#Scurf133: Borrowed words, stolen kisses, shared playlists
some evenings are just you sitting on the sofa thinking for long, unending minutes about someone, that one someone
words come out better, without slipping, chipping or falling off in the way, when i write emails and letters to you. they flow, without a pause, halt, not even the slightest of hesitation.
what happens then to those words? you read them, i know. but then? what after that?
in this economy of endless words, we constantly steal thrifty looks at texts floating around us. what do letters, written emails and words of concern mean in this time?
does it mean that you will think of me tonight? scratch that, did you even open my email? did you receive my words in the same breathless way i wrote them?
what after you read my email? what about the intensity of my emotions? did they translate well onto the grey background of your screen continents away?
writing emails like that is a double edged sword, because, well, you know…
today i’ve been listening to a particular music album that you would’ve had a lot of things to say about. i would’ve loved to have that conversation with you. among those thousand other conversations.
where do you keep your thoughts about me? since you’re not writing to me. where are those feelings and secret ruminations? do they surface at all or do they always lurk behind the steely front contours of your sleek life.
does the extreme weather of your new city make you think of me and our ordinary weather days together? what does the summer there whisper to you about my absence? does it make any difference to you at all?
or does the distance dull some pain? you become the hot knife to your own emotions regarding me, slicing them, sprucing them, finishing them each night with dinner.
i have questions, as you can see, but more than questions, i have statements to throw at you. writing these very personal words on a very impersonal place makes me feel queasy. is there a word for when you start imagining the person you miss and transposing them on other, even unknown, people around you?
the dhol outside is beating loud, loud enough so as to immerse the sound of my beating heart. It’s a marriage, a mirage, same thing. a regular, seven-day, north indian affair. they had the haldi ceremony this afternoon, all of them glistening in their mustard coloured outfits. bands of red and yellow and pink cutting through the entrance of the house, as i passed by that place a few times during my walk.
here i am surrounded by a panoply of mundane things — filled up forms, printed paraphernalia, books for reading, a poetry book by Agha Shahid Ali, a practising book, a notebook (which i’ve covered with brown packing paper), an odd-shaped candle whose wick dances almost in sync to the dhol’s rhythms, a pile of rejected tissue and a half-filled deep green glass bottle of water, it’s cap slightly ajar, letting the crisp air wheeze in to cool the water.
even in this very quotidian, lame time, my mind is busy knitting up the memory of a far thought, something that didn’t even happen. something i had only ever dreamt of — with no intent of making it come true. in my mind, a corner is animated with the light of what seems like ignited charcoal shoals. a distant wicker of a memory thrums there.
the striations of what once was made anodyne by one, mere layer of time. the firmament that is our time together, will it always be greater than the sum of its constituent parts? or will i always be a walking vortex of contradictions.
words are just that – words. Â
here i am listening to the same track (you know which one) for the n-th time, writing this, not caring about the readers of this newsletter and what they will make of it. to me this is writing. anything other is mercantile, futile, evasive, superseded by the wishes and beliefs of others.
there is a kind of distortion hanging almost tangibly this evening. feet up on the sofa, my toes curl because of the mild cold that pierces through the lining of my new adidas socks. this essay started off as a gathering of knick-knacks and ephemera of the past, but now it’s a mere haunting of your absence. a graveyard of thoughts. as i walk around this house, this city, really this life, within the precincts of what once was our cultivate milieux, there is not the slightest bit of strangeness.
i can lie too.
all of this can, in the end, be lumped under the rubric of ranting. i will keep my rue, my leisure, my complacency and my very own dissatisfaction and retire for the night. for the month is long, these four days, are a batch of 96 hours from which the grime of your absence cannot be washed. and so be it.
till we next write to one another.