Ilah – Young Adult, Old Soul

Happiness is a mango

Happiness is a seasonal fruit.

Last summer, I would return home every few days, excitedly hauling watermelons, to no one’s surprise. Sometimes it was humongous ones that you had to hold like a very fat baby indeed, sometimes two or three smaller ones that you rolled around for fun. And oh, every moment was delicious. The small thrill of opening up the watermelon, the crisp cutting, wondering just how red it would be inside, hoping there wouldn’t be too many seeds. And the juices dribbling down your elbow when you cut the watermelon up in small pieces, to be chilled and enjoyed later at night with family, when the cloying heat would become too much to bear and you would seek some relief from it.

And when the bowl was empty, when I downed the remaining juice — cold, refreshing and sweet — I would always go out to buy a new one. To replace it. To repeat the experience. To have more, more, more. Every single time, because I could.

Watermelon season usually lasts from mid-November to mid-January here. But a miraculous harvest made it so that I was able to find watermelons in the city streets up until beginning of March.

And then eventually, even though it lasted months past its season, even though it went counter-current for a while and surprised people with how long the season lasted, watermelon did go out of season.

And this — this is happiness. A seasonal fruit.

A fruit going out of season.

The thing about happiness is I couldn’t write about mine.

Whenever I sat down and began to put pen to paper, to consider the warmth of the happiness enveloping me, all I wanted was to dive back into it. All I wanted was more of it. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to write. I just wanted to be happy.

So I set the pen down and went running to savour happiness, like a fruit going out of season.

(And it did).

Note:

Title: Happiness is a mango

Subject of post: Watermelons.

I realise the absolute irony of this. But while watermelons are my favourite, I have a nostalgic connection to mangoes that I can never shake off. And here’s a photo of my very exciting watermelon season, I say casually, as though it’s not the first time I’m sharing a photo of myself here 😂

A falling star came to me.

There will be a time to let go.
This is what happens
when you catch a falling star.
So I draw you closer to me
and hold on a little tighter.
The end is too near, too soon.
But a miracle it is,
to catch a falling star at all!
Forever is too far away —
a distant idea, obscured by Fate.
Let them dream of tomorrow,
I have now.

At the peak of night, I draw you close.
A warm, fluttering light,
My affection bounces about,
alive and well, exultant.

At the peak of night, I draw you close.
I commit to memory the way you feel,
the way I feel.
I let go of Fate and
sink deeply into the now
I cut ties with all
and float in the infinity of this
— this self-contained moment,
encased in glass.

The sun will be up soon
and
your light will melt into
the light of a new day.

I draw you close tonight,
because tomorrow you return.
Tomorrow you join the sky
you came to me from.
Tomorrow you remind me
that while moments last forever,
people are only ever loaned to us.

I kiss you and give you back.
Melt. Become the sun.
Become a star.

Note: I am no poetess, but this came to me. So now it’s also coming to you, because. Hope you’re doing beautifully!

Write it right.

When my inner world is in disquiet, I like to come back to pieces I’ve written, to that moment of calm, of revolutionary stillness when my thoughts align with my words — and some clock somewhere in me is set right and sighs in relief to be finally, finally in tune with itself.

I don’t love writing.

I love words. I am fascinated by creativity.

But writing?

I don’t love writing.

It’s part of my nature, that’s all.

Writing, for me, is survival. I am driven by a need to set the world right, to give back to things the real shape of them. I write to right a crooked reality. I write with an obsessive need to correct and say: “No! This is how it is, this! The sunlight isn’t random, it isn’t something you can ignore. It’s there, a caress, a kiss in a troubled world.”

Writing is like the need to drink water: do I love needing water? No, no.

But do I need it all the same? Yes. Yes, I would die without it.

Note: Please excuse the extreme paragraphing. I’ve been writing for LinkedIn way too much. I hope you are doing wonderfully ❤

Blue night.

Summer nights shift through my hair, pressing gently on my eyelids.

This, I realise, is the feeling of summer: not fun, a spark-like joy, but rather a feeling that is half relief and half boredom, underpinned by old longing — something that was once desperate, restless yearning but that has since been worn into this pale, tired feeling. It’s the saddest thing in the world: for yearning to become a wistful “could have been”, to see your longing through a veil of impossibility where before it was real, throbbing in you.

With the gentleness of a mother explaining the limits of the world to her child, the years crush your most feverish yearnings, rearranging them into artful melancholy; faraway looks into the night sky, sighs carried away by the vastness of the night and a heaviness from which there seems to be no relief.

Where “I long for you” was once a promise branded in heat, it is now a space in your body — a small, distant illness, something you live with most days, something you ignore and forget about, until. Until it is summer again and the end of year frees you for a precious few weeks; until you start getting drunk on the coolness of the night air; until you let your hair down and your shirt clings to the back of your neck; until you feel a smile tugging at your lips as the neighbours’ music echoes in the streets; until you are allowed a moment’s contemplation and the matter of your own happiness comes up, the figurative lid popped off by the heat, loosened while you were busy cutting open watermelons and picking at the fibrous remains of mangoes between your teeth, while you wrinkled your nose at the smoke of cigarettes the neighbour indulges in even more zealously in the darkness of his veranda.

It is summer, it is the end of the year and there are no hermetic spaces left. All the possible doors, windows and vents have been flung open and the summer air commingled with hope and regret infiltrate your lungs, even as you are too busy partaking in the rituals of summer: getting burnt by the sun, haggling prices for litchis, complaining about the people.

This is all it takes: a stream of warm, good days to envelope you and the cold, repressed truth comes streaming out.

Note: Happy New Year to you! Be blessed with warmth, goodness and light for this year and all the ones that follow. This piece is a bit late but here it is anyway, featuring some of the most egregious use of semi-colons and repetition you have ever seen 😂

Who are you?

I am a mess-maker.

A hobby-hopper. A pull-every-crayon-outer, a faded enthusiast, a leave-behind-a-trail-of-passions-gone-colder. I am an interest-plucker, an endless well of curiosity.

I am light, reflected and magnified, travelling from the cosmos to forest and hillside and to that particular corner of a kitchen somewhere, sometime in the afternoon.

I am perfume that spreads through the air. I am here and there, in this moment and the next and the one before. I am a blade of grass waving to the sky, a raven remembering a face, a raindrop falling on someone’s shoulder. I am scattered, everywhere all at once. I am gone, as short-lived as I am intense. I am an imprint, a scar you can’t forget, a vertiginous sensation you cannot describe, a feeling you will never feel again.

I am a falling star that you forget as soon as the morning comes.

I am an old song that clings to your skin, a childhood memory you will remember at a crossroad in your life. I am someone you’ve never met before, but who you’ve known for millennia. I am the last of my kind — a quiet extinction. I am a disappearance no one notices, but which leaves the world changed, silent.

I am a softness you did not know existed. I am a warmth you thought you would not find again. I am the last kite you ever flew; the last time you saw your primary school friends. I am the embrace you never wanted to leave; that one love you kept hidden. I am a calm sea, a deserted beach on a weekday. I am a truth you’ve lost to the years.

I am a morning that comes when you don’t want it to.

I am a dawn after the darkest night.

I am the solemn words of a person of faith. I am a piece of Fate. A common flower that grows on the side of the path you walk everyday. I am the plastic bag flying in the wind. The new poster superimposed on layers of old paper and glue. I am too many sensations, I am nothingness.

I am a chance, a breath.

I am one spark of light, millions of years ago.

Note: This very conveniently started out as me documenting how much of a mess I can be and then the right song played and it ended up being about something else. As always, sending my warmest thoughts your way!

Big details.

There is something to be said about the aching tenderness with which the afternoon light layers itself on the tops of houses, with what fondness it settles there, tired and warm.

I am in quiet awe of such end-of-day scenes lately, caught up in these little love affairs that are there for all to see, should the eye but linger a little, just a little. Life becomes a picture, a post card in these evenings. As we melt into the summer and humidity clings to us, the sunsets also grow more colourful, the sky painting scenes that might seem fabricated were they not so overwhelmingly, achingly real. One sky, dyed the colour of daydreams, summer loves and the tunes of youth. Pink and lilac, purple and fiery orange, yellow and peach, all blooming into the wide open sky. A spectacle, a feast, a homecoming. The essence of our beings. Mostly ignored. Forgotten.

How essential it is, how absolutely essential.

It was just a few days ago when I was telling him — as we pulled up in a parking lot, reclined our seats and watched the sun lower behind the mountains — how endlessly important it is to take one step back, to feel small. Problems too quickly seem insurmountable, too easily become the point to which our lives and consciousness are moored when we focus only on ourselves.

Step outside of yourself, understand you are small, so small in the vastness of this universe and if the sun can move, if the colours of the sky can change, then will your pain last forever? Will the sadness never pass, when even clouds and seas shift? Is there no hope in a world that everyday revolves around a ball of fire? Though our routines lull us into a sense of stability and stagnancy, should we ever forget that there are greater powers at play? Should we ever forget that we are moored not just to ourselves, but to each other? That our lives and selves ripple across time and space, and there is always, always more to us than what we limit ourselves to?

It is vital to get lost in the details of life, to follow each one until one forgets, until one’s own self becomes a point in the distance, small and surrounded by so many others, part of a much vaster picture.

Art by: Alexandra Levasseur

Note: So I guess this is where I give up all pretense that I will regularly maintain this blog (?) It’s been a strange, healing, bad, no, actually good year. And even though it sounds too good to be true and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, I’m officially a business owner! (WHAT). Ahh anyway, I hope you have all been doing beautifully.

In a vacuum.

It rattles, rattles, rattles…

The train dives head-on into the scenery, currently flanked by yellowed, crackly bushes. All of us are locked safely, almost hermetically in this moment in time. We are suspended in the infinity of those few minutes, a sort of solemnity not even broken by the stops few and far between, the beeping, the sliding open of doors, the driver’s staticky voice on the intercom announcing the station and closing of doors.

Nothing takes away or interrupts my longing gaze into the faraway, the zooming past cities and villages, cutting through congested arteries, sugarcane fields and mountains alike.

The train’s ‘new’ pathway slices through and lays bare even the most intimate details of the city outskirts: holey shirts and dingy shorts hanging on the line, someone’s dog looking all but melted into an early afternoon nap and the piercing gazes of people-watching grandmas now hourly exposed to the eyes of thousands — all of this private life, previously hidden away has now been bared, and has become a part of the spectacle the train offers. And I, I was brought here as a spectator, not an actor. These days, everything I do feels wrong. Tough decisions with tough consequences that leave me feeling not at all like myself. I was brought here not to be, not to change or disturb the littlest thing. I was brought here to see and feel and maybe, maybe write about it.

The train should go on forever. It should cross into the night, rattling on its way to unknown galaxies, to stories I was told as a child, to blurry memories of childhood beach days. The train should go on forever, with me on it, a traveller, a spectator. Someone who does not influence the story but only records it. A record-writer, quiet, unassuming, existing outside of the rules that the rest of the actors are subjected to.

Let me hold onto life a little lighter. Let me have these moments forever.

Listening to:

Break.

It’s late at night and the warmth of summer is slowly creeping in, settling in between the comforting layers of downy blankets, clinging to the back of my neck, lightly dampening the roots of my hair. My ample shirt has slipped off my shoulder somewhere between innumerable hours ago and now, and my eyes close each time a breeze floats in, rustling the curtains and breathing coolness over my exposed flesh.

I am breaking my own heart over the beauty of the exquisite, tasting the salt of tears that fall for the sake of beauty. They taste different from tears of exhaustion, are sweeter than those of bitter sorrow.

Far away or not far at all from this anchor of time and place, ‘I’ lay floating… My shoulders and ankles, my toes and eyelashes, my hands and the destiny carved into them have all dissolved into light, on this night when I have breached eternity. Floating around are old, old love songs that lap at this reinvention of me in gentle waves. When I sink into them, limbless, the sound is distorted, faraway, with a grainy quality. The words and voices of long-gone lovers echo, traveling through time and epochs, timeless in their longing and devotion; their beauty carries an eternal truth, so deep it blooms into an ache over me. I wish to feel this forever — the pain of too much beauty, this unending story of lovers colliding and melding into each other, utterly lost in themselves, in moments that feel too much like infinity that they fall into the certainty that the world is an abstract concept, that the Universe has set them apart… Inexorably, though they do not believe it possible, they are torn apart, screaming — unceremoniously snatched in whichever direction Destiny wills. Never again will they meet but all life long they will carry the wound, until the very end they will wish it had been otherwise.

This is where I am tonight: wandering the wispy prayers of lovers who no longer belong to each other, who no longer belong to this world. Are they, I wonder, somewhere so close to where I find myself, reunited finally in the cosmos, swaying among the stars and into infinity?

When light breaks, hearts heal.

Note: Now, I am not the greatest romance writer there ever was. I’m not even halfway decent at it, but these songs. These songs I have listened to!! There is just something about old love songs and the energy that flows from them… It inspires even people like me who have no idea how to write about love. It took several tries to actually get even close to the feeling, the mood I was absorbed into. But all things considered, I’m happy with how this turned out.

Quotes of the Day:

“Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?”
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Listening to (among others):

Convergent.

All of Time is in the crook of her hand. In the clear body of water contained in her palm, swaying gently with every slight movement.

“That’s it, huh? This used to be so scary.”

“What was?” He asked.

“Time. Having it…not having it or, or running out of it.” came the words.

“But now it’s just here.”

“Now it’s just here.” She nodded.

“So how’d you do it, genius?” He smiled.

“I just — I don’t know. I stopped chasing it, I guess. I got too tired…and it just… it just happened. Like you fight all this time, then you give up and it’s then that it surrenders to you. When you stop trying to pull on it or stretch it out, Time just…lays in the crook of your hand.”

“So, in conclusion, time’s like a cat?” He grinned.

“Time’s a cat, yeah.”

He looked up finally, brown eyes illuminated by the pale moonlight.

“I think,” he said, and his voice had this faraway quality to it, like when he spoke of his days at sea, “that you have to understand first that Time isn’t ownable. It’s not land or, or clothes. It’s not something you deserve or not. It’s given to you, no questions asked. And you take it. You don’t have to do anything with it, least of all worry about it. Just have it. Don’t think about it — don’t ask yourself how to live it. Just do.”

Silence sat with them after this, a companion.

“It’s easier to not overthink it when there’s people like you around.” She said, finally.

“What do you mean?”

“You take all my brains away. My IQ lowers when you’re around.” She snickered, eyebrows knitting into a mock-evil look.

“That’s your way of saying I blow your mind, and I humbly accept it.” He dipped down in a low bow, followed by an exaggerated curtsy.

After all these years, the memory had not faded, not in the least. In it, was still enclosed the peculiar scent of blooming flowers mingled with the freshness of night and the saltiness of tears.

Note: I hope you’ve all been doing beautifully 😊 I’m not great at writing conversations so this was a bit of a practice round.

First Belonging

I do not know who I am anymore.

I thought I did, all this time. I thought I had peeled back and laid bare the many layers of my self. From character to personality, learned traits, preferences, triggers and addictions… I thought I had been thorough in my analyses, cutting in my judgement. I believed — worse, ‘knew’ — what I had uncovered to be the truth.

But here I am, a mystery to myself once more; a stranger in my own home.

Take me back.

I was brought into this strange world, and have been dyed by its colours and the bright spectacles it puts up…yet part of me remains foreign and calls to what once was. It seeks to unite again with the Source of all matter.

Always, in every one of the soul’s actions, in every yearning is this desire laying dormant, to return to the place of first belonging — the Place Before. Before the rushing tunnel of lights, Before the shower of stars searing soundlessly into the silent universe, Before the brief all-encompassing obscurity that lasted a billion years, Before it all exploded into red-hot life, pulsating, throbbing, crying —Before it scattered us all about, our names wiped, our memories vanished but still there, everywhere inside of us, haunting our every move, colouring even the most benign choices of our existences until our very end.

There is a void in me that calls for You. This is no simple emptiness. It is no random gaping hole. Only Your names will do. Only the truth of millennia past will ever calm my soul.

Take me back; free me from myself.

Note: So I’ve been immersed in worldly life a lot lately. I (arrogantly) thought it was not something that could happen to me, yet lo and behold I’d lost touch with my spirituality without even knowing it. And then, no amount of information or psychoanalysing or introspection could help. Even now I feel like I do not know myself. It’s strange to have lived 26 (26!!) years thinking you know yourself and then it turns out you don’t really. Welp.

Anyway, to distract myself I’m trying to say “Before the shower of stars searing soundlessly into the silent universe” fast 10 times. Maybe it’ll help (it probably won’t but at least it’s entertaining).