#Scurf131: mid-october
when all wilts and blooms, goes but also comes back, is here but also not
it’s been a while that i wrote or shared something. here’s an essay i was able to cough out despite this morning, despite yesterday, despite life. i think that’s a great way of waking up and doing really anything, despite yesterday, despite myself, despite the circumstances. that’s something i never thought i’ll write here. anyway, the usual addendums here — for the time this is a free to read newsletter, but soon i’ll be putting a lot of this behind paywalls. subscribe and share with the readers in your life, till then?
You wake up a weekday, it’s past 10 and as soon as you open your eyes a well of tears waits at the brim. You are heavy with the weight of all those wasted days, weeks, months. Spaced out, you tumble into the kitchen to make a cup of chai. The water boils, you add adarak and leave it to boil. Your thoughts drift back to the near emptiness with which you slept off the night before. Are you living your full life? You pull yourself out of the fruitless frisson of having a thinking mind, look at the bright yellow sun, shining still at 10am. It fills you with a hope that doesn’t wane. You remember the chai, run back to the kitchen, it has boiled down to a lean drizzle.
This keening tug at your insides, the waxing and waning of emotions, the distance with which the future glints, only faintly, at you. These make the innards of a coving month, a potent time when only staying afloat matters. The weary tape of living, the jumbled shape of time cruising along even as you try to rest and catch your breath — everything is both momentous and also altruistic.
It is the strangest feeling, the weirdest month. Everything mangled but also pretty, but that doesn’t mean that it is not also eerie. It is mid-October. It is here and as always; you are not ready to deal with the every-ness of it.
It’s now that life becomes something you want to give in your all, but then also wonder why you would want to go to that length. It is now when you go looking for that moment when you can like, really like, what you see in the mirror however brief that glimpse is. You know it is not a lasting feeling. It’s a mellifluous song, a scathing screed, a booming wail about that brief, oh-so-brief, moment in the wall of time when everything made sense, the locks turned, and the keys really worked. In that second you could see what sustained you, nurtured you, you knew that it’s all available and that it is comforting. The dichotomy of that moment pulls at your insides, making the moment last a little bit longer than usual. And then the rubber band snaps and you’re back to where you belong. The cesspit reality of this world where everything is crumbling, all the time, comes haunting back. Reverberating, echoing, pouring its bile out on you ever so slowly.
You open more tabs than you read or close, reaching out for more than what’s in the offing. A sulky smog awaits to envelop your being. A glee exists in these moments before. A time paused and uninterrupted by all that will come later. In this place of half seen things and unuttered joys, you relish. It is here that you know you must hold on to this strange, brief time of effervescent joy. Hold on to it tighter than your butterfinger hands allow you to. There is a mundane poetry to this, a quotidian twinkle of hope, an unusual feeling of remembrance. It makes you want to doubt the words you use: strange, brief, moment. An unknown sense of almost happiness gets a hold of you. Almost good. Almost happy.
And right then something catches at the back of your throat. Its blurry shape makes you jump with a start. You close your eyes and remember all the October parties, their vanilla façades now looking like upside-down versions of themselves. There was then almost perfect quiet of not knowing, a sense of being free and unattached, ungraffitied by time. You were then under the ongoing impression that you are/were loved, always have been.
Then something shifted. A water, of sorts, broke.
You left the humid crescents of that, once-upon-a-time life. Echoing the description and reflecting the experience of many who came before you. You realise this is how everything comes undone with time. And you patch yourself back up with the bandaid of knowledge. It's a jumbled tape but you like the sound of it. A little jagged, rough, broken around the edges. You learn to listen a little deeper, to dig a little farther, to be a little keener — life will teach this all— in one mid-October afternoon.
If you like what you read, share this friends, folks, colleagues and acquaintances who like to read. Share it with those who are alone this October, or those who are with others yet still alone. I will write to you all soon again, hopefully from the inner recesses of the Delhi smog. A little song about life in 2022’s smog, or about something other, completely other.
Recent work: On Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Parts 1&2; On Dur e Aziz Amna’s American Fever