A little of Remembering and a lot of Forgetting

I try so hard to capture
everything I wish to forget,
     the feeling of your lips-closed and pressed-against mine
     the way your thumb traces circles inside my palm
     the little breath of a kiss in my hair under a hug
     the heavy weight of your head upon my chest.

I try so hard to remember
even as I'm already losing,
     the words of the arguments we've had
     the differences that seemed insurmountable
     the fact that you're stubborn enough to let my b'day pass unwished
     the hurtful things I have done to you and you have done to me

I'm becoming more and more uncertain,
of what I wish to remember and what I wish to forget,
Even as the passing time ensures 
A little of Remembering and a lot of Forgetting.
-h.c

In my own words, I don't think it captures quite the essence of loss I feel constantly. To make myself remember again and again, that we are not together, haven't been for so long, that it is more 'reasonable' and 'sensible' that we be apart. To remind myself that this failure does not confirm that I have lost too much, nor that I am irreparably broken; only that I have failed here and now. Just this once.

Once again, more than my own words, Buddy Wakefield does justice to the emotions in these words. 

There are Rules.

I have rules for everything. Everything. Running in public? Rules. Picking up calls? Rules. Eating alone? Rules. Somebody cancelled on you? Rules. Wearing socks with open toed shoes? Rules. Borrowing socks? Rules. Denim with denim? ahem. No. not unless you're in L.A. and its fashion week and you have a statement to make that people want to hear. Rules.
Everything.
I have these rules because I am slightly obsessive about why things happen, about the things I hate absolutely and will not allow to happen again and about what is good for me and my mental health and what isn't. Not surprisingly, a lot of 'life' isn't.

Image from here.

So here are a few of the rules, mostly related to calling:

1. If you have been a jerk to me at any point in my life, I will not pick up your calls-Ever. I will call you when I am nice and ready for a conversation with you. and on your birthday because I believe social codes exist for a reason and if you stop believing in them, floodgates etc.

2. I will not set you up with my friends. I am not a pimp and my friends are not mine so I can abuse the privilege. I may, on occasion, introduce you to a friend but I will never insist they go out with you if they don't want to. Sometimes, given both your mental states as I perceive them, I will not even introduce you when both of you wish to be introduced to each other.

3. If there are 3 occasions where I call you, and you fail to pick up my call or fail to call back thereafter, I will delete your number so that I never call you again lest I be further disappointed in you. And I will never call you again. except pursuant to Rule#1.

4. If we make a plan and you ditch me for a reason not-nearly-good-enough, I will cancel every plan we make for a considerable time in the near future or alternately, be really late for the plan we do make or alternately, be very vague about when I am free and avoid making plans with you. I know this is extremely childish and juvenile, but I do this because my time is extremely precious to me and to have wasted something that is so precious to me for a reason not-nearly-good-enough is an extremely thoughtless and inconsiderate thing to do. I will only forgive you for this if I really like you and you have paid your dues by being out-weighingly fun.

5. The three strikes rule. I will cease being a good friend after the third strike. I am the sole determiner of whether an event counts as a strike or not. You cannot justify a strike as a non-strike because you are not me. You cannot say that I am unfairly counting an event as a strike because you don't know the rules and to say that I would unfairly use the fair system of three-strikes is in itself a strike.

6. I will dislike you a little bit if you over play the privilege of calling.

I'm Still Dreaming

I've had an unusually busy morning and a fairly easy, lazy day.

I'm doing the Rickshaw Run in August, 2014.  Its all very exciting.
The Plan is to take the entire month off work and just travel a bit. A bit being all the way from Shillong to Cochin-3500kms approximately. Hopefully without any naxal encounters.
The Plan is to drive the autorickshaw myself.
The Plan is to see some beautiful things.
The Plan is to not think about all those disturbing things that we must think about each day. and even those things that we must not, but do.
The Plan is enticing.

You know what happens when you plan big?
Your wallet gets stolen, alongwith your relatively new Driving License.

Of course that happened!

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Anyway. I went to the Zonal Office today for a duplicate license. It'll come home in a week, supposedly.
That is what the cops said about my stuff too. A month ago.

But the Transport Department is a pinch better than the Police Department.
I hope.

I'm still dreaming.

What February felt like.

WE WERE EMERGENCIES

--Buddy Wakefield

A poet

can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.

But tonight let us not become tragedies.

We are not funeral homes

with propane tanks in our windows

lookin’ like cemeteries.

Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.

Let go.

Tonight, Poets, let’s turn our wrists so far backwards

the razor blades in our pencil tips

can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.

Step into this

with your airplane parts

and repeat after me with your heart:

I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hate myself.

Make love to me

like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.Go slow.

I’m new to this

but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping.

I have realized the moon did not have to be full for us to love it.

We are not tragedies

stranded here beneath it.

If my heart really broke every time I fell from love

I’d be able to offer you confetti by now

but hearts don’t break, y’all,

they bruise and get better.

We were never tragedies.

We were emergencies.

You call 9 – 1 – 1.

Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.

Novalis I say. Novalis.

New to me.

I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance
throughout my beings limitless expanse,
Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages
I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past & future ages.
--Novalis


It just feels so personal. So hopeful and so hopeless.
It feels like it should go on to reveal something ...cathartic.

On the cusp of a journey that begins tomorrow. I feel like I am ill prepared for facing certain consequences that must follow from certain acts which began about 3-3.5 years ago. I feel like I had conveniently moved past something which refuses to move into the past.

Here is to setting out on the journey to face the truths of the previous chapter of my life.
It feels appropriate to be reading Novalis right about now, as I enter this phase of 'clearing new land'!

Happy Journey.

Opening 2014

Lessons 2013: 

1. Realization is always a belated friend and when she arrives, it is safe to assume it is too late already.

2. Our fates are sometimes ascribed by our assumptions.

3. Sometimes how people react is not indicative of how they feel at all.

4. Some things we will never learn-like keeping your wits about you. and it is okay.

Resolutions 2014:
I maintain another blog, and a lot of the content here has already been posted there. For the last vestiges of anonymity, I will refrain from simply copy-pasting that list :) more so because this feels like so much more a personal journal entry than that entry which is...public. 

>is everything public...impersonal? is that why a secretive relationship is so appealing? is it that my gold loses luster when your eyes witness it? is it also true of all intellectual property?<

So then, here are the core resolutions of the year:

1. Take offense as you would take salt. a pinch at most, and then to flavour and not as an ingredient.

2. Discipline & Health

3. Footloose in Old Delhi.

4. Pay attention to yourself. Dress with care. You are worth your time.

5. Every Quarter-do something adventurous/exceptional/out-of-the-ordinary/unusual/that makes you smile.

6. Travel. If you can/ when you can/ however you can. Now. When you're young. before you're married. before you have unarguably good excuses.

7. Gratitude. Once in a while, a Big Thank You.

This list is neither adventurous nor too ambitious. It is simply, a To-Do list for this year with reasonable requests of myself.