirt to work today.

It's not too loose, not too tight. It's perfect, just like you were, before the lies. 

It smells of you, your kisses, your caresses, your affectionate way of moving the strands of hair out of my eyes and tucking it behind my ears, your grabbing my fingers with yours when we walked. 

When I need to be enveloped by you, I wear your tee. I needed it today, because I'm willing to admit that despite everything that happened this past weekend, I still love you Bubba. 

What does that make me?

Reviewing the past.

I was looking through my book reviews on In Good Books and I realised, God I could be quite a bitch! A handful of books that I have trashed, I have done so spectacularly that the reviews are making me cringe for the author's sake. And a new feeling accompanies that cringing - humility and a realisation of the effort it must have taken for those authors to get published. Well, at least a big chunk of them. Having been through a trying time in the last couple of years, I realise now how opinions can destroy ambitions and souls. How they can deprive someone of every ounce of confidence they have. 

So, for all you authors I have trashed in the past, my apologies. Please know that I don't mock or demean your efforts. You have the ambition and the honour of being a published author, now please just work on your words so that any opinion that comes your way does not have the power to rob you of your sense of self and self-worth.

True, that.

Image via Jar of Quotes.

He said, she said.

"I know you hate me", he said.

No, I don't hate you. It's hard to hate someone you've spent the better part of your adult life loving with your mind, body and soul. I'm just extremely disappointed, with a sprinkling of eternal pain and a mugful of hurt feelings. I can't hate you, even if I wanted to, because you are as much a part of me as I am. And I am done hating myself.

That's what her heart said. Her mouth went, "Yeah, I do."

Dear 2015, you need to stop being so effing effed up.

I decided to start our relationship on a positive note. I was mentally prepared to like you and do wonderful things with you. Start writing again. Be in the present more often. Be fair to me. Get things moving in the right direction. Give myself a chance to love again. To live again. To feel alive.

Clearly, it had slipped my mind that this is supposed to be two-sided. Clearly, 2015, my dear, you were not ready for this. And so you did what I did in my last relationship - you flailed your legs and flapped your arms and shook your head from side to side and refused to accept it or let it happen.

You could have given me a sign, you know. Some inkling of what was to come, so I could be better prepared. It's been hardly three months and already I'm regretting living to see you. Day after day is an excruciating exercise in functioning like an absolutely normal human being, trying to stay whole even as pieces of me are claimed - demanded - by all that's around me and inside my head. I don't know how I'm keeping at this, but I am. I don't know how long I'm going to keep this up, though. And when breaking point comes, I don't want it to be at the cost of losing people, principles and schools of thought dear to me, that hold a high place in my life.

So, I beg you, 2015, my precious, to consider this - you and I are stuck with each other for 284 more days. For better or for worse. Why not make that time we have together, better? Stop being angry that I made all those wonderful plans with you. Maybe I should have given you an inkling of what I had in store for you, would have saved this tantrum. Sorry, did I say tantrum? I didn't mean that. Now, how about we kiss and make up and promise each other that if we can't make things better, at least we won't make them worse?

Hanging on to the last straw,

Me

I'm one hour away from growing a year older, and the only thought running through my head...

... is this: when did my life become a choice between frustration and regret?

On love.

An interesting perspective on loving a woman. Begs to be asked the question, though - Who loves like this?

"When you love a woman, what do you really love in her? It will be different with different people and it will be different at different times. If love really grows, this is the way: first you fall in love with the woman because her body is beautiful. That is the first available beauty - her face, her eyes, her proportion, her elegance, her dancing, pulsating energy. Her body is beautiful. That is the first approach. You fall in love.

Then after a few days you start going deeper into the woman. You start loving her heart. Now a far more beautiful revelation is coming to you. The body becomes secondary; the heart becomes primary. A new vision has arisen, a new peak. If you go on loving the woman, sooner or later you will find there are peaks beyond peaks, depths beyond depths. Then you start loving the soul of the woman. Then it is not only her heart - now that has become secondary. Now it is the very person, the very presence, the very radiance, the aliveness, that unknown phenomenon of her being - that she is. The body is very far away, the heart has also gone away - now the being is.

And then one day this particular woman's being becomes far away. Now you start loving womanhood in her, the femininity, the feminineness, that receptivity. Now she is not a particular woman at all, she simply reflects womanhood, a particular form of womanhood. Now it is no longer individual, it is becoming more and more universal. And one day that womanhood has also disappeared - you love the humanity in her. Now she is not just a representative of woman, she is also a representative of man as much. The sky is becoming bigger and bigger. Then one day it is not humanity, but existence. That she exists, that's all that you want - that she exists. You are coming very close to God.

Then the last point comes - all formulations and all forms disappear and there is God. You have found God through your woman, through your man. Each love is an echo of God's love."
- Osho

A beautiful evening calls for a beautiful song.

Thank you, A and W. We may get together again. Or never at all. Who knows? And that's the beauty of it, that we don't know. We never know.

Obsessed: Aaj phir tumpe, OST Hate Story 2.

I can't get enough of this track. I get goosebumps and am instantly transported back to the 80s era of sexy love songs.

I'm like a bitter gourd.

Resentment and bitterness. The first feelings that come to mind every time I think of you. I'm bitter inside out.

You're an asshole. You didn't treat me right, but you didn't have to treat me wrong, either.

You were correct all those years ago. You lack what it takes to hold on to something good. Someone good.

I hate you. I think I can admit it now. I hate you for what I have become. I hope that someday you will realise what you've done. How deep you cut me. I hope you understand the sense of betrayal that refuses to leave my side, the pain that pushes harder into my innards when you don't seem to care. Actually, strike that. You don't care. You have new people in your life for that.

So many years. So many. And all that came out of that closeness is our desire to be strangers to each other. 

Obsessed: Harjaiyaan, OST Queen.

I haven't watched the movie still; but if the song has me hooked, then I'm quite looking forward to seeing what the movie will do to me. 

My latest serenade song.

I'm going to be halfway in love with the man who woos me with this song. *sigh*

Days like this one, I will henceforth call Disaster Fridays.

In order of events, last Friday:
- I woke up with a nagging headache that refused to go away.
- I was getting my bike out of the house and I lost balance and the bike fell over. The laptop attached to it was fine, thank goodness.
- I almost met with an accident when I almost rammed into a guy who zipped across me on the roads.
- I had just stopped at a signal when a bird decided to poop on the bike, right where my hand held the brakes. I decided to wipe it off and got the keys out of the ignition just as the transvestites at the signal went around asking for money. My keys slipped and fell on the road. I got off in a hurry to retrieve them and the signal turned green just then. 
- I rammed my rear view mirror into the gate at my workplace.
- I got an extra 40K in my salary account, only to be told that it was a mistake and that I had to transfer it back.
- I got into an unnecessary and absolutely painful fight with a very close friend.
- I was so angry that I hurled my phone at the wall with every ounce of rage I felt, and it went kaput. The screen shattered, the motherboard got ruined and the battery got busted. I am in the process of acquiring a new phone.

I felt like the Baudelaire orphans from A Series of Unfortunate Events. I hope to never have a day like that again in my life. Never ever. Ugh.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said...

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."

How true, and yet, how... sad.

A recent occurrence made me open up my mind to the possibilities of being single. I feel... free. I feel... invincible, like I can do anything. Anybody, even. It's liberating in many ways. It makes me want to simplify, cut back, bite off the threads that dangle loosely on the other end because they're attached to nothing. The Greys will always be there, it's only a matter of knowing how far I'll go. And for what. 

No more clutter. No more hoarding - emotional or psychological. (Physical's another matter - I love food too much to cut back on that!). Lean, mean, sexy. Sexy on the inside, more importantly. That's the way to be. 

Hello, Singledom. I have finally understood what it is like to love you and be a part of you.

And a good year to you all.

In January, I lost a close grandparent. The same month, I found out that I would have to reconsider my work options. In February, I discovered that a relationship I had been struggling hard for didn't exist any more. I also discovered that it wasn't a recent development. In March, I discovered a distasteful side to myself. In April, I thought I was going crazy and briefly considered reaching out for professional help. 

May is when the Bhutan trip happened. It was my first two weeks of peace between an extended period of chaos. June is when professional life changed. Every month after that was full of fights on the personal front with the one person I care the most for. Every month was a struggle to find my footing professionally. 

A bout of travel happened.

Things started looking up. The author of No God in Sight got in touch through a review I had written on his book. The author of The Dream Chasers and I got into a Twitter showdown - I beat him at it, of course. The Adventures of Potli Baba got a couple of awards from fellow bloggers. Someone from Jet Wings got in touch to know if I could do a travel feature for them - in the end it amounted to nothing, though. 

In the beginning of the year, I was the insecure one, unknowingly giving some stupid psycho bitch of a woman power over me. Yesterday, though, she did something extremely stupid and in doing it, she not only relinquished the power she had over me but also gave me some over her. Turns out, she's the insecure one.

So yes, there isn't too much to redeem 2013 for me, but there have been a couple of turning points. But this year - starting today - is going to be entirely different. 

This is the year of me. 

I am reconnecting with the person I was, who got left behind in the dust raised by the stampede that's been my life this past year. I'm going back to get her, and this time she's going to stay with me.

Time travelling.

I get onto Groove shark and a song comes on. The song that started it all.

It takes me a long way back. Takes me back to me sitting on a bed, you trying to put me in a better mood after an episode with a friend - how you had come searching for me then, wanting to make that episode go away! This song playing on TV - the first time I heard it, saw it. 

And as I listen to the song now, my insides are pulled by a force far, far away - as if from a parallel universe - and I have this intense desire to go back to that time. Go back to before it all started. Because that time was good. It was uncomplicated. It had only anticipation, no expectation. No discomfort, pain, grief, sadness. No bitterness. 

And then I think, will you be able to unlearn everything about me and go back to seeing me like you're meeting me for the first time? As someone you may be interested in - you don't know, but you'd like to find out?

Will you be able to do that?

Have I told you about Hannah Brencher?

I can't remember where or when I came across her. All I know is that her writing is heartbreakingly beautiful and true. And every time I read her, I feel my chest pounding. I feel life coursing through my veins, sadness - oh, so much sadness - engulfing me and a desire - a deep desire - to be brave and deal with things.
 
Today, I came across a post of hers. I'm struggling with a relationship that has come to an end. I don't know how to deal with it. I don't want to let it go. I'm actually having serious trouble letting go - I cling to it like it's my lifeline. My very being. My everything. Today, in the middle of that struggle and what is possibly the start of the healing - the one-digit-at-a-time loosening of my grip on a long relationship that probably wasn't meant to be - I came across this post of hers. And I'm left breathless with grief and heartbroken, because I have to do what she says. I know I have to do it. And I need to pull myself together and find the courage - that oh-so-evasive courage - to be me.
 
To be free. Like he wants to be. Like he's trying to be.
 
Read it. Maybe she'll do something for you too.
 
http://hannahbrencher.com/2013/12/03/dont-bring-anything-more-into-the-web/
 
 

Never have I been so in need of a hug...

... as I am today.

I just want someone to wrap their arms around me like they love me to the depths of my soul, stroke my hair, kiss my forehead, absorb my restlessness and uncertainties and pain and confusion and just whisper to me that it'll be okay. That it'll all be okay.

Last night, I dreamt of baby giraffes frolicking in the sea and of catching up with friends as old as Time itself. How weirdly fascinating.
 

I always love it when history comes alive in the form of stories.