#Scurf143: Waylaid scribbles, unscrupulous thoughts, parsimonious mulch
Notes
Map loving
After more than seven years of being attached to this map of the London tube, last month I finally drummed up the courage to pull this out from inside a corner of the almirah and stub it on the soft board in my room. I still remember the small thrill, the secret motivation and an epiphanic ecstasy I experienced when I used the London metro for my mercurial week in the magical megacity. As much as I loved moving from 221B, to Tate, to Notting Hill, to Trafalgar Square, the connection between all these places was the mode of commute that put me right into the vibrant pit of this historical city. I’ll never, for instance, forget the midnight atmosphere inside the tube when i left from barbican to be back at my Kensington square hostel.
Most of the details now are muddy, and I’ll chalk that up to the relentless passage of time, but each time I glean through those feverish nights and blossoming mornings all that rushes back to me is the small tides in which public transport can move us in ways more than one.
#londontube #tubemap #londonmap #citydiaries #cities #publictransport
Squalor
• squalor • a state of being in a hotel room that’s a essentially a temporary abode, a moment of transition, a portal from where you were to where you to wish to be. hotel rooms are almost always full of promise, a sense of impending magic and the immediate squalor that annexes these emotions. often impelled by life’s drudgery I find myself taking an overnight bus, an ill-planned flight, or a poorly thought out train journey just to get from my city life full of urban nonjoys to a neighbouring or far-off place just to be able to spend some time in a hotel room. in doing so I’m maybe planning an escape route, like all of us, but I’m also tending ever so carefully to the joys that lurk in taking those casual, mundane risks induced by last moment, largely unplanned, entirely unrehearsed travel. is that why I also end up going back to places that I’ve already been to (more on that some other time)?
there is immense power in travel, but there’s also a gently satisfying, even dull, stirring in being merely transported like the everyday commute from the bed to the office-desk. in taking those inessential, dormant, in-between hours to stretch my mind, body and soul in the womb-like darkness of a hotel room. sometimes even those handful of hours can be mimetic of the power of moving without actually moving. sometimes being able to manage just that much is travel.
#travel #hotelrooms #pause #rooms #hotels
Last day in the hostel
The last days of hostel life are a cluster of nostalgia, mess and leftover emotions. Everyone you fought with over the year(s) suddenly starts assuming a more deep, involved role in the make up of your personhood. You’re still rugged, rough around the edges, but some parts break themselves open to reveal a meaningful yolk within, while some doors shut themselves for good. The best of friends, unable to give complete closure to the end of an era, fall apart and age old foes come back together in a jiffy.
Having lived in hostels for a good 6.5-7 years of my intermediate adult life, I’ve never known a time in hostels free from the gravitational pull of leisure and laziness. In those years my graphomanic tendencies caused me to limit human interaction. All I ever stepped out of my room was for the nourishment of other people’s touch, food and soul replenishing drinks. And yet at the end of each of the three stints in hostels in three vastly different geographies, I felt a sense of resignation, always an abiding sense of resignation.
Hostel life then to me was an ancient city with an emotional, condensed and barren palimpsest of living as a student. @armpit_lint told me in 2014 that being a student is the best time of life - she put it in words so violet and full, they streaked the insides of my heart. A saying goes, “there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.” And my hostel lives was a cathedral to all the versions of me I went through in those spaces and places.
However long or short your stint hostels, you go through it all - a condensing of time, a corralling of your being, and the invariable tearing at the seems. I remember the latter being a large part of my life, in all hostels. A sudden fight, a strange animosity and you’re alone out of the blue. This kind of picking up at the entirety of one’s being, gathering the sediments of oneself after a betrayal (however small or big) — that’s what makes hostel life singular. Something about trotting through those years so alone and yet surrounded by people.
You find each other, a way of living, and at the end of it all (no matter what you think) you also find your own self.
#hostel #life