packed days, frustration, and all that's been said and done

humari kahani likhi hui hai

I will die if I make it but I will die if I don't. I'll let this paragraph stay jagged. It should feel frantic. Potential haunts me in the night. Its fangs dug unto my hunchback screw it, I've written that before. Close my eyes. Everything, I'm everything.

Shush little whiny baby, it's alright. Remember the world doesn't revolve around you. When I close my eyes i'm everything. I hold a digicam in one hand and, I'm painting with another, singing war songs shrill and keeping my head low because my eyes are stuck on this movie I'm watching right now as we're speaking. I am the jack of all trades. Could've been better than a master of one but I'm not. I'm mediocre. I'm scared you'll find out I'm not what you signed up for. But hasn't that already been written? Isn't everything written before i pick up my pen? Too little, too frail, and that all my words were accidental. But you bet on me. You bet on me. Bet on me again.

I am the eternal losing dog. Bet on a losing dog.

And if I cannot write better than what I wrote before this, then what's the point? What's the point if I cannot make you feel seen or happy or make you cry? What's the point afterall? Point. A point where everything becomes one. Absurdity. There's a point inside my ribs, i collide and crash into it. I'm one. I'm everything. I'm alive in that point. I'm a void elsewhere. Bullshit. All i come up with these days is bullshit.

The truth is I have not been writing. Not ardently. Not in the way that makes my chest ache with relief. I’ve been tracing circles around the idea of it, like a rangoli. White rice powder, spiraled in symmetrical loops, only to be smudged by the wind or a passing foot. Beauty in impermanence. Art that expects to disappear. The futility of trying to matter.

Am I the art that is disappearing?

Coming up next is slice of life. My speciality. Or is it? I can't stop feeling like a fluke. I am now the girl who said sunday is the first day of the week in a coding class. A dreadful nap in a casket. Stuffed tight with my blanket, tangled with my mother’s. Furry, fuzzy and frightful. We sleep like sisters in an exhausted womb. Somewhere between my elbow and her waist, a chip packet crinkles. Crumbs of cream biscuits munched at after lunch. Set in the half-woken world of nap delirium, messy beds, leftover food, shared warmth that feels suffocating. God, mom, move a little. My leg is falling off.

I rise like the Undertaker — cranky, crusty, cheek slick with drool. Is it mine? What — the attitude or the drool? I knew I shouldn’t have dozed off. रात को नींद कैसे आएगी? How will I sleep in the night? And please don’t tell me it’s after 5 pm. Godawful. But the news channel is already screaming. The same voice, the same fire that's only burning everything that's around it. Reality intrudes violently, crawling on all fours and almost knocking over the peace in my limbs. The television burns while the kettle clicks. My father walks in with half a cup of strong milk tea. His favourite show is on. Entertainment, is it? Does too much pity make you laugh?

So early and I’m already on the edge. Pushed to my max. Throwing up within the walls of my mouth. Embarrassed and disheartened even.

हिन्दुस्तान का ख़्वाब दुनिया के लिए ज़रूरी है  (- Tom Alter) The dream drowns in the depth of my palms. Shrinking, trembling and tucked within hands too frail to reignite the ख़्वाब an indian man saw. The Indian man that was Tom Alter, the same indian man who was white. Two truths can exist at the same time.

कौन खतरे में है? Who is in danger?

नहीं हम नहीं, in my brain i muster up the courage of a young man. हिन्दुस्तान का ख़्वाब. The vision of my homeland. The vision that held everyone, not like a fist, but like an open palm.

"कि सिर्फ तारीखी तज़ुर्बे, संगीत, हमशक्ल ख़्वाब, और हमज़बानी लोगों को जोड़ सकती है, मज़हब नहीं! कभी नहीं!" (- from the movie, salim langde pe mat ro)

The fan creaks above my almost lifeless body like a worn-down nation that's too tired to remain what it was. Or maybe it is this wooden door that imitates the scream of hundreds that suffer while I write this on my phone. I dream of flags, floating, without poles. The central question is no longer just “रात को नींद कैसे आती है?” It becomes: “How do you sleep in a world that keeps waking you up in the wrong way?”

It means watching the country slip into something unrecognisable and choosing not to look away. Mid-dream, or mid-disaster and a pungent after taste. So I wake up with a taste in my mouth again. Not sleep, not toothpaste, not last night’s noodles. It’s the aftertaste of a monologue I forgot to perform. Like I missed an audition in my dream. Again.

I sit up. The fan blades whirl above me like some cheap metaphor I haven’t sharpened yet. I stretch. My arm aches like it’s been somewhere without me. There is noise and darkness like slides taking turns flashing infront of my eyes. But maybe, just maybe, if you stay awake long enough, you begin to see in the dark.

God, I cannot even write slice of life anymore. I'm terrible at what I'm best. Don't fall for it. My shoulder aches like it’s been carrying something I never asked it to hold. My knees are bruised. My laptop is dead. There’s a hairline crack on the mirror and a deeper one on my ability to believe that what I make is worth anything at all. Bah, I'll think of something new.

College. Yes, college.

I sit in this classroom with all of these people and I don't hate it. First times for everything. It doesn't kill me like all the classrooms before this one did. It doesn't matter if I belong. I don't have to anyways. I'm not 16 and belonging isn't everything to me.

I sit next to a woman who came all the way from Arunachal. It was my dream to move out and have my college far away. I wonder if it was hers too. She's pretty, she's regal. A slightly overgrown blunt bob cut. Iron maiden t-shirt with purple skulls on it. Her eyes smile. I wonder what she sees in my face when I turn to her. Is my warmth borrowed from this woman i haven't seen before, who sits next to me and tells me about her little sister like it's an icebreaker? Does she see that warmth too? Does it translate to her as something that's not just an awkward gaze? Does she know it's all hers, all this sunshine and wide smiles?

But isn't everything I am and everything I do borrowed after all?

Learnt my editing skills from scrolling far too long. My art style partly from pinterest and partly from a girl from school who sat infront of me two years straight. My music taste, well that's entirely mine but how does it even matter? Ahhhhhh nothing I say makes sense. The tangents i surf on don't land just like my jokes don't. I'm whiny today. Let me. Let me be.

I'll turn into something new if you hang on for a couple of paragraphs more. Something afresh. I'm burning alive, mid-sentence. And I am like candlight in many ways. I am the candle flame and I am the moth and I am the witness watching it. Blue core. Blue insights. An armour of a hot single-take big breath. A let out that's personal— wavy blazing heat. I am anew now. Now I won't irritate you. Now I'm a saint. The giver. The ever yet so needy.

But it's wrong to want more while it's still raining. Summer was six cokes, three chuskis, and one death ago. Nothing much has changed. Except everything. But I'm still just as avoidant. Still wondering why I cannot make myself listen to all of those songs we used to listen. Still wondering why love felt like suffocation and why my thigh is still bruised.

Fuuuuuuck I'm writing about it again.

The truth is— nothing is wrong. And I don't know how to function when nothing is falling out of place. I don't know how to write unless some unnatural thing is ruining my life on the sidelines. And especially when I'm here, here in my life— the place I've so begged for.

Now do I write about how for as long as I can remember I've had my hands cupped? Or do I write about how when the devil couldn't reach me it made me fail at getting anything and everything I ever wanted or remotely enjoyed the idea of having? Any which way, I must've written about it before. Any which way, you must've read about it before.

So when i have nothing much to offer, I sit with my face in my palms and wonder how terrible it must be to be me or how frightening it must be to be someone else.

Have you heard that one before (or worse, read that one before) ?

I write my wits away. And so I will continue to do for the rest of my life. Blurt out a few words and make it make sense. Season your prose with metaphors only you can understand. Put down the book you're reading no matter how riveting and write something of your own. And write until your words scream like a tidal wave reaching the desolate corners of forgotten legacies.

Write even if the paper bleeds and the blood dries up to breed hundreds of ticks. Write even if the ink catches fire and the smoke fills your house up to the brim until you can't see straight anymore, can't breathe anymore. Write as if only you could. Cheat death if it knocks before you're done writing. And write until the nib breaks.

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Ps. if you've been reading what i write— lmao I'm sorry that you have to read this but I'm trying to get out of a really bad writing slump so here's a messy and all over the place and relatively weaker piece (next time I'll write smn better fs xx)