Snowflies,butterflakes.

I realized joy can never be relative. Leafless trees make a city look moribund, but to spot just one evergreen cypress on a street is what joy can be like. A TV show about a community joining hands to feed the homeless on Christmas day, watched by no initial intent, can later manage to move a lot of your inner scaffolding. That is joy. The unexpectedness of snowfall on the most potentially murky day is what joy has come to be, with me..

Butterfly houses always enamored me. A shrine to witness the wondrous transition of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Watch those brittle wings gently struggle to sprout from inside a cocoon. Take the form of an ethereal being, fluttering across the waves of air, swimming in an ocean of carelessness. So, anytime I wanted to block out the ugliness of subjected reality, like the times when you can’t seem to deal with the fact that Christmas can be lonely for some, or that the evergreen cypress (snow-sprinkled) outside your window has to stand in the cold all winter, I imagine a little cloud surrounding me, a cloud of imaginatively invented joy, of self-preservation.

Like a cocoon, it protects me while I momentarily hibernate from that moment. It becomes so easy to close the moment like that, pretend like the moment never befell you, never spun you, never turned you. While I develop wings inside this cocoon to help me lift off this unwanted, unwelcome earth. Like a thousand butterflies, engulfing me, like liquefying skin made of a million wings, a cloud of controlled motion, morphing into my shape, hiding me. Defining me.

And I only found out, on the day that it snowed, that this doesn’t have to be my fantastic vision, conjured by a desultory mind. Snowflakes falling weightlessly, staying afloat for those uncertain yet heavy moments, are like butterflies (both ephemeral). Butterflies made of snow that whirl in concentric flight around me. The whiteness of the snow hiding the murk of the street, of the day. And this time, reality confirmed my little bubble of imagination. It was reality (which we all try so hard to escape, make lame excuses from and cheat with sometimes) that showed me the silken thread woven between her and my imagination. And that was joy to me. Non-relative and simply confirmed.

artiste - Christian Clipart
art title - Butterflies and Christmas snow
image url - here

Unclothed, for once.

So, it's those times when you run out of wine and realize the immenseness of your dependency on it to adjust the dimensions of your gloom. Idiosyncratic gloom. The fullness of the wine in the glass tosses your securities. You know, the way your securities sometimes depend on the purpleness of the winter or the opaqueness of hope. There is an unstated, understood security I have come to find with the presence of wine in my house during winter. Before, I sought that security in the musky smell of my dogs’ bodies as they lay by my feet, sleeping but only narrowly so, always providing me with company as I sailed through the nocturne, all guarded.
I suffer a howling affinity for winter. I like the way it shuffles the order of things inside my carefully draped emotional demeanor. I seem to admire the fact that having wine becomes more of a physiological necessity than just some thoughtless guilty indulgence. The pseudo warmth works (almost) as a temporary substitute to the musky warmth I was otherwise used to. The dryness in the air is easy to associate with when you are replenishing a void. The early sunset makes dealing with the harshness of absence easy. The wait for snow will overshadow the other forms of longing meanwhile.
It becomes easy to long, watching the tiny specks of snow float effortlessly inside the glass globe. It is easy to swim deep into words and songs and poetries during this seasonal metamorphosis. Lyrical intensities don’t seem to fail you. Filled frames seem to do their job. Lowly burning flames on the side table seem to induce warmth of soothing magnitude. The hissing wind through the crevice of my window feels friendly too. Maybe I will let her unravel my robe. I can use a little sliver of winter inside my sealed house with depleting wine tonight. Inside my sealed skin with depleting strength.
When the hands go cold, the blood settles coolly in the center of the heart. Easy to heal. Maybe the skin of the heart grows thicker too. Easy to deal.
I will sail through this nocturne too, all seamless.

image source : http://www.cepolina.com/freephoto/f/nature.water.snow/snow02.bw.jpg


"I'll be your harvester of light, and send it out tonight, so we can start again.." - Winter Song, Sara Bareilles.

Curse of being cursory - the cursor.

Have you wondered how the cursor on our computer screen could be a reflection of our ever-so-transitory state of mind? It blinks with uncertainty and balks at resistance. When there are too many words to say, it flutters across like a brisk, aimless firefly. And with silence, it quietly fades away like the words that were never brought to being.

Maybe the cursor on our screen really is that part of our minds, which is like the magician’s hat, from where we, like a magician, keep extracting our words, pulling out the seemingly never ending string, forming a heap of thoughts, sometimes disarranged and sometimes resonant.

A jilted-at-the-altar Carrie Bradshaw sits in front of her Mac screen, a cursor, blinking in and out of sight, forming and dissolving dots in front of the word “LOVE”. And you can see how that cursor looks as poignantly empty as perhaps Carrie felt when she tried to get back at pulling out a string from inside her.

And that’s how dependent we are on a tiny vertical black streak of line for our semantic derivations. Love letters do not require to be written, wishes do not need to be spoken, and presence doesn’t need to be felt. Just pull out a structured string of sentence through the cursor and you are all set to convey the particular emotion. And when you have not a feeling inside you, when you are parched of the strings to extract, you will recoil, only momentarily, until your insides replenish again and are ready to be milked again.

It is all fleeting, touch-and-go, like impulses of a million emotions that hit you, every day, every now and then, some stimulating, some numbing, and they will stop by again, at the doorstep of that magician’s hat-like part of your mind and enter if you allow them, only to be drawn out later again… through your cursor…

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." ~Walter Wellesley, courtesy Lena Michelle McCue

image courtesy - www.maclife.com

image url - here

The funny, funny thing

You know there is the stratosphere of ‘rock bottom’. And there was me, some 30 feet below it. I wasn’t getting any younger with the quarter life threateningly beckoning at me. My career felt like a regurgitating toilet. And more often than not, I quietly lament over the inability to find being sorrowful as being cool (how I wish to be coolly sad, but damn my prosaic personality). Add to that was the weather that felt like I was made to conduct my life in a furnace. Even retail therapy failed me. So there I was, in this deepest crypt of miseries... And only freefalling deeper.
“It is funny how things don’t work out. It is funny how they DO”... That line from Sweet Home Alabama always gets me. I usually have a very pessimistic purview of the dynamics of ‘things working out’. I guess, optimists like to put a ribbon of fate on such rare, coincidental and convenient interlocking of events. So it was obvious I wasn’t going to see any damn ‘brighter side’ in that shithole I was going through.
And then that funny thing happens. That funny thing which sends you into this frenzy of confoundedness. Where you question the stash of beliefs that you have based all your cynicism on. All that defiance you secretly harbored for the corny movies, songs and poems that endlessly tell you how precious friendship is. All those mawkish episodes of “Friends” crash into you… How they plan a surprise for months, going through tiresome, personal differences to make it work. The way that surprise causes a rush of these funny, syrupy emotions and makes you want to burst into tears like a clinical emotional dork. And how you put together all of their shady behavior that they have been displaying all this time they were going through the predicament of planning a surprise. And regret on not having guessed any of that bad acting of diverting your attention from the surprise which might have lead to any premature disclosure.
And that’s how funny the way things work out is. How these miseries start seeming relative. And eventually diminished. How little things stop tampering with your composure. How little things start becoming existentially tangible. How a little, big surprise can alter the pole of your state of mind. How the realization of this precious relationship that you have subconsciously nurtured, makes you feel self-approximated and... Just simply, basically happy. Funny, eh?

P.S. Thank You to Sushi, Ash, MazakMasti, Tatu, Porny, Jassi-ca, Neepz & Dynamo for making my birthday the best I could ask for.. Love ya much & always!!!!!

Feathered

What happens when you have the misfortune of witnessing a pigeon being crushed under the wheel of a truck? What does it do to your day when you see this supernal being that is suppose to be air-borne, celeritous, sensing the slightest bit of threat way before it approaches it, free and unbridled, bouncing on a busy street (the last place it belongs to) and then being splattered open by a raging 100-tonne machine, pressing it’s body into a sheet of blood and feathers, dispersing some fragments into that paused air?

All you do is flinch away, your insides lurching, like someone squeezed your heart out right when it was pounding its heaviest.

And you go on.

Into the affairs of our lives, shook by helplessness until the next most routine occurrence tries to send us into the most settled state. So we watch the fireflies get caught up in a burning flame, setting their wings on fire and we learn to get use to it. We watch a butterfly crash into a car and fall down with the most silent thud and we learn to get used to it. We watch ourselves free fall, and we comfortably get used to the acceleration after the initial jolt, like it was a state of rest.

Or we settle down, in slow motion, like that broken aloof feather, the gravity pulling us down after all, and then sweeping us into another draft of unsettling air, to be again thrown up and then eventually settled.

And so we tread through our daily lives knowing that things, people, events will turn on us, abandoning their affiliations towards us, deserting us. We live in the constant, dormant fear of loss. A phone call can toss our world into a trench of miseries. A wrong turn can scatter the atoms of our lives into something amorphous. Breaking us into pieces and then making us back again, almost.

We go on. We get used to everything. Everything.

“We are all miracles” – from the movie, Little Children

art - Black Sand Feather, abstract landscape

artiste - Ross Alford

url - here

Unfeeling

She remembered how back at home, between her mom who had become queerly possessive about her, and her dad who had gotten somewhat awkward around her, between those burdening breakfasts and dinners of quietude, between having to study integration of numbers and being made to expand her culinary endeavors, she felt limpidly torn between these nascent experiences, these impositions, these prescriptions, that she sometimes found too hard to attach her waywardness to; to not want to flee this rush of overwhelm, like this one rush she was about to feel, sitting in that bus, between the viscous sky above and the rolling sheet of road below her, rolling like those hormones in the pit of her stomach (or was it a bit lower?), tossing her like an autumn leaf towards the season of attraction; and attraction is what she was about to feel, feel and later dismiss, just like that autumn leaf, outcast and trampled by the righteous, the church-goers, the conformers.

So attraction is what she felt, on that bus, when this rather handsome girl sat by her side, uncertainty filling the brims of her ripening chalice, overflowing through the yet growing saplings, soaking her wet, like she were being fondled by those occasional grazes, so gentle yet so conquering, like there was a larger conspiracy involved, a larger intention.

She flinched this feeling away, sieving it out of the mesh of her emotional ambivalence, through those recesses she would later fill out with her suppression, thinking about the chores, those despicable chores that waited at home, the cake that her mom wanted her to bake, for which she had to acquiesce, to confirm her normalcy, inspite of wanting to rather read that book she was reading, the book that helped her escape into the ecstasy of likeness, like every line had a continent between it, and she read it over and over again, revisiting it, every time her existence seemed to melt in it’s core.

She disliked the way she had taken to the protagonist with such fondness because it made her feel only more whimsical about herself; but even so, she didn’t really resist this cohesion. She felt, after all, like the hostess to this party, serving compliantly to the beliefs and notions of the people at this party, in her life. She was, after all, buying flowers herself, on this day of hormonal irresolution, in this season of throttled attraction, in that hour, that long unforgettable hour, that hour of unfeeling, unfeeling this and that.

art url - here
art title - Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)
courtesy - The New York Times
find out more about Virginia Woolf

Globally warm, locally frozen

It is 3.15pm soaked mercilessly in a blazing sun and all that the stretch of my parched capacities allow me to think is whether it was the sun that’s gotten bizarrely hotter than ever or the ozone that's drilled irreparable.
Whatever the case, I have just attended to my compulsive shopping urge and I am comforted by the sight of shopping bags strewn across every appendage of my body. I watch my shopping bags.
Patent leather shoes - A carcass of a cow, probably named Laxmi, reared & revered, to be skinned after or before she died, slaughtered either way - Rs2500; Lycra jeans - Manufactured in a communistically dilapidating factory in Argentina amidst an impending insurgency - Rs2000; A B&W shirt - Printed in a dark, constrictive room by pre-adolescent children, particles of cotton settling inside their lungs with playful levity, something they should rather be chasing - Rs1800; Marc Jacobs perfume - CFCs suspend like helium balloons and explode like atomic bombs - Rs2500.
And like a habitual ingrate, I complain about the cruel summer, the endless traffic jam, the choking smoke and recessive consumerism and I watch a beggar-child sneak around my cab. I expect an imploring, shabby hand but I see a bunch of 5 carnations there instead. Strikingly natural (because they were somewhat wilted?). Their serrated petals curling away from the heat. Rs15, she tells me, extravagantly.
I look away like I am taught to. While she stands there endorsing those 5 carnations, all of them a greenish hue of a disobeying yellow. Taking a chance on insensitivity. On insecurity. (Flowers??? They are embarrassing!)
While the sun keeps scorching outside, the exhaust of my cab keeps emanating fumes and frustrated faces keep spitting their spites, I sit with my trinkets of abnegations, looking away from those orbs of birth. I sit there in defiance holding on to my shopping bags.
And she stands there taking a chance on hope.

Art title – glicee/lithograph depicting carnations

Artiste – Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS

url - here

Afloat in stillness

He stared at the picture frame next to his bed with a blank assessment. The long of his smile felt like an achievement to him now. Now that it felt like it had been an eon since the last his lips curled in a rapturous suggestion. He has woken up from a sleep painfully induced by blinders. It was the subliminal kind of a sleep. The kind of sleep that keeps you still attached to the transpirations of your surroundings so much that you can tell the moon’s reflection ebbing on your face. He could see the toilet seat from where he lay detached to the vigor of a new day and remembered how he had flushed his pet fish last week. Her mouth permanently gaped with what must have been hours of battlement. Fins billowing in the water with a pseudo-life. Her color a moribund yellow, her eyes wide open and accusatory.

He wondered over the ease of the concept of the ‘flush’. A lever pulled down, a whirlpool of water swirling you downwards, pouring you into the purgatory until you get deposited into a scum of remains, only to be propelled towards the ocean where you eventually disintegrate. Maybe that’s what eventually does happen to all of us, he thought. How much he longed for that flush now. Ease. The kind of ease he felt when he had that synthetic tasting chinese directly from the foil every night for dinner.

He felt so unable to set himself in motion, to join the glorious madness on the street outside that once you become a part of is strangely soothing. He always had difficulty getting past this inability. It was like a clasp-knife, once the initial resistance was gone, it just flings out. At work, in that cubicle with out-dated, moribund yellow post-its and the keyboard with dusty crevices, it felt nice. The self-inflicted, self-proclaimed and self-defined kind of nice.

He played operatic music every night, loudly, to sap the million thoughts running through his head when all his enforced industries seem to run out. This baroque was the only ostentatious feature of his day, otherwise marred with trite monstrosities. When Giovanni’s motet surged to its highest crescendo, there emerged an ethereal numbness inside his head, disconnecting and disentangling him from the discordant orchestra he always heard around him. He tried memorizing and replaying it now, to fight the non-buoyancy of the bed that he was sitting, staring at that bafflingly cheerful picture. Awake but not really. The kind of awake that is more detached than being dead.

Flush, he thought.

art title - Floating In Blue, oil on canvas
artiste - Peter Arnold
url - http://www.artofpeterarnold.com/img/s/s-005.jpg