Late Night Epiphanies – Young Adult, Old Soul

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 😂

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):

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).

The Things Meant For Us

About a month ago, I lost the hide and seek game with Covid, ending a near two-year winning streak. In my fever-induced haze and struggling with the reality of being imprisoned in my body by sickness, a compartment of my mind sought distraction, something with which to pass the time and the haunting of night. I did not want to be with myself through the sickness, the dropping blood pressure, the sandpaper throat. All unpleasantness. All helplessness.

My restless eyes caught onto something on the back of the many crinkly pill packets (throat lozenges, pain relief, vitamin C, antibiotics and whatnot) I had been given: a manufacturing date going back two years. 20 Aug 2020.

All this time since, this particular packet had been lying in wait for me. For two years, before I was even close to any illness, a pill that would help me through my infection had already been made in a lab somewhere in India and was bidding its time in storage until Fate would call it forward to fulfill its purpose — to help me.

When I reflect on this, I wonder: what illusion of control are we still holding on to? What iron hand do we insist on wrenching around our lives, thinking it will make a difference? Why do we try so had to hold onto people and positions when there are greater powers at work than our own desperation? The things that are meant for us are meant for us. Regardless of fear or happiness, deservingness or undeservingness.

“Relax your hands around the wheel. Don’t grip; it won’t fall away from you. Touch the wheel, go with the movement of the car and the car will go along with yours. Easy, right?” That’s what my driving instructor says. Such a phenomenon, this woman.

Gripping harder does not help exert more control. Dedicating all our life’s energy to one purpose, to preventing one loss — none of it helps. We can never stand for too long against the currents of Life and Fate.

What is meant to happen, will.

The good, the bad, the surprising, the inconsequential, the in-between, the “What the hell was that for?!”, the “too good to be true” and so much more. So release the tension. Steer the wheel, but let Life take you places, too.

What a year! (I say, barely 4 months into it). I saw my sister after 3 years, quit my job, got covid, went freelance, am in the works to open my own baby business, started learning how to drive and, well, other sadder things, too. But whew, what a year. Each day I grow into someone I can’t recognise, and I’m still deciding whether I like that or not. Oh well. I hope you’re doing well, and that life also has its moments of craziness for you.

Character study.

Heartbreak is the taste of love gone sour. Filled with love one moment, brimming with bitterness the next, and having nowhere to dump it… not even wanting to be rid of it, because of what all that bitterness once was.

All your kind words.

I will take all of your kind words and keep them in a book. Every acknowledgement and encouragement, every advice and well-intended remark ⁠— every word, every word, I gather close to me like a fragrant bouquet on a summer’s day. I feel it as I feel the sunlight on my skin, the warmth of a star light-years away.

All your words have left an imprint on me, similar to a pattern left behind by a pressed flower.

An imprint like a touch of sweetness. Something to say that I was there and you were there and our lives crossed in the gentlest of ways.

Note: Thank you 💚

Her.

I imagine this is what she would have looked like.

The purified, wispy white hair of later old age peeking out from behind her headscarf, loosely arranged around her rosy face. The same kind eyes and gentleness. Except, she would have had strength even then – that brilliant liveliness and loudness, the same sense of humour that so boldly painted her personality.

It’s been 10 years, my Mother reminds me.

How could it have been? Life has grown around the wound, the hollowness that was left once she was snatched away. The pain has dwarfed in comparison to 10 years of life. But it never fully went away. It never will. Grief is the mark Love leaves behind, it is where we pour all of our feelings, our care and frustration, our anger, our despair once there is no one to receive it.

Seeing her always triggers a back and forth between tears and hope. Tears because they look too similar – it’s like seeing her, hearing her, feeling her again.

And hope, gratitude that something of her survives.

How many people get that? How many people get to have such vivid recollections? As though the person was truly there again, for just a second. Who gets that? I do.

It is a kindness. It hurts but it is a kindness all the same.

I’m always a little shaken after these encounters. We all are. My sisters burst into tears as soon as they saw her. She understands, they all do. They know the pain of loss, how tender it leaves you in places, even if it’s been 10 or 20 or 50 years.

I’m 25 and well, I want to tell her. Life is long at 25; everything has both changed and remained the same. I think of you even now.

For now, these thoughts will keep falling in the timeless space of grief. But someday, someday…