The whirlpool of “what ifs” is terrible. Running around in circles of uncertainty can make even the most confident person falter their step. I’m not sure when I wrote this little piece, for I have moved far too many times to far too distant places, dreamed of it even. But now that I re-read it, the timing seems apt and a love far too real gets left behind again.
This is a part of Confessions Series. Written and forgotten in old sketchbooks, bought to life again here.
There they sat,
Patiently waiting,
With a silent plea of acceptation,
Tainted with an air of desperation.
A hundred others sat,
In a room unknown,
Not talking, Not moving ,
Living in a bubble of their own.
Not many knew me,nor I them,
I just kept collecting,
Sorting them by roles,
Grouping them by needs.
It’s not their fault,
Not mine either,
We just sat there in each others vaults,
Squatting in a space which belonged to neither.
I refused to acknowledge them in daylight,
For knowing all along that I didn’t,
I drew a line,
And then a threshold.
I would collect only 200 of them,
Not a worthy person less, not a worthy person more.
There have been many a list made in all the blogging sites about the things do. The most popular ones being – Things to do before you die, things do when you are 50, the things to do when you are in your 30’s & 20’s ,5 things to do when you are aged 5. It is like our minds cannot evolve from one age group to another without such progressive lists. That said, lists are our mild OCD patterns of things we ought to write and forget( or not). Personally , I love lists, I make them up all the time, like “things to say to your inanimate best friend” ; “things to say to your dog so that he may have self-esteem”; “things to say to your boyfriend so that he may be left with some self-esteem” ;”things to do when you are bored by the presence of people” etc and so forth. So here is the greatest list of things I believe that must be done in your twenties.
#) Convince your best/favorite/only friend to shave their head. Why? because in your twenties is the only time you will have enough conviction to do so and your friend will be actually gullible enough to listen to you, after which you have enough time in your life to make new friends in an extreme case where your friend abandons you.Also shaving off your own head is so overrated.
#) Quit on the one thing you absolutely love. It can be your obsessive gaming, football, chocolates,your girlfriend/boyfriend,books,movies, Facebook,coffee,cigarettes, marijuana,cocaine. It helps you build up your immunity for all the further disappointments that are lined your way in your 30’s.It also helps you enjoy the same later when you are acutely miserable.
#)Ride away into the sunset. Yes, buy/borrow/steal a minimum of 300cc bike and go on a road trip. It’s the only time you can afford to take one without your doctor on your speed dial.
#)Plan a wedding. This is only because you do not want to be left out of the crowd where all your friends are either thinking about getting married or are getting married. Plan a wedding for your pet snails or yourself or your grandparents. The whole planning part is so tedious that you rather face a hundred tasks dumped on you by your boss on a Saturday evening.
#) Eavesdrop on the guy in the other booth in a bar. It surmounts to nothing. Next write down their conversation. A few laughs are bound to be generated when you read it out of context. But lesson learned , everything you do from this decade onwards-surmounts to nothing. Peace.
#) Listen to Music from the 1920’s. Yes , get over your Bob Marley, Guns and Roses, Aviici or Swedish house mafia. You will go a long way in life knowing artists like the Blind Lemon Jefferson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington. Also it will earn major brownie points with people who know their music and adds a much need snob quotient with people who listen to Justin Bieber.
#) Write a Novella. It is a necessary rite of passage. It can be about your ever clichéd love story to your boring childhood where nothing ever happened, It could also be about your fantasy parallel universe which is similar to Lord of the rings. It doesn’t matter as long as you write because it improves your vocabulary. It also helps you type in full words than “hw r u?” (Seriously, that is not cool!)
#)Own a leather Jacket. Just because you can.
#) Make plans to build your own bunker. Plan it well. Hire an architect too. You never know when you might need a mini bar if a nuclear explosion ever occurs and you are hiding in your bunker.
#)Visit Siberia. It might be freezing cold. You might lose a couple of toes to the weather , but it will be the place you will describe to your grand-kids about every-time they ask about your missing toes.
#) Buy a camel. Why? Same reason as why you bought a leather jacket in the first place.
#)Make your own Things to DO lists. Seriously! Get to it.
It’s not often you dig down your memory lane for that one important person who knowingly or unknowingly changed the way you see things. But again that’s the thing about this very selective memory of ours, we remember all the disappointments the regrets but we sure do forget those little instances which subtly altered the course for us. These instances sometimes seem like the beach, where every high tide leaves behind a distinct impression that can never be altered or seen again twice. one such high tide is the introduction of Miguel into the very plain and mundane life of Nita.
“I’m Miguel and I shall be your Spanish professor, but that does in no way mean that I am better than you ! “. Miguel’s this introduction would be forever recorded in Nita’s mind ,for no one before or after has ever been so honest to her. But then again Miguel was what the world saw as a drifter, for he couldn’t stay put in one place for too long.There were times in the Spanish class where he would teach nothing about Spanish culture and every honest thing about life that others would shy away from saying out loud, in fear of the acceptance of those facts, for themselves and for the audience too . His curiosity was immense, sometimes so overpowering that he had to try everything that he came across. He’d say “the world out there is existent just to put rubber stamps and labels on everything that we do ,so I might as well get many of them(labels)”and so he got labelled everything from a pilot ,a chef , a diver ,a junkie ,a nurse, an engineer ,a businessman, a vagabond ,a teacher …these labels weren’t due to the lack of ambitions, for he had plenty of them to last a lifetime, only his pursuit of these goals were off-track.
Where Nita couldn’t take her life seriously enough making plans for every second, Miguel became a friend who would believe that those plans would work even though she didn’t. “Nita, those future plans don’t matter without a history to share behind”. Miguel became the friend who wouldn’t be afraid to quit something because he didn’t enjoy it anymore , in fact it was where Nita learnt that there was no adjustment for choices about one’s life, if it meant mucking yourself about. He subtly refocused the looking glasses through which she saw her life, for she realized that the dominoes lines wouldn’t fall so easily if you made plans with the scope of flaws in them, and the failing of dominoes is not necessarily a bad thing because the possibility of re-stacking them up would never occur until the chain collapses. It was a life lesson she learnt amidst the craziness of a few found friendship. A friendship that everybody knew wouldn’t last, but made effort to do so anyways, because “it was worth nothing and that’s just the beauty of it” as Miguel would say.
The drifter moved to another continent to work while he opened up new doors bracing for the failures but never trying to fit into molds. Nita ,well, she took the work she wanted to dream off and let the chips fall because controlling them would just be stupid .She packed her bags ready for things to tumble down, to study what she likes with no possibility of a fixed future and that just suits her fine.
PS: I do not know how I never published this post when it remained in my drafts for the last year or so.Teachers ,Friends happen to teach us a lot about ourselves and somehow revisiting them feels like looking at an older version of oneself and yet appreciating the person who you are now.
Today I met a friend, a friend yet unknown. He was sitting in the corner of a bus, just like every other day he sits in the bus, staring at his shoes. The world would pass him by, a blur of moving vehicles, advertisement hoardings and standing people. He would look at them all through the shine of his shoes. Sometimes he would while away his time by squinting at the words on the newspaper. He often pretended that these lines were tiny ants moving like a formation, changing their positions as their tiny ant minds would direct them to. Although these formations never made sense to him, he enjoyed their patterns every day.
Will anybody like this pattern, or will they like that pattern, do you know what patterns are?
His travels in this bus was always unusually usual ,with the scene around him always painted in a strange green that reminded him of nowhere .I would meet this unknown friend everyday on an uncertain bus top. It would please me immensely the day he had his face buried in the paper. Today was one such day. The skies were just stormy enough and the weather was dry, so I decided to ask him a question that I have been meaning to for a long time.
“Sir ,where do you go with your patterned paper?” he stared at me as if I was from a strange planet talking in Morse code .And then he scratched his bald head with exactly a single hair growing from its follicle. After a whole two minutes of waiting he replied “err……..
Restlessly Random 