testing waters

got a little anxious and cannot stop trying to please everyone so here's a test run! just a little reflective thing for now. now is your chance to send me to your spam folder

18th Oct 2021, 21:15

I just applied a mosquito repellent. I feel very kissable right now. Irrelevant and not really connected to each other, but connected to me in ways so that should count right?

Lately I have been thinking I need an audience for everything I do. I mean, everything I am going to tell you could easily be written in a journal. But how will I feel heard? How will I get to assume that you are reading my words and falling in love with me a little? If you’re not, I am okay with you feeling contemptuous in regards to me. As long as there are feelings involved. I don’t think I fully exist until I am an extension of other people’s existence. We all need friends, don’t we? I need friends, admirers, a few people who hate me but still want to come back for more. I just want to be a movie star, the focal point in people’s lives when it is convenient for me. My love for my solitude is something which keeps saving me from this over and over again. I have learnt how to cultivate my loneliness into a barrier between me and bad decisions. But here’s the catch – if I sit with something long enough, irrespective of whether it’s good or bad, it turns into a dead animal in my hands. So I am still figuring it all out, trying to tie it together.

Ultimately, I want someone to take me as I am, beyond these words, despite my wrongdoings, and because of how much I am capable of loving them. But what happens when capacity cannot be translated into action? In this particular sentence, I am talking to you, I know you know who you are – I love you. And I am unable to let you know how much. This inability stems from distance and all the irrational half-crazed thoughts I have about you and your skin. Okay, moving on.

When our scope for love stays stagnant for a long time, when we are isolated from people who are willing to pull us in and then close the remaining distance themselves, we tend to forget what the Big Deal about love is. Funnily enough, we also get way too excited about the ripples caused by tiny rocks. But the truth doesn’t change, rocks always sink to the bottom.

By “we” I mean I, and by “the bottom” I mean my heart. My heart is a rock collector. Patthar dil, Hindi for cold-hearted/heart made of stone, but I am not that – I just like people like that. I have an affinity for them. Hunger hurts but starving works, and what not, right?

How to get rid of this stagnancy, which breeds self-loathing as well as a fear of being seen by someone who is willing to look? You have to take the plunge in the water which has turned murky because of your memories. I was reminded yesterday that one bad relationship does not mean I am bad at them. So I am going to tell you that too. Jump in, and pray someone else follows suite, and dives into your pool of love. Pray, or hope, or wish – ultimately you are just wanting.

I was feeling really anxious today, about my future, about what to do with my small basket of talent and facilities. I kept googling places, universities, jobs, a very silly thing to do; as if I could fix my life with a few google searches. When I was young I had tried putting myself up for adoption using my father’s computer, but a few problems are bound to arise when you are trying to sell yourself to people who live in Minnesota while you’re in New Delhi.

Now I am sitting on this ill-made bed, about to continue reading On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I am leaving you with a line from it – “And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.”

It’s now your turn to find that mediocre but beautiful moment in your life, over and over again. Tag, you’re it.

Love,

Manek Mullah* 

*(the storyteller from Suraj Ka Saatvan Ghoda)