#Scurf118: I'll call you
A fiction piece
It is difficult to move on, very tough if love started with listening to Lorde’s Royals driving up and down HKV ('13). I miss you, your being, around me. I miss those crazy nights in Delhi – listening to Babel, to Royals, to Counting Stars, to Joelene - our story is nothing short of a love story. It was not romance, or puppy love, it was beyond that. It was deep friendship that at that point was as selfless as it comes. You gave me music, I used to listen to you – get bothered about things we couldn’t change. I tried to make my ways work around you. I tried – I am still trying – to put words to what it is that I feel for you. I write to you from this small obscure, yet sheepishly expensive town on the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It’s a lovely neighbourhood where I live. It’s a small quintessential Tamil Nadu town, Coimbatore. I went out with a colleague’s family to drink.
I feel like a balloon full of cold water. Holding itself by tenterhooks. Just swaying in the present. Without you in my life I feel like I could burst anytime. Every trip taken by myself in this town takes me farther into the woods of sadness. I feel so detached from my own self. I gobble down ice-creams without much ado. Gorge on chocolates. Eat out almost every meal comes from a shop or an expensive cafe.
Living on tentacles.
A life so fragile, so weak yet too strong to ask for help. I took a long long ride in an auto-rickshaw today. It was ten and a half kilometres away from my office. The auto-driver was a student, working part-time as an auto driver. It was drizzling. The ride was to get my laptop’s external hard disk repaired. He said it would cost fifteen grand. What a joke! On my way back, my niece called from Nagpur. It is her birthday tomorrow.
I just feel like all of this is a mistake. Coming to this town. Should not have taken this job up - mainly because of the city. I love my job, I can't say it enough - how much I love it. But I long for familiarity. I long for faces that I could believe more easily. I don’t know the language here. I feel scared all the time. I love my assignments, I love my story ideas - and just not that, my bosses love them too.
But — and maybe it’s the rains.
It is the rains, I guess.
I am crying thick tears, I feel lost and unbelonged. Heaviness has made home inside my heart. I don’t like the permanence of this knot. And worst bit is that I don’t even know if i leave this city if this feeling will recede. i am spending a lot of money also, and it does take its toll on me. i should be a little more easy on myself i feel. i am falling apart.
I want someone - that one someone to come here and put me together, piece by piece. And maybe that someone is you? The way I helped you out? But you don’t even know that I’m here. Then there’s this other person I know through Twitter. Is it possible to even want that of someone you have known only through social media?
I look at the map and the distances weird me out. they are over two thousand one hundred and forty seven kilometres between my hometown and this town. It feels so good, this job and my writing and words and myself in there, but outside of it I think i will go mad.
If this flatmate thing works out - good enough for me, but else - i think i will give up. I loitered around through the lanes of this town, in an auto-rickshaw and then you know, the work was not done and i come home to an empty apartment. the city was covered with heavy pregnant, about to burst kind of clouds... but it was only drizzling. I don’t know if its just my words, but i really want to come out of this. i try a lot of things. i try pushing the blame on someone else. i try deep breathing. i write, pushing all the laziness away. frankly, Ive never struggled with ideas - so that’s sorted. I am still able to write my stories off in less than an hour. i love my job. but the rest of it - its taking a toll on me. should i see a therapist? i live in a society that is so full of people and kids and swings and pools and trees and plants - yet i feel so alone. Maybe it’s all not cast in stone - maybe its not. i want to get out of this feeling.
Will you come here to help me? I think I’ll call you tonight.
Thanks for reading. This is the first time I’ve tried putting a sort of fiction piece out here. If you like it, tell me about it? I’ve always been under-confident about writing fiction at all. This short story comes from a place of not knowing where the future will take the protagonist and how love and loneliness intersect and intertwine. If you want to read more of these write that in the comments below and go here if you want to access to the full archive of this newsletter. Later this year I plan on launching paid subscriptions which will come with more deeply felt, richly described essays. There will also be weekly conversation pits. See you here next week, and thanks for reading.