Summer – 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 😂

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 😂

Twenty twenty too.

Even now, I almost write ‘2020’.

Like everyone else, I think, I am still living somewhere in the past, finding no noticeable distinction from the present. Roaming the dark tunnel of these past two years has made me lose my sense of time. More of the same everyday. And the next day, and the next. Is it today or is it still yesterday? Ah, it’s already tomorrow?

But again, summer is upon us. And not just any summer – a December summer.

Sticky days with a punitive, skin-burning sun and sultry nights that have you tossing and turning, unable to sleep from the heat, the airless atmosphere. Still, summer calls us to it, in spite of all its inclemencies. It is a summer that hides a lot of pain — not the summer of love or discovery, but the summer of time lost and adventures unhad. A summer of grieving all that could not happen, and all that did.

Still, and perhaps most cruelly, life goes on. On the remains of yesterday, the seed of the present grows.

Our other freedoms cut short, we partake in the remaining rituals of summer… We grab on to ripe mangoes of different varieties: some round and firm like apples, others mushy and fibrous, with that signature curve. Then, we hunt down laden branches of plump litchis at the best price, we pick sweet-smelling pineapples and haul heavy watermelons, the kind that have juice dribbling down your chin.

Here it is, another summer of hanging on, worse for wear.

And yet, and yet, we are lost if we do not believe.

If we do not believe that tomorrow will be better. That, like the summer, this darkness is a passing thing.

Beautiful days come if you believe in them, so believe.

Note: Merry Christmas to all those of you who celebrate and Happy Holidays! I’m going to stop saying I’m back to posting more regularly because I feel I’ve been jinxing it 😂 (And now I am going to pretend like me not writing is the result of some jinx and not, you know, me making excuses not to write 😬)

Listening to:

Dreamscape.

In and out, gently, like a whisper lost in the wind…

In and out, in…and….out, in….and…

My breath crashes in shallow waves, distant like the tide in a hidden cove. Slow and warm, this to-and-fro accompanied by a warm rise and fall is the sweetest, most subtle expression of life.

One after the other, the lights of my consciousness flicker; my eyes struggle to remain open, their tireless efforts to make sense of this strange world valiant but in vain. Far away, the curtains flutter and billow, the clock ticks and the indoor fan groans under the strain of a heat wave.

A heaviness cloaks me, pinning me under an unbearable weight until all the world and its sensations have melted in the summer air, joining the scent of wild palm trees and the tinkling of distant laughter the sea breeze often carries. Against my ribs, my heart hammers, unwilling to yield yet falling under the seductive spell of a too-warm afternoon and beautiful words that blur on a page, that slip into my unguarded unconscious — only to later appear in the fevered haze of an afternoon doze that feels like it has somehow lasted longer than a workweek, longer than the whole month of January and longer even than the summer holidays from when I was 16.

I have surrendered to the languor of the summer heat, melted into it as all things do — I have gained a lifetime in sleep, in the sweaty dreams of a 3 p.m. nap. I have lived more, I suspect, in my mind than I have anywhere else.

Between you and me, I sometimes wish I could fade into mist and slip, unknown and unmissed, into one of these drowsy afternoons, staying back forever in the moment instead of rolling on. It’s easier that way. Life would be so much easier if you could freeze moments and live inside of them: the same perfect happiness over and over — the kind of happiness that doesn’t wear out with time but that only deepens, reaching ever closer to your heart and making itself more precious to you.

I wish, I wish. I dream even within dreams.

But for now, this moment is mine.

Quote of the day:

“And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees
Out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow”
— Bob Dylan

L’été.

Summer is sweeter this year, something that is very much at odds with the devastation and grief of a raging pandemic.

We have had a case of local transmission here after several good months of hugs and handshakes, masks hanging precariously on ears and no moisture-peeling hand sanitisers. The anxious fear has found me again, sprouting scenarios of endless grief and loss.

So I want instead to count the little things — each of them an argument against fear, a shred of reason to counter the rising irrationality of my reeling mind.

Summer is sweet and soft like a kiss, still clinging onto the last dregs of a delicious winter. Often enough in the past, I had known summer had come when I would have to woefully send my blanket to the wash. You know the kind: thick and fluffy like a risen pancake fresh off the pan, it traps in warmth and banishes the cold from your fingers and toes.

This year, I find myself sighing into this heavy blanket even now, during midsummer nights that should have been sultry and sticky and uncomfortable. Instead, these nights gather me close, they hold my dreams above my head like a mobile, like the universe has unravelled in my room to tell me all about where I am from.

You need only take a single look at me to understand what I’ve become: a creature of summer’s making… Flowy dresses in my wardrobe, pineapple-printed shirts, wandering without fear of getting lost, and — at long last — a little curious about love.

Note: I hope you are doing well, wherever you are. It’s tough times out there and I’m only beginning to realise that all over again.

Distant summers.

young adult old soul magic realism zuoji — Art by: Zuoji

Balmy summer nights. Condensation trickling down glass bottles no sooner are they popped out into the heat. Glistening droplets sliding down, making the bottle slippery, one moment away from crashing onto the floor.

There is a warm, orange tone to life. The everyday scenes have changed to reflect that. Dripping mountains of coloured shaved ice, necks glowing with perspiration, a looseness in the limbs, the general air of summertime carefreeness and mouths that sigh, sigh, sigh: at the heat, the late buses, the sweet, good times.

I feel like I am living in a metaphor. That somehow, this moment is more than its apparent sum, hiding more meaning than I am able to decipher. Summers always feel a little far away somehow; I know there is a large part of them I cannot touch even as they unravel underneath my fingers in waves of summer tunes and late-night conversations. There is a depth I cannot feel, a susurration my ear is not attuned to. But I believe that life happens twice: once in the moment, and then again in retrospect. So I stay up nights not to understand, not to grasp and pursue this vast unknown expanding in my chest, but to experience, simply. To sigh at the cricket concerts, at the humidity sticking to my skin like a layer of cling film, at the gentle smile of a summer love.

Whatever meaning there is, whatever lesson or symbolism lays dormant in these moments, they will come to me when they need to.

Presently, I am filling up on the sticky sweetness of right-nows, enjoying my gentle metaphors, my odes to freedom and pink-peach summer skies.

Love in the Time of Cholera.

young adult old soul magic realism writing — Art by: Unknown

I am in love the way I’ve rarely been before.

It started with a frantic search for Beauty, something I was looking for like a missing gold earring. I couldn’t find it where I was: somewhere amidst smog-stained skyscrapers and the confines of open offices. To no avail I turned myself inside out. To no avail, I looked out the window, soaked in the morning dew and afternoon sun. It was as though Life was consumed by endless shades of grey. Like I had swapped my rose-coloured glasses for smoke-tinted shades.

Beauty would not come my way: it refused to sprout from the cracks in the concrete, to touch me even through broken streams of sunlight. Spurned by the world, I turned inwards, chasing the ball of light flitting about my consciousness. But there was something off about it, too. It was oddly calm, unmoving as though tranquilised. Then, uncharacteristically, I turned to others. I made the first step then the second and the third. And let me just say: people are beautiful but I wouldn’t go looking for Beauty with a capital ‘B’ in them.

And then finally, colour appeared to me in the lazy, drawled-out sentences of a yellowed library book that hadn’t been borrowed in 25 years. It is there, in creamy pages infused with a nostalgic scent that I finally felt the sun dappled on my face. I awoke to the sweet smell of pressed camellias and the lone sound of a lovesick violin… I found beauty in someone else’s eyes, I felt warmth through some other skin.

It was such a lazy novel to read: not much happened but the passage of time. The plot mainly stayed in place, only ever swaying slightly to the left or right, like a person who is trying not to fall asleep even as their head lolls about this and that way. I did fall asleep to it so many times though, rocked by visions of summers eternal and love enduring. These words left on my eyelids daydreams the way a pressed flower leaves its feathery marks on the pages of an old book. It was slow too, unhurried like a riverboat trip through time. My heart slowed to a gentle, rhythmic beat, joining birdsong and the rustle of leaves in their naturalness.

Ah, all these unfathomably rich sentences, these pages overflowing with wonder and an underlying magic — these Spanish names, the gorgeous sound of the R’s I’ve been learning to pronounce. Fermina Daza, Juvenal Urbino de la Calle, Florentino Ariza. Oh and the stretched-out sonorities: San Juan de la Ciénaga, Escolástica.

Lazy, drawled out like a long summer afternoon on the terrace, body too heavy to move significantly, uninhibited, tired, forming slurred words, limbs far too lax to hold any tension…

09/11/19

An imaginary journey.

young adult old soul magic realism — Art by @lilmisch

Do you ever feel that this life is not really yours?

I have this deep, unsettling conviction sometimes that one day I will wake up, and it will all have been a dream.

I must have wandered off one late summer day, probably during a family picnic at the beach. Trying —without knowing— to touch a moment of infinity, to connect to the strange energy swirling inside of me. I tried to talk to the ocean, to understand the hidden language behind its ebb and flow, and the eons-old story it tells.

“Tell me what you know about the stars.” I whispered.

I let the washed up shells guide my steps, imagined waking up within one of them, bathed in a pinkish glow. All around me, the world was telling a story and I was listening. To the winds that told me where they go to rest, to the rocks that have only ever felt life, to the sands that murmured stories of when they were corals settled deep in the ocean.

I must have wandered so far as to get utterly lost. But I was unaware. Too taken by the secret magic of the world to notice. I wandered for years following that inner light, only looking up much later, far away from the beach, from any sounds of laughter, from any comfort of family.

And ever since, I’ve been trying to find my way back. Have been trying to connect to that same energy from that day on the beach, many summers ago, in the hopes that it will take me back.

So far, I have reached a desert, where seashells have been swapped for fennecs and other desert dwellers. The desert sand tells a different story : one of dunes and unfathomable mysteries buried in its breast. And again, losing a few years, I listen.

Once or twice, I think I collapsed from heatstroke. And in between my barely open eyelids, I glimpsed the beach from another world, another time. The backs of the people I love are turned to me, and even though I’m so near, they can’t see me, they don’t even know I’m gone. Or that I will be gone.

But then, on the third time, I wake up.

All the years I’ve lived in the desert dissolve into dust; they were never real. That is how life feels some days. An imaginary journey, something I was too young to embark on, something too dangerous. I’m constantly straying from the things that brought me warmth and comfort, and my whole life is spent seeking that lost haven, never knowing whether I will find it.

Note : Did that even make sense? 😂 I don’t know, but it’s good to be back posting.

Sun-kissed and sun-loved

I need a break.

A day at the beach, swimming, marveling at the feeling of sand and the summer warmth reaching my toes. I want to be sinking into the gentleness of the summer that I have only known to be suffocating. Like a scornful person who has peeled back their layers and trusted me with the vulnerability within, I want my skin to soak in the tenderness of the previously burning sun, to be sun-kissed and sun-loved. I need some wild wanderlust and a jar of freedom bottled like perfume, something that diffuses in the air, wherever I go. I want freedom so fragrant everybody smells it. I want to smell like the froth of the sea, like deep-green forests after it has rained all night.

I want to smell like Nostalgia, like the wind that brings you the scents of your childhood. I want to be both familiar and strange, something that has you running after it to figure out what it is. I want to forget about spilled ink and paper and formal clothes — I, I just want to breathe and not have to do anything.

I want to be want to be so small so the world can seem so big again, so that I can slip inside an iridescent bubble for a while and watch the aggrandised world in ever-changing colours. Jumping from bubble to bubble, I want to rise, rise towards the skies and the sun like Icarus, getting too close, too high, too much and popping into a million tiny luminescent droplets and dropping back to Earth. Then landing somewhere under the sun, falling asleep under its soft blanket of warmth as a thousand moons blink in and out of view. I want to wake up and have nowhere to go, nothing to do except losing myself in the patterns of the leaves overhead, the patches of sky and light that swim through the foliage.

I want lazy afternoons spent in a nap-induced haze, I want stars and the cool blueness of night, I want soft orange lights to illuminate my 1 a.m.s…

I want, I want…

Endless things, endless free things. Free of too much worldliness, of duplicity or heaviness.

I just want to feel light again. And free.

Note : Here, we are currently dipping our toes in the first blistering heat of the summer, and the atmosphere is so heavy it almost feels like something we’re carrying on our backs. Still, even writing things like this helps a bit.

Listening to :

A Lie Beautifully Told

“If reality were nothing but an agreed upon lie, childhood would be the most beautiful lie we would have.”

KazuhiroHori_flood — Art by: Kazuhiro Hori

It’s always so strange to see childhood friends being adults.

To see them in suits and beards, wearing 9-inch heels and nail polish when I’ve seen them eating glue, their hair a nest, some of their teeth missing or moving precariously in their mouths. It feels like a masquerade, like another school show they’re putting on.

Any moment now, the sticker-beard will fall off, the nail polish will wash off and they will all shrink back to their normal sizes. In this way, life feels so unreal. Like I will wake up from a nap and will find myself in that old classroom with the worn wooden chairs, the smell of flowering trees and summer wafting through the windows, chalk dust all over my hands. And my friends will be laughing at me while my teacher sighs and tells me to go wash my face.

Sometimes, life feels like this weird, far-fetched dream, the kind you have when you’ve had too much sugar during the day.

Other days though, it is childhood that seems too farfetched. Too perfect to ever have been real. Like something a younger version of you would go to a genie to wish for.

But it’s real. Or at least, it seems to be. If reality were nothing but an agreed upon lie, childhood would be the most beautiful lie we would have.