I'm feeling more alive. I'm happy to be alive. It will change tomorrow, probably. But I am feeling blessed today. A long way to go still, but that's living.
All This Wondering
'May your trials end in full bloom' - So Far Away / Agust D
Saturday 20 July 2024
Saturday 18 May 2024
Mosaic
Our lives are intertwined. It's been half a decade and I still pray to gods that are not mine. At home, we add green sprouts to our chatpatey, after a relative I don't talk to at all or even particularly like, made it for me. If I come across news about a football club or a footballer, I still wish them good luck because they are a favourite of a partner some years past. I've been meaning to read a book ever since a friend said she loved it and every time I see the book or author mentioned, I remember I need to read it because my friend loves this book.
Black coffee reminds me of another friend. Different comic books are forever tied to different sets of people.
'I am a mosaic of everyone I've ever loved, even for a heartbeat.'
Saturday 27 April 2024
my sweet boys, I miss you
Do you ever think of your pets who are no longer with you?
I think of our dog - our energetic, unruly boy who was unfortunate enough to be stuck in a home where we were ill prepared to take care of him. But he went to a good home, to people who wanted him so I am very grateful. I hope he is happy.
But it still haunts me that we were not good enough. I hope he did not suffer from being far away from us, I hope he forget us. Do dogs forget the people they've known?
And then our sweet cat who was still a very young boy. He went out for his usual scamper around the neighbourhood last April and never returned. Despite looking for him for days and posting online on social media, we were not able to find him.
Then about 10 months later, we got a call from the vet that our sweet boy had been killed in an accident. The most devastating thing was that the accident was just a street down our house. He probably got lost and forgot his way home. It breaks my heart to think of him scared and hungry.
I hope to be a better person so I can take care of my pets better.
Sunday 7 April 2024
your vision blears, you carry your weather with you
This is a story I heard from a friend of a friend.
Usually something to take with a pinch of salt. But I've been watching 'I've been thinking of ending things' - and listening to this story, at that particular time, was just like being hit in my solar plexus.
A friend of a friend lives in a big apartment block. Recently, they had been dealing with a dirty smell permeating the entire apartment block, especially the pathway just outside the apartment entrance. Then one night, the friend heard a big splash. it smelled like urine and feces. The friend screamed at whoever it was. Silence from all around.
A few days later, something similar happened. But the difference now was that the friend realised which apartment direction it was coming from. They stormed over. Banged on the door. Finally, an old woman in her 80s opened the door. Shock and confusion. The old lady apologised. She didn't have electricity and water. So she had to resort to throwing her urine and feces out the window.
It appears the old lady didn't have family to help take of her. so there she is, in her sunset years, struggling to live with dignity. Perhaps achingly lonely. And sad.
The story has a somewhat 'happy' ending. The friend called social services who promised to arrange to bring back utilities for the lady.
But I've been thinking and thinking.
In the movie 'I'm thinking of ending things' everything is crazy and surreal and disturbing. A sort of menace is underlying every scene. I couldn't take it any longer so I googled the movie. The story is about loneliness, deep loneliness, and a fragile mental state. You'll have to watch it to understand what it truly means, I suppose.
I wish I were a better writer so I could encapsulate what the movie is about and how much it scares me.
A a modern horror story.
There's poem in the movie called 'Bone-dog' (apparently it is written by Eva HD).
Read this and ask yourself if you don't feel rattled.
The way it is delivered by the actress is astounding. There's a moment where she looks at the camera while delivering the lines, and it is chilling.
Bone-dog Coming home is terrible whether the dog licks your face or not whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you coming home is terribly lonely so that you'll think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you've just come from with fondness, because everything is worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice-creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return coming home is just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect and made from different material than those you left behind you yourself are cut from different cloudy cloth returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots. Seamy suit of clothes, dishrag-ratty, worn. You return home, moon-landed, foreign the earth's gravitational pull--an effort now redoubled, dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead. You return home deepened, a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of... anyway, you sigh into the onslaught of identical days, one might as well, at a time... well, anyway, you are back. The sun goes up and down like a tired whore the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older Nothing moves, but the shifting tides of salt in your body, your vision blears, you carry your weather with you the big, blue whale; a skeletal darkness. You come back with an x-ray vision, your eyes have become a hunger, you come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone everything you see now, all of it: bone.
Saturday 23 March 2024
Little light
I think about death and dying and life and living. The bane of human existence, of being conscious is precisely this. Not the death and dying or the life and living part. But the thinking and feeling of this undeniable truth.
One more thing has started tacking itself to my unoriginal thoughts - the shortness of it all.
What a fucking shitshow.
Life no longer seems long and endless or whatever I believed it was, previously. Now human beings are fragile, fragile creatures. Like a hummingbird with a little light inside them, flapping its wings for 10 or 20 seconds before suddenly dying, no longer existing, its place taken by dust and light and another hummingbird.
I catch myself thinking these unoriginal thoughts - my unoriginal musings taking me nowhere new, nowhere fun. But in the last few months or maybe weeks, something floated by and brought my boring train of thought to a screeching halt. If life is short and we die and cease to exist before we can fully even comprehend who we are then perhaps our duty is to treat each other well. Or maybe it's just what I must do, regardless of whether it's a duty or obligation. Treat people well. Starting with my family. Treat them better. Hold the light inside everybody preciously.
Maybe that's the point of existence. Not to create something great. Or to enjoy life. Definitely not to be brave and take on whatever shit life throws at us. Maybe the point of existence is to treat each other like a precious little light.
UPDATE: Just a day later, this reached my inbox. Here's the Marginalian/Maria Popova with her deep insights on the same topic.
'You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.'
Saturday 16 March 2024
Sad? Food pics as balm
Feeling a bit down in the dumps.
Looking at what I ate since the beginning of the year helps me feel a bit better. How come I don't have any pictures of our typical rice-veggies-meat-daal dinners???
My fav snack
Wednesday 17 January 2024
trudge
Saturday 30 December 2023
one night in December
think about how life is haunting
how it pricks and pins you
as you struggle
how haunting it is
in its beauty
or is it despair
like a yellowed afternoon
that is both soft and scarred
depending on the memory it contains
do you hold on to life
do you thrash to unwrap it claws off you
what do you do
what do you do
you do not know
you do not understand
all you do
all you know
life is haunting
it haunts you
from the moment you experienced your first heartbreak
you discovered your friends gossiping about you
it broke your heart
or maybe you found your mother counting pennies
and it was a peculiar feeling seeing her stack up those coins
the slight air of helplessness permeating the air
something reared its ugly head
when your lover called you names, not of endearment
the sound of a heart breaking, into twos and fours
Wednesday 15 November 2023
are you doing well?
- Sajjan Raj Vaidya - Hataarindai, Bataasindai
- Jerusha Rai - Barud
- ONE OK ROCK- We Are
- Jannabi - For Lovers Who Hesitate
- Epic High Ft. Tuna - No Different
Sunday 30 July 2023
hello, darkness, my old friend
Monday 27 February 2023
how to be happy
I find myself typing 'how to be happy' - seeking answers on the internet, hoping someone smarter and wiser than me has already found the answer and will teach me.
I don't know what I'm looking for.
I can't manage my stress levels the way the internet tells me I should.
I hate exercising so that's out.
I think I have a good handle on my negative thoughts and typically practice 'good thoughts' quite well but that's got me nowhere.
So, I am back to square one. I have nothing to do but type 'how to be happy'.
There's no answer. No human has found the answer, it seems.
We were all forced to exist. We make do because that's all we can do. Then we die. Death isn't even a relief according to what some people say. Apparently, our consciousness continues to exist in the ether. And that's somehow worse. Floating and floating. Cursed to be aware of everything for eternity.
I'm so glad I don't have a child cursed with the burden of existence
feeling blessed
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