A condensed version of this essay was published here in Sunila Galappatti's lockdown journal.
***
Today was more or less the same as yesterday, which in turn was the same as the day before. This is not broad brushstrokes of generalization being painted over all my days, but a mirror into which I see a messy blur of all my days gone by. All the 106 days and 105 nights. What's outstanding is that these last three days were Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Before the proverbial Monday blues could singe me today, I found myself preparing dinner at 5pm. I then sat for my yoga class and thought about how incandescent sleep used to be.
*
I think it's been over a month that I had indelibly unfettered sleep. And almost one month since I filled in the pages of a new notebook. I've stopped writing, but thankfully I continue to absorb.
I just wish for all of this to cease. From work to lockdowns, to this all.
I've shared this message with 3-4 friends in the last few days. When all this is behind us, we will very seriously be demarcating our time as the before times and COVID times. They will be marked by clear signifiers. One of which for me would be cooking as much as I can, sometimes unwillingly too. I would love to look back at this time when I managed to work on some of my friendships and willfully keep unwanted ones at bay. I will remember it as a time of unforeseen kindness from some unknown ones, as a time of unforgiving summers and equally harsh landlords. But by the time we get to the other side, the collective exhaustion, the mass delirium might get too much.
I have slowly become farsick. For a place and a time, I have no inkling of. For a people I have not seen, for an era that might be behind or too far ahead of me. I am farsick for an unknown life.
*
In the before times, I was a peripatetic. I moved cities, left relationships and people. Now, like most of us, I feel as if I am the one being left behind. All the same, the numinous quality to these days and nights does not escape me. The darkness of some still days and the lightness with which some nights glide by stays with me. Most other days are a cluster of gloaming moments. Earlier, I would have felt an especial agent of the greyness, as if I knew it like the insides of my boudoir. But now it's almost as if my interaction with the crepuscular has become tetchy. The days are dark, grey, and stretched out in their vast emptiness. And my patience is the exact opposite. Irascible, snappy and true to the bone.
I look up in the dictionary words for a pedestrian traveler, which is what I thought I used to be. But it feels lifetimes ago. Clueless, lugging from one city to town, in search of something that even I had no clue of. The French word dépaysement pops up and I resign to its staidness. The unyielding formation of its letters. Fernweh comes next, and I think of my friend Nitesh Mohanty and his series of photographs from Bombay. What did those photographs have in common with what we are living through now?
Were we all carrying the knowledge of something like this from our mother's wombs and in our marrows?
We, and our documentation of the mundane since time immemorial finally seems to be catching up with us. As lives are running by, time stands still, mocking our very idea of existence, what do we do with that Rebecca Solnit coinage: faraway nearby?
*
Some sleepless mornings things are in a lock jam. I feel like a rusted old gate manning some ancestral property the heirs don't really care about.
On those mornings, my heart, an injured bird, is looking for a place to nest. It’s out of reach, inaccessible to me just like the injured bird. Breathing it’s last few breaths inside the empty container of her body, every breath an echo of the hoofing sounds of having had too much, felt too intensely and feared too little.
*
On one Saturday I resign myself to the sublime iridescence of Christian Petzold’s movies, while on Sunday morning I absorb the understated wisdom of Angela Schanelec’s films. My weekend brass tacks.
*
I try to sleep, and a word cloud wafts above my head. I lumber to grasp at it. Half-awake. I catch it, only to realize it's the legs of a housefly, and then I let it go.
*
Dreams, the sine qua non for my writing, have finally deserted me. From having rabid nightmares to these blank pale dreamless nights, I’ve traversed a bit. Now, I take to watching vlogs of Himalayan trekkers and trying to sleep while watching them. It doesn't help.
*
As a walker, my life was full of possibilities. Even though I was laconic and impulsive to a fault in my approach, I took pride in my ability to navigate paths and master directions. Walking to me was an act of faith.
Where do I invest this faith in now? How do I now find the serendipitous favors of walking? These little, pained, mute, pliant, slapdash words trigger me now. I stare at them, daring them to snarl back at me.
When nothing helps, not writing is my go-to form of self-torture. It keeps me wide awake and starving for relief. I surrender to its vagaries, completely rattled, obsessing about the next rejection, I doze into the most paper-thin sleep, warts and all.
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