Saturday, March 2, 2024

Oxygen therapy

 Squeezing my eyes shut, and mouth as open as I can, willing my ears to filter out the horrifying sound of some deadly metal rod scraping away at my teeth and gums - this is when I realise that I need to breathe. 

I always knew, that I have a low tolerance for pain and not the greatest of faith in medical ability of humans and yet, when faced with the unavoidable situation that I was in, the only relief I found was to focus on my breathing.

It is such a given, as living beings, of course we breathe to live, but I had not acknowledged the power this simple act has - the way it can send to background, the painful feeling that you want to avoid. Almost like balancing those nerves and sending a strong signal to the brain, that I am still alive and things are not so bad. We can make it back from here. We can pick ourselves up. 

And come to think of it, I use it at other times too. Like when I am running, and my body tells me after the first 10 minutes, that I cannot go any further, that I have to stop. That is when I start focusing on every breath. I take deeper breaths and breathe out from my mouth. I don't know if others do this - but I do, to keep going. And slowly my body falls into this silent commanding rhythm, and I feel relaxed as I keep running.


So in a way, this is my long winded attempt at reminding myself - that even when the situation seems rather overwhelming and the problem at hand maybe overly complex, sometimes the solution may still be quite simple. It is ok to take a moment to pause, breathe, create a bit of a mental distance between the problem and yourself, and then decide next course of action.

Sunday, January 28, 2024

A ghost and a shadow


If I think about it,
You have always been
Like a ghost to me.

On most days
A forgotten memory,
Until suddenly your absence
Sends a chill down my spine.
And like a soul, possessed,
I find myself sitting out in my balcony
Having an imaginary conversation 
About gangsters and their paradise.

And I have been
Like a shadow to you.

Following a notion of you around,
trying to keep up,
Riding the crest, and then down the valley
Until eventually I disappear,
Sinking back into the horizon.

And that is how we exist - 
A ghost and a shadow,

A long distance relationship, 
Thriving in imperfect harmony.
We don't belong in the same song,
Our heart beats don't even rhyme
And the smiles we shared, 
in our overlapped past - 
While some were fake,
Others, a function of incidental
happenstance.

Yet somehow after all these years
You found me, slowly blending
Into my backdrop.
And revealed again that child in me,
Who wrote verses and jumped a lot.

---

To that one friend, who I don't really understand and I don't know if he understands me either. But when we meet, we smile at each other.



Saturday, August 12, 2023

Sad endings

It's particularly painful to see yourself so connected to fictitious characters. Holding onto them, crying with them. Real world does not move me as us they do. Why? Is it because I am lonely, craving a connection, craving the need to be understood?

They know what we want. They know how to manipulate us into little soft balls of  play dough. We, the audience, are totally malleable in their hands. 

The state of acknowledging that someone else has such power over us, could that be an act of intelligence?



I know, at this point I am rambling, because I want to bare all. I want to show you the inside of my soul. I want to give up on my feigned sanity. I want you to give in to my stubborn desire.

But I lie, because I still don't dare to show all.

I fear powerful words.

Like love. And Loss.

They keep building through life, building up. I keep my raw edge blunt. Because I fear cutting myself otherwise. And then bleeding all out.

So I keep my hesitation intact. I don't dare to name real feelings, just keep them as a sound that barely leaves my throat.

Only at times, through fiction, do I occasionally let the build up materialise into something tangible.

Knowing that soon it will ebb. Just like it peaked. 

But in that moment, it's real. It's painful. 

And I know I cried for something that does not exist.

On second thoughts though, maybe I cried because it does not exist.

Saturday, August 5, 2023

Self introductions

Why is there so many ways to look at the same past? Like each version has a life of it's own? Visualise yourself as a nine-tailed fox. Each time you turn back, there is a different start point to your existence.

The past seems to keep evolving into a history that I never truly lived, but it makes sense. Because each time I look back, my present self is at a different vantage point.




Looking for a stable future seems suddenly pointless. And to think that this was what kept me down for a good part of last year. Even after telling myself that I have found short term resolution, I always knew in my heart I had not. But I so wanted to pull myself out of the daze. Self preservation requires the ability to convincingly lie to yourself, I guess.

...

Most times the strangest person in a room filled with people, is myself. When I introduce myself, I have a well rehearsed script that I stick with. Over time I have learnt to say it with confidence. I used to stutter saying my name at one point. Now, I have made peace with a few variations of it, and I can say it (them) aloud without much thought. I envy (and like) people who can say my name confidently. But annoyingly, I relate most to those who mumble it in a barely audible voice. Perhaps these are the ones who see through my act. They don't pretend to care or understand me (or my name). 

For a while I even took relief in physical stripping to enter a Japanese onsen (public bath house). The act of being able to strip naked in the presence of other people was psychologically speaking, quite difficult for me, but once the bandaid was ripped, gave me an uncanny feeling of liberation, albeit short lived. Metaphorically, I now know the feeling of being able to face yourself. 

And hence also the fact that I am not there yet. 

After 4 decades of living both inside and outside of myself, I am still too scared to bare all, and look at myself for who I am. A 'me' without my parents, family, friends, without a job and without internet. I cannot put a face to this person. I have gotten used to the comfort of my parasitic existence, where I live off multiple refracted versions of a personality created purely by my circumstance.

And no matter how many times I turn back, the one unchanging fear that has lived through each iteration of my history, is the fear of digging deep only to find an empty shell.


Saturday, January 28, 2023

Night in shining armour

So I am back to this dark corner of my mind and this blog, which I realize is just an extended representation of the same. 

Actually I never really thought of my writing as dark and depressing, until this person who read my blog for the first time, told me so. I guess in my mind I am mostly a lighter version of dark... Like  70% dark chocolate or an espresso kind of dark - not too happy but definitely not the sad kind... Oh well, it's always interesting to see yourself from someone else's point of view.

Anyway, here I am after my holidays and most importantly the trip to Japan last year. And no it was not holiday, but a work trip, it was only a week and I did feel guilty of getting the chance to go back on my own. But at the same time, I was excited beyond words. Because of the unexpectedness of the trip, I guess I couldn't rationalize in my head the intersection of what I deeply wanted, and the sudden manifestation of it in real life.

I was also very scared of going back, scared that the world I had left behind existed only in my head. 

This wasn't true though. And I was happily surprised that our life in Japan was not an illusion but in fact very much real. And I felt the same connect and same strange sense of peace while I was there. Just that this time it was less falling in love, but more of a reassuring steady kind of love. My friend and I even joked about it - 恋じゃなくて普通の愛みたいな感じ。

It also made me realize, that I am the kind of person who can overthink and ruin a perfectly good relationship by constantly questioning it's goodness. 

A bit like a night sky. Filled with light from countless stars, and yet you mostly see the darkness.

Friday, November 25, 2022

A Lexicon of 'Missing You'

This has happened a few times. I am sitting on my bed or sofa, reading or watching something on my laptop, and suddenly I feel the bed shake - ever so slightly. My first instinct is always, is it an earthquake? But I know too well, it cannot be. Not in this part of the physical world.



It's strange because there are some words that you know the meaning of, but cannot definitely tell that you are feeling it. And there are also times, you feel something, but cannot connect a word with what you are feeling. Is it just me, or are there others who also live this 'almost life', a seemingly disparate existence, one on the surface and another somewhere deep down - perhaps in their soul?

I learnt the meaning of the Japanese word '恋しい - koishi' after moving back to the UK. 

It was during the only Japanese-English language exchange meetup that I attended in London. Someone asked me what I feel most 'koishi' - missing the most, yearning for the most - about Japan. And I was completely taken aback by the question - no, not the question, but the word. 

How was it possible that I had never heard this word before? Not that I want to boast about my vocabulary, but honestly, this is such a necessary word, I thought, how was it possible that after 3 and half years of living in the country, interacting with people, having seen an uncountable number of animations, and passing my Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 3, I did not know - never even heard - what at that moment in time felt like such an important word?

Is it possible that I never went looking for it in all this time?

Of course I oversimplified the answer to the question - I missed my friends the most, the food, the people. It was the truth. But I also knew, that somehow what I miss the most is perhaps what I cannot explain to anyone. Maybe I have not yet learnt words that can help me describe this entity, and I was in no rush to learn either.

Most times I am happy to live with ghosts of feelings, which are neither dead, nor defined - but reside in some shapeless, wordless corner of my mind.

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Silver Sunrise

Even on days that I don't believe I am PMSing, slowly and steadily I can feel the coolness of distance. 
Living together and being too close definitely takes a toll. Over time, a translucent wall appears, and all we see is an outline of the person on the other side. We rely on memory to make inferences and extrapolate intentions. But we don't bother to confirm. After all, we are no strangers here. There is no need to impress nor confess. We eat, speak and sleep with this grey outline of the other and ignore the occasional ugly head of doubt that shows up unexpectedly, like a blurry dream.

*****

I woke up to what I thought was the moonlit silhouette of a sleeping wtp, only to realise in a moment, that it was 7 a.m. and that it was in fact, a silvery ray of sunlight from our west facing window, that escaped into the otherwise dark room. Winters in England - I thought in my head - for a rather moderate weather place, this country can make you feel quite cold at times. This morning was particularly so. 

And I suddenly remembered the dream I had just woken up from.... Are dreams made of what we long for, or are they what we fear the most? Why does something so unreal have the power to unsettle us?

I decided to lie in bed for a few more minutes. With eyes closed, I failed to see the gradation of grey that no doubt transformed the morning.