(Pseu)Desi girls

IBCP

Indian Born Confused Pseu-desi.

You cannot tell me I am the only one. 

We are the lot who lived a protected life as kids, mostly in our own imaginary world, and then migrated to another country in our formative years. Only to never find a way back home. Because the country of origin has rapidly transformed into a winter vacation destination where we spend our time in perpetual special 'welcome home' status.

As such we relate to no one. 

We meet Desis (Indians abroad who believe they have a strong sense of Indian-ness) in our country of residence, happily celebrating Indian festivals, organising (to me rather painful) get togethers, and we feel nothing but the desire to disappear from the scene because it's not something we did back home, so overdoing it now feels unnatural.

We meet locals in our country of residence, and as much as we would like to fit in, the first mention of some obscure childhood television show (which didn't make its way to Indian TV) instantly creates this barrier to belonging. We nod our heads pretending to get it, but we clearly don't and never will.

And then we meet these second generation Indians, lovingly called as (Insert first letter of country of residence)BCDs, but this is where we realize that there are indeed 50 shades of confusion and no two confused states shall ever relate to one another. Apart from our daily struggles and confusion, our accents are completely different too - making sure that we can only mix as well as oil and water.

And so in order to build a community of (un)like-minded global misfits and outliers who are not only displaced from their home countries but are also equally unsettled in their residing countries, I feel the need to give us a catchy name and definition. 

At least now there is a chance that Google will randomly recommend a Meet up for fellow psudesis or IBCPs (or whatever acronym catches on - I don't claim to be an influencer) when I am least expecting it.

Dusty Days

 Somedays, some very occasional dusty days, I feel I need to give in to it. Just succumb to it completely.

Most days though, I am fighting it. I wear a mask, I wash my hands a million times, my allergies remind me to stay away. I am fearful, lazy and an escapist. At best.

I feel constrained in a world that my mind has created and trained to believe that it is beautiful. I don't fit my own idea of beauty and I know I need to update my thinking. And yet the escapist in me happily wastes time building a maze within my mind, to reach the place I know I should be operating from.

From childhood, I have a habit and almost an innate need to preserve my core. There was a time I was definitely ashamed of it, though over the years I may have normalised it in my head, and perhaps added layers to it in a way that part justifies, part rationalises my identity to that hidden core. But there is still some disconnect there, which unless I make my way into the self created maze, I will never manage to connect.

Some days though, I pretend to be so normal, I could fool myself.

To the point where I float just above that layer of vacuum that I have created, below which I know is all dusty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thoughts that escape

That's three times this week that I felt mild discomfort. And after a very long time, a story made me think. Like every time, this time too, I was surprised that I am still capable. Are my periods of comfortable numbness increasing? Am I taking longer each time to surface back? I don't really know. And possibly there is no merit in trying to keep track of this statistic.

So about the story, I did not relate at all to the main characters. Or even the side characters. All I know is their core sentiment resonated with mine. Liberation, or freedom - for as long as I know, I have pined for it. Not really knowing what from, or where I wanted to escape to. My very first verse that I ever wrote in life was about a bird flying away. Even as a 3 year old, you can say my strongest emotion was that of setting myself free. And yet little did I know, that any strong emotion or desire is in many ways a chain that keeps you firmly tied down.

In any case, the characters in the story, they question, rebel, fight, cry, let themselves down and occasionally manage to reach a place of compromise or even few seconds of happiness. Life cuts through their story at it's own pace and not once care to balance the good with the bad, or wrong with the right. There is neither reward for being good, nor punishment for the bad. Like a train on it's predetermined track, time moves along, and so does each character while making the best sense that they can of their lives. None of them feel free at the end of story, and yet somehow the author is not hesitant to drop the curtains and leave loose ends for the audience to take back with them to chew on.

It annoyed me, I guess, that the author like me had no answer. Or if they did, they did not want to share. Either ways, it did make me think. And some times even that is a small victory.

On repeat loop

 Yes, I have been through this before, I thought to myself as I picked myself up this time round.

The misery followed by the cold numbness, and then a glimmer of hope, followed by anticipation of an anti-climatic outcome. 

I wonder if to be human is to live with perpetual bouts of self doubt and inadequacy. The more I live, the less I can trust any of my emotion. It is as if I have lived through this already, I know the drill, I know the cycle. And I know that nothing is real. Yet I live in hopes of finding something that feels real. Something I can touch, feel, depend on. Something that is not transient and can stand the test of time.

Thinking back, there was one moment that broke the cycle and did not repeat. The day I saw wtp on his bike in his white shirt, cool sleeves, quarter folded to expose a bit of his arm. I don't remember any more if he was going away from me, or coming towards me. Guess it didn't matter that much. Perhaps it was my inability to define my exact feeling at that time. But it is a feeling, I think I never felt again. 

Age and Grace

Life is a long tunnel of questions where every now and then we pass by an answer. Momentarily it lights up our way and then we hit the next crossroad of uncertainty. If you are afraid of darkness, practice closing your eyes, take a deep breath and take a step. 

As I entered the bookstore, I wondered why I was so afraid to feel uncomfortable. Even the imagination of discomfort made me feel uneasy.

And hence I wonder if to age, is to be too afraid to move forward. Too scared to lose the amassed sense of comfort over the years. And to spend time romanticising a past, clutching it tightly,  reminiscing it, even making up memories to fill in some blanks and letting the mind play tricks where necessary.

Is grace the art of cool composure that you gain with the experience of your practiced self-act? to feel comfortable in the knowledge of an image that we call ourselves? Why would we allow ourselves then to be lost, to struggle, to flounder any more? 

Is it appropriate to match the mess that we are on the inside and let it show on the surface? 

Am I allowed to age gracelessly? 

真っ白の世界 (My journey through the Snow white world)

 去年の冬休みに秋田に行きました。冬だから雪の可能性があるから今回は新幹線で東京駅から秋田市までいきました。四時間以上の時間がかかるから日本語のテキストを持って行ったけど、東京を離れて一時間半だけから外の景色が完全に変わって、それから目を離れられなかったです。こんな真っ白の世界に初めて入ったかもしれないとおもいました。

盛岡からもっと北のほうに行ったら、雪がもっと強く降り始めました。電車の窓から見ると一つとか二つぐらいの建物とか木以外はなにも見えなくなりました。

 

そしてこの曲がずっと私の頭の中で続いてました。。。

”まっさらに変えてくれ俺を

過去の傷も塗りつぶして

震える保愛しいBlizzard”

Kyushu Diaries

九州の旅行をしながら毎日の日記を書くのは私の宿題でしたがそれは書けませでした。でも今飛行機に座って、やっと書き時間が出来ました。

ほぼ２年ぶりに飛行機で旅行をすると、多分不安になるかもと思ったけど一度空港に着いたらこれ普通だな、前いつもこんな風だったと思い出しました。

ではこれから九州旅行の特別の思い出を書きたいと思います。

火山と紅葉とそば

私達は羽田から熊本に行って,そこからレンタカーを借りて阿蘇山の方に行きました。３０分ぐらい運転した後景色が完全に変わって行きました。山の方は紅葉がいっぱい見られました。阿蘇のカルデラも初めて見て、本当に大きくてきれいだなと思いました。阿蘇山は一ヶ月前噴火をしたそうだから近すぎるのは危なかったけど私達は少し遠くから見まし。火山をこんな近くから見るのは初めてでした。その後火山の博物館に行って阿蘇山についていろいろ学びました。昼ご飯は美味しい海老天そばでした。

海と寿司

二日間阿蘇geoparkに過ごした後熊本に戻って次の日海の方に行きました。熊本から３０分ぐらい西の方に行ったら、すぐ海に到着出来ます。私達は朝早く起きて天草まで行きました。コンビニから朝ごはんを買って一つの高い所にあるobservation deckから海の眺めながら、ゆっくりコーヒーを飲む時、これは本当に幸せだな、と思いました。その後色んなきれいなスポットで止まったり、写真を取ったり、散歩したりしました。昼ご飯は海辺の近くのお寿司屋さんに行って、新鮮なお寿司はごちそうになりました。板前さんは優しくて、少ししゃべってくれました。こんな風に人と少しでも、つながって、文化を交換出来たら良い思い出に成りますね!

おしゃれな福岡とラーメンと明太子

次は熊本から新幹線に乗って福岡に到着しました。福岡は何か東京よりおしゃれな町だと言う印象がありました。それは私達が東京のすごくローカルな戸越に住んでいるからかもしれません。
まずは博多駅から歩いてホテルに荷物を置いて、おほり公園に行きました。途中で福岡城によって外から景色を見て、きれいな紅葉も見られました。月曜日だから公園は閉まっていたんですが、私達はそこまでの散歩だけで喜びました。昼ご飯は福岡の有名な豚骨ラーメンともう少し健康的なラーメンチャンポンをいただきました。やはり福岡と言えばラーメン何ですね!お腹いっぱいで美味しかったです!その後ホテルに戻る時明太子パンのお店を見て,我慢出来なくて、ちょっと試してみたいなーと思って２個買ってホテルでゆっくりお茶と共に楽しみました。晩御飯は絶対食べないと決めたけど、夜になったら、もうちょっとう歩いてからなんか食べたくなりました！

 

こうやって五日間の九州旅行は完了になり、明日からまた仕事に集中しないといけませんね！
 

The girl who cried, wolf?

In the past, there were times, I thought I was going through a mid life crisis. I feel like I have been there, done that, when it comes to emphatically expressing how I need to run wild, give it all up once before having to really give it all up. Cried about the dropping metabolism, the grey strays and wondered about one night stands. But each time, it was a phase of outbursts, until the next important thing in life grabbed my attention.

Looking back, I think I grossly misunderstood the meaning of the words midlife and crisis. It is not a phase that comes and goes. But a continuous process that one must learn to live and thrive with. Perhaps those phases where I felt anxious were precursors, trying to give me hints regarding what I might consider important in life later on. But I was quite oblivious to those signals then.

Thinking about it now, acceptance is the strongest word that emerges from all those signals that I recieved in the past. What would the 40 year old me tell the 30 year old me from the past, I wonder? Would it perhaps be the same as what the 60 year old me from the future would tell the person that I am today?

• Learn to accept your true self without apology. 
• Learn to apologise where you believe you hurt someone's feelings. 
• Identify what gives you real pleasure. 
• Spend time visualising the person you want to be. 
• Learn to persevere for what you truly want. 
• Play fair, lose graciously, win humbly. 
• Times when you think there is no point in life, live for the many small joys that you have experienced in the past.
• Endure the difficult times, and keep moving until the next joyous moment. 
• Forgive yourself when you don't meet your own expectation. 
• Death is a shortcut to nothing. It maybe an equalizer, but being alive is the differentiator. 
• As long as you are alive, the heart is feeling, the mind is ticking, something may change. You can change. 
• Cry when you are sad.

Time paradox

 Sorry, I could not keep my promise. Part 2 of my previous post, will surface at some point I guess. But not today. Maybe not soon. Instead I will talk about more random thoughts.

What I am feeling this moment is 'longing for a transient moment to last a bit longer, knowing that it won't."

Is it the impossibility, or improbability of it that attracts me to it? I don't really know. The perceived value of transience  is quite high. Not just for me. But it is also ingrained in a country like Japan, where the fleeting cherry blossoms are absolutely revered and enjoyed by all, precisely because of the short life span of a few weeks.  

Yet, 'sakura' (cherry blossoms) may not be the perfect metaphor for my feeling. Since spring is a yearly affair, a falling sakura snowflake also is a promise for the next season. A start of a new period so to speak.

Whereas my feeling does not seem to have the hopefulness and at the same time the mundaneness of a return. Mine is an end of sort. A looking forward with a view of looking back kind of thought.

...

In other news, I have stopped posting on most social media now for a while. Guess I needed the distance. I had almost started to represent something with my thematic posts about my travel experience in Japan. But from the very start, I don't want to sell the brand that is 'Japan'. I only want to coincide, flirt with and interrogate, understand and occasionally be understood by what I believe is the intrinsic core of the country. 

...

I guess the idea of loving something you know will soon disappear can be viewed as wasteful. But I am trying to explore if it is okay to love fully, knowing the blemishes and imperfections, knowing the expiry date, and loving it for that moment. Will the future me still remember, and be able to look back fondly on such a moment?

Maybe I will talk about my struggles with the concept of permanence another time. 

But that's it from me for now.

今日はここまでです。

片思いの日本Love！Part 1 (My one-sided Love - Part 1)

 ずっと前からこれを書きたかったです。『なぜ日本に来たの？そして、今までの経験はどうでしたか』という質問の答えを日本語で書きたかったです。

まだ勉強かけの日本語だけど、少しやってみたいなーと思っていました。

では、私は日本に来た理由は何でしょう？

子供の頃はあまり日本のこと知らなかったです。でも小学校の一年のとき急に一人の学生が私のクラスに入学しました。あの子は私と同じインド人なのに、日本から引っ越して、家族と一緒にインドに戻って来たそうでした。なぜ分りませんがその5歳の私はあの時この転校生のことすごく気になりました。真っ黒のサラサラの髪の毛とピンクの可愛いカバンを持っているあの子のことまだたまに思い出します。

この話の後何数年も立って、日本のことほとんど忘れてしまいました。

そして４年前の話。その時はイギリスに10年頃住みました。偶然なんですがある日、日本の一つのアニメを見ました。見るとなんかすごく感動しました。後で調べて見たら、あのアニメの漫画家は私と同じ日と年に生まれたそうだったと言うことは知って、本当にびっくりしました。これ運命じゃないのかなと思いました。それから一年間位、少しも暇だったら、他の何も見ずに、日本のアニメだけが拘って、見て続きました。途中で少しずつ日本語のことも、日本の文化のことも気になって来ました。

つぎの春に二週間位の旅行の機会があり、初めて日本に来ました。その時の経験が一生忘れないと思います。前は色々な国によく旅行していて、その時の私は海外旅行は少し飽きたと言うのに違いないです。なぜなら、どこの国に行っても、外国人の立場から観光すると経験がほとんど同じぐらいになるはずだと思ったからです。でも日本旅行の経験は本当に違いました。

何が一番好きだったと言うと、この三つの点ではないのかなと思っています。

一つは日本の食事です。味だけではなく、食事の提示のやり方も特別で本当に好きでした。お寿司とお刺身は前からのお気に入りの食べ物でしたけれでもこんな新鮮な味は初めて経験しました。

次は日本の言葉です。旅行の前の一年間ずっとアニメを見たおかげで、日本に来た時、お店の人や他の人などの会話は少しだけ分かって嬉しかったです。もちろん、それは全体の会話の小さいの一部だったかもしれないですが、でも私にとってそれはとても重要な経験になりました。

最後の理由はその旅行で出会った日本人なんです。日本人はお互いのことをよく考えながら行動をするのはよく聞きましたが、その一方で、外国人を避けたり、自分の本命を見せないで、人と人の中で壁をしたりしている人でもある、そう言うことも聞いたことがありました。でも日本に来て、この想像と意外、やはり日本人は優しくて、暖かかいだと思いました。ほとんどの人達は言い訳しないで自分の選んだ仕事を一所懸命で、頑張って続いていると言うところが本当に尊敬しました。

二週間の日本旅行が終わって、イギリスに帰りました。しかし、帰ってから心の一部はまだ日本に残っていたかもしれないのかと感じがしました。そして、同年の十二月にどうやって日本に引っ越したのか、それは次のchapterに書きます。

この話の中で伝えたかったことがいっぱいあったけれでも、それは正しく伝えられかったかなー。。。でも今日はここまでです。

では、お休み。

Island life

"No man is an island entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent
A part of the main"
- John Donne

But lately many of us have been operating from our island mode.

The fear of the virus is taming the social animal within us, and not all of us are responding well to this. But, we have all been reacting in our own ways.

For a while social media kept us connected. Together we went through the different phases of lockdown life - the kitchen experiments, the garden improvements, the zoom calls, the cool pyjama looks, the learn a new skill phase, the Netflix overloaded groggy eyes, the previous travel photo re-uploads, the hashtags of new normal...  to eventually now, when it is no longer new.

Now, after a good 6 months or more, some of us are beginning to understand what it means to live in this new world... which surprisingly looks not so different to the old. Everyday is very similar to the previous. And it is becoming a lot more difficult to whip up a new trend to remain excited or entertained by it all.

Our survival instinct tells us that we should adapt to this 'change' but to me it seems a little ironic, when everything around us seem so unchanging and static.

It is no longer an apocalyptic drama, but a cold reality which seeps into us and becomes part of us. We are no longer frazzled by the numbers, the deaths, the business and the economic losses. Although some of us are still waiting, we don't really know for what, and when.

I wanted to write a story of me embracing my island life, but it is turning out to be that of the island slowly engulfing me. I know the answer lies in my ability to change the lens with which I look at the world, but this is easier said than done.

For today, let me just focus on not sinking, I guess.

Happiness, punctuated.

Shiawase 幸せ- It's the Japanese term for happiness.

But my interpretation of this happiness is not the giddy feeling of overwhelming ecstasy. Instead it is more like a lying down in the field, looking up at the sky, watching clouds float by while being aware of your beating heart - kind of feeling. You know, the kind where your heart is filled with gratefulness towards the universe, simply because of the existence of this very moment.

It probably takes years of living, breathing, dreaming, failing, falling and restarting to get to such a moment, and will definitely take more of the same to recreate another similar instant. But when in such a moment, a smile escapes you, in spite of this understanding, I guess you can call it happiness?

I have always been a coward when it comes to this flavour of this particular emotion. Always insecure that admitting something like this would open me up to pain and hurt. I am not sure when in life I became so protective about myself and why, but it felt as if it is taboo or a vulgar state of mind.

But the fact that today I simply allowed myself - in fact I didn't even have control over it, so cannot say "I allowed it" - to feel this way, and say it out aloud without running away from it - probably means something. 

And this 'something' is probably nothing too big or small; it simply is a semicolon in the passage of my life.

My time with time

Displaced

A frozen moment

disturbed by chirping crickets

- Already summer?

Clarity

Driving on high-speed

motorway be like, one step

and then a-n-o-t-h-e-r.

Last few months I have been witnessing this elastic property of time. Like it stretches on for a while, almost paused, allowing me to pay attention to even the gentlest sounds of breeze or a crunch from the leaf that I stepped on. 

And then again at times it feels like I suddenly woke up in another time or a different season, kind of shifted from where I was. I don't know if this is just me, or if the lockdown has been making people feel a bit disoriented. Whatever it is, I decided to make these little haikus of some of these unique experiences within my head that I have been going through.

Would love to hear your story too.