palkon pe sapnon ki agni uthaye

journal / title: on my eyelids i carry the embers of my dreams

Adult Children

You can grow up but never grow out of the shadow that your parents cast on you. The entire span of early adulthood is seemingly spent on trying to figure out how far away from your parents you can plant your feet. It doesn’t help that the concept of home and parents intertwine, making it tough. One bad drunken decision, and you are tempted to call mom back home, wanting to ask her if it is okay to sleep in her bed that night. The bed is miles away, there are no trains available, and you have things and people to get back to. The phone call doesn’t exist. She sleeps by ten anyway.

Adult children take pride in being aware of the fact that they learnt from their parents’ mistakes. The person who learnt was a child, still unaware of the world and the cost of freedom. The mistakes are the tax attached to the experience of living. So adult children make mistakes that are a variation of what they have witnessed as collateral damage, and they chide themselves in private – dignity is learnt and wished of throughout life, and it is the smallest pleasure one can give oneself.

The years pass, but the months and dates remain the same. You might not be in 2012, but it will be November yet again. This is something my father taught me, November of 2012.

Joan Didion talks about her daughter extensively in Notes To John. The book felt like a guilt trip; I should not be reading this. She is dead. This was her life. How much sympathy is going to undo the effect. Too late.

There was a phrase in it that stayed with me. “An extremely delicate negotiation.” That is all it is. Life. Adulthood. Being somebody’s child while trying to be somebody else’s lover. Being the person you always wanted to be, but that idea keeps changing. It is not 2012 anymore. But the year is ending. Time for change.

In The Dream House

The dreams have taken up on their sentience too willfully now. The dreams have realised they resemble a house more than a thought, and I have no choice but to enter that space each night.

I have longer, black hair, and I look a little different. I look beautiful. I am back at my school, from years ago, an elevator where my last classroom used to be. My best friend from a past life is there. We enter the elevator, and it is free fall. I suffered a miscarriage. I tell nobody. I sit on the school bus, I am older now. The bus takes me somewhere. It is cold. My parents are in every dream I see. They seem to uncover new things about me. Things that are inherently a part of me, but still new to them. The dream door opens, something guides me outside. Tells me to come again. I have no choice.

Love

While I wait for the vegetables to simmer, I do the dishes. While the milk boils, I put sugar and coffee in the cup. While I wait for the auto, I light a cigarette. Everything is a response to the Other, an act of waiting. And all of it is a show put on to fill the minutes while love is in the back. I will be patient. I will wait. I take things. I sleep. I enter the dreams and forget about the wait. But fortunately, time keeps on passing in the real world. I wake up on my bed; the light has shifted more than I have in the past fifteen hours. Love is closer now; I can feel it. I tell myself these things, not to listen to the other possibility.

Pretending that we’ll meet

Each time I turn a corner, I walk a little faster

Pretending life is sweet

‘Cause love’s around the corner, I walk a little faster (Fiona Apple)