For when I ramble.

30+, they/them, lowkey highkey ia

[between-hurting-and-healing]

Lightyears in Time and Not Distance*

*Not a scientific commentary on the way we use words, I promise

How long does it take to fall in love? It’s a question I find myself asking really often - and a question I don’t really seem to be able to find the answer to. There are love languages and a million articles about love out there and there’s so much everyone has to say about the ways we love, the moments we fall in love, the things that were said and the things left unsaid, but I don’t think I’ve gotten an answer on the number. If the clock keeps ticking and we all experience love in a myriad of ways that’s unique to us, surely, I should be able to quantify that number and say, “On average, this is how long I take to fall in love.”

“On average, a mammal takes about 21 seconds to pee.” We have the answer to a question I don’t think most people thought to ask - certainly not the question posed by the average mammal, and yet. And yet this is an answer we have, and yet this is knowledge that I can’t erase from my head (and now you can’t either, and you’re welcome). But ask the same people who won an ignoble how long it takes to love, and they can’t answer it. Maybe I’ll win one for this in the future. That’d be nice.

I’m a researcher. I like numbers, I like data that flows, that makes sense to me, things I can put into neat little slots - and this means I’d like to this to my feelings too. Numbers have long been used as a tool of oppression by many and that shocks me, because if all I have in my hand is a tool that’s been used to slot and delete and discriminate, is it going to do any better in my hand? Are these numbers I want to be looking for? Am I any different? I have a lot of questions but a lot of ways of getting answers seem wrong and reductive and I don’t know if the sum total of the human experience can be reduced to this. But also know that I’m not trying to achieve this - I’m trying to make sense of things the way I best know how. 

If you spend your entire life reducing your experiences to keywords and numbers for filing away, it easily becomes a pattern of processing that occurs to you without prompting. And I’m fine with that, for the most part. Or at least I’d like to think so. Injured X times in my childhood, hit my head Y times, felt like running away from home Z times. Stands to reason I try to slot everything else in manners that meet specific criteria that allow for specific forms of existence. I did this when I wondered if I was ace and wanted to know if I was ace enough to adopt the title. (This was four years better and I know better for myself and for others but when your patterns of thinking are so set, you really don’t know how to unravel them.)

Sometimes you don’t want to? I think that’s true of me too. If I unravel the only pattern of thought I’ve known all this while, what does it mean for me to be able to consider any alternative in its place? I don’t know how. It’s like picking up a research tool you’ve never used before, just assuming you know the process and the mechanics and hoping for the best. Researchers are supposed to thrive in uncertainty, it gives them greater access to the fertile lands of sowing questions and caressing, coaxing, cajoling answers out of barren spaces and while I can do that with most other things, I find it difficult to extend that infinite patience to myself.

So I keep asking this question of people. And I keep not getting answers and not knowing what to do with myself. Because if I have no chances of getting the answers and all the chances to fall in love, I won’t know what to do with myself. Directed emotionality is confusing to me because why would you - anyone really - consciously make the choice to direct any emotion in my direction? What does it for you to not know my flaws and love me? What does it mean for you to know them and continue to love me? When do you leave? What makes you choose to stay? Answers to these questions would help me make a frantic mindmap, a schedule, a calendar list of events that I would need to go through in order to fall in love, stay in love, fall out of love, and everything in between. But I don’t have that, and I don’t know how to, and sometimes that scares me.

I get that life doesn’t come with the neat blueprint I expected and I’ve come to accept that - but that a small facet of it, love in any form goes right now really - the fact that I can’t answer that really wounds my pride. I can’t keep falling in love and sort of hope it’ll make sense along the way - I’ve tried that so far and it hasn’t been working. False and true positives, true and false negatives, I’ve sat on all of those quadrants and I still haven’t found a way to quantify the experience in a way that lets me sigh and go “Okay, this is the result of hypothesis testing” and people keep telling me that’s a good thing that I don’t have the answers, but is it really? They keep telling me to stop looking and just be and let the experience wash over me, but critically, that hasn’t worked in my favour in the past and I have no reason to believe it’s going to start doing so now.

Engaging with my idea of love means engaging with a lot of doubt. I’d like to someday believe that people can love me despite all the doubts, despite the niggling thoughts in my head, despite my body and my mind wanting different things, despite my body occupying a different space of gender than the inside of my head, despite my antidepressants culling very specific emotional responses in me, despite this, despite that. But I don’t know if it’s fair to ask that of anyone. Why would they compromise? What do they stand to gain from my reductivism?

I’m not sure there are ways to ask these questions that don’t sound dismissive and like I’m incapable of love, but I promise it’s not that. It’s that I worry that I’m doing it wrong, and maybe if I had signposts telling me what to do at specific stages along the way, maybe I’ll do it right. And maybe I won’t disappoint and maybe I’ll be enough. But I don’t know. I can’t test. I can’t tell.

I tried to make the question one of grandiosity instead. How long would it have taken for the Universe to fall in love with the Earth? In the scale of things, I’m as insignificant on Earth as the Earth is in comparison to the Universe, so maybe these metrics are useful. And even in my most reductive times, I realise that the Universe probably fell in love with Earth as a process - a process of closeness and slowly drifting away and expanding till love could occupy the vacuum created between them. And maybe I should try that too. And maybe this time it won’t take five billion years, and maybe it won’t make sense on a cosmic scale, and maybe I never get that ignoble after all. And it’ll be okay.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

My heart aches at the fullness it felt after discovering your perfection. There had been many like you before, but none this recent - and none this foreign. I was never foolish enough to think not being home meant nothing remotely close to home, but there were parts of home I had brushed aside and locked away in deeper parts of my mind, perhaps having lost hope that I could ever find something like it. I don’t think I knew how much my heart yearned for those parts of home till I went back (as frequently as I did).

Food had never been an important part of my growing-up experience. I loved most food that had flavour, and growing up where I did meant there was an abundance of flavour no matter what I ate. At times, I grew up as a creature of habit - never fussy enough to reject variety, but never adventurous enough to crave it either. As long as I ate something at the times I expected to eat something, I think I did mostly okay. My family didn’t particularly try too hard to bond over food. When it came to places, I held some of them in reverence for their ability to make a particular kind of food, and while they were embedded clearly in my memory, they didn’t form a part of my agonizing remembering process.

I think things began to change when I moved away from a place I called ‘home’. Moving often enough had ensured that I didn’t root my idea of home neatly into a specific cultural identity where I Belonged. Or so I thought till I moved to a place completely foreign to me. There, I think, I could have compared parts of my idea of home-ness closer to a dandelion being blown in the wind, really. Coming apart bit-by-bit, but never as dramatically as in the movies. There were still parts of home that clung on stubbornly till a final, extremely strong gust of wind would blow them away - a gust that thankfully never came. I think part of that stubbornness also meant I started associating those aspects of home more deeply with what it meant to have Home with me wherever I went. Food became those stubborn florets that formed part of my internal cultural resistance.

I’d always assumed that coming back home would mean that things snapped back in place, mostly unchanged, and for the better part of a year, when I stayed home, it had seemed so to me at least. Perhaps I got a little louder about ideas of home, perhaps I wrote a lot more about it, but that didn’t mean much had changed, did it? At least not when it came to food - then there was some craving, and now there wasn’t. I didn’t notice how formative food was till I moved again, somewhere not-too-close-but-not-too-far. 

Once I moved I noticed that there was a constant (almost visceral) hit of what I tried to refer to as My Food. If it erred even by a little bit, it wouldn’t do. It had to be perfect. Even as I held food close to me by these standards, I was aware I was being hypocritical because there was no way these standards were constantly upheld wherever I went back home. But as is the case with hypocrisy, those were easy to dismiss. Cut to present day, it was a constant rejection of a certain brand of food that I deemed as not-good-enough, not-right-enough, not-evocative-enough, until today.

Today, I discovered you. And somehow, all of it felt like art clicking into place, like one finally understanding what the artist is trying to communicate through their work. It’d been ten months of hunting for something that always managed to feel not-quite-right, and ten months of that rush of expectations followed by mild happiness that still managed to be tinged with some disappointment. It was great, but never just... right, until you came along.

Gentle and crisp at the same time, you looked up at me and I felt as though I was being blinded just a little. Like the sun was shining at me from a different direction and I didn’t know how to deal with it. You were coloured like the sun and the sand I was so familiar with too, hues of browns and reds that I would associate with the sun settling down for a nap in distant lands that I couldn’t even think of reaching. You were unassuming in a way things with great power occasionally tend to be, unaware of all the emotions you were stirring in me. Today was one of those rare days food felt right and perfect and like it could be an experience to eat. And for that, I am thankful to you.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

some days such as today, it’s really difficult to see the bright side of things and to focus on the positives and to smile my way through the pain - today was a long, extended grimace and sometimes we need days that let us do that and that’s okay. i don’t know where i can talk about my identity and associated ideas without it becoming too much for most people who didn’t sign up for this internal commentary of the state of affairs of a consciously anxious brain, but I know some days i don’t feel like myself. today is one of those days it’s beginning to feel like my identity is linked to this flesh prison that i associate with myself and it’s been extremely difficult to look past it. not feminine enough, there’s too much hair too much ugliness just not enough femininity for that. not masculine enough, i present as female and so that must mean i am except i’m not some days i’m just NOT and it doesn’t matter how i look or how i sound sometimes, me saying that should be good enough for you. not tall enough to be staturely, not short enough to be cuddly and cute. i’m not athletic enough, skinny enough, curvy enough to really stand out and most days i just feel like a genderless blob trying to make sense of the world around me and most days i don’t really want to stand out because that would mean i’d have to acknowledge myself as existing and i don’t want to do that. there’s rare occasions i do though, and i wish i was perceived as more than a blob, more than somebody who could just be disembodied voice somewhere and still be recognised, i wish there was a uniqueness about me that wasn’t just body art and wasn’t just “oh your hair looks nice today.. i guess”. i wish i was that right kind of sharpness and that right kind of softness - you know, the one everyone approves of - and didn’t constantly feel all wrong, like a sculpture project that somebody gave up on that got a C– for an attempt maybe. and i know this feeling will pass tomorrow because i have enough to worry about and do for this to last for too long. i do wish i knew this feeling was creeping up on me sooner though, and i wish it wasn’t associated with something as simple as standing in line at a sports store to try on a pair of shorts just a little higher than i usually might have. and i wish i could shut it down. but it’s okay. breathing today feels slightly more unnatural and that’s honestly exhausting, but maybe i’ll sleep soon and wake up and breathe normally again. reset.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

(Chennai-5)

Reading you – knowing you

feels like a task (though never a chore)

that I would happily leave behind

for greener pastures.

No offence, of course,

I just get skittish the moment I become aware

that I am comfortable.

And that's sad (and a little bit pathetic)

and I swear it's not you, it's me.

You've held me

(but never held me back)

and I'm thankful for that, really

but you hit too close to home

(and that's not even the terrifying part.

The fact that I actually call something home, is)

and so, I must go.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

(Chennai-4)

lighthouse

“ˈlʌɪthaʊs/

noun

a tower or other structure containing a beacon light to warn or guide ships at sea.” I don't think I credit you enough for the work you've done.

I wasn't quite lost,

because lost would imply there was some direction to begin with.

I was probably closer to driftwood:

lackluster, lackadaisical, just... lacking. I stumbled upon you like I stumbled upon every place I briefly settle in

but you were the first to anchor me to a place.

So now I sway within your confines

and learn from them too.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

(Chennai-3)

My strongest memory at Umapathy street

was probably my weakest moment there.

I fell in the space between two beds

and though stuck, I laughed.

I laughed like there was nobody watching

(and there was)

and I call it weak because I fell,

my constant “Ow”s making the household snigger

barely restraining their mirth or their concern,

both equally beautiful.

I think about that moment and really,

They laughed and I laughed and we all laughed,

and how long has it been since that happened?

(Too long)

I miss the sound of their laughter

(now hidden behind their frown lines).

Sometimes

I think I miss the sound of mine.

And maybe that makes more sense as a moment of weakness.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

So I did a quick... sketch(?) thing of the quote my blog's URL is based on. Thank you, Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Thank you, AriDa. (Thanks, Yellow, for working your fine-tuning magic on this photo!) “Had I been hurt? Had I been healed? Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.” - Benjamin Alire Sáenz

[between-hurting-and-healing]

(Chennai-2)

Marina beach and mushroom soup

feature heavily in my favoured choice of mornings.

They're not filter coffee

and perhaps they needn't be.

Filter coffee is for bitter comforts

and unyielding routines in the face of abject terror.

Filter coffee is what I need

to face the unknown

and everything else.

Marina beach and mushroom soup are meticulously planned surprises

for brightening up mornings like

the rays of the sun that hit the prism (Delta, I swear) tattoo on my wrist

and create the rainbow inside of me.

(Friends, is the sunrise a little gay?)

Marina beach and mushroom soup are

a little like the unknown themselves:

everything and nothing all at once,

a little more salt than necessary,

but by God, so beautiful.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

(Chennai-1)

I know some streets in Chennai like the back of my hand.

I grew up on them

running errands for second-home-and-third-home

in the sweltering heat

that naturally accompanied summer vacations.

I never thought Chennai would actually be home someday:

the repetitive nature of my escapes to the land

had only established patterns of hug and leave  

and later, breathe and leave.

There's no complaints,

just a few questions,

and a spot that needs filling.

When did Chennai become home?

What is home-away-from-home now? And

could you take that spot instead, please and thank you.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

To know water is to know me.

Time decides

if I reflect or absorb light.

Time decides,

if you ever get to know what lies under my murky depths.

I decide,

if all I present to you is going to be an illusion,

refracted, and a little bent out of shape.

I am too much and too little all at once:

held in the right hands,

I can be the world.

But I decide

if you ever know water

or know me.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

Sometimes​ I want to rename seasons so they can feel real to me. (As if the mere transition between seasons isn't real enough. Arguably, but I live in a land where the only seasonal differences I know are because of fashion collection​s and sales.) * Summer, or the time of unforgiving insight about my own self. (As if this insight isn't blocked out immediately. I suppose, but I live in a space where it's easier to put up walls that block me from me, where there's no mirror images staring back.) * Monsoon, or the time of washed-up sorrows that are sent back to the skies. (As if these sorrows don't first drown out anyone who might survive to tell the tale. Possibly, but I live in a time where it's good enough to hold on while still being rusty, and isn't it just great that I learnt to swim when I was younger?) * Autumn, or the time of fallen regrets that I crunch into the ground. (As if the mere act of crunching erases them from existence. Possibly not, but I live in a time where it's enough to acknowledge my fear and metaphorically crush it, and I just so happen to love crunching​ leaves and I am enough.) * Winter, or the time of the consortium of unintended pain. (As if the association between different parties that cause pain can really be anything but complicit and very intentional. I suppose not, but I live in a space where it’s easier to think about everybody and nobody in particular, and maybe everybody was complicit in the pain but nobody in particular intended for it to happen - it just did.) * Spring, or the season that breaks syllable counts and forces me to grow.

(As if - Arguably not.)

[between-hurting-and-healing]

“I'm glad it wasn't a Clean Break between us. I know people say it hurts less, but I was bursting at the seams with my emotions for you, and you got rid of them bit by bit till I could manage the emptiness we created. Now, I'm back to bursting at the seams with no room for you, so thank you for helping me break This (Us) so I could build something I am proud of (Me).”

— Thoughts on creating tomorrow with the remains of a past I don't often deal with

[between-hurting-and-healing]

The more I think about it, the more I resent you.

Resentment for those who've wronged me doesn't come to me naturally,

so really,

congratulations on that achievement. You must be so proud.

I have a lot of trust in my heart that I hand out more freely than I should,

and you took it, and with that, a piece of my heart.

I also hand out pieces of my heart more freely than I should,

though that usually makes me feel fuller, like this piecemeal approach to it

somehow

makes the sum of the parts greater than the whole.

So you took both and battered them for so long

the pain of their loss was part of my resting state,

almost like a weight I've carried for so long that letting go causes me to sway on my feet

from the sudden of lack of gravity.

Thank you for that.

I still trust too easily,

and I'm so glad you couldn't take that away from me.

Because if I can still trust-and-love-and-feel like I did before you,

the Utter Destruction wasn't as permanent as it felt,

and I think it is a victory

to lie in this space between hurting and healing.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

When I think of flying, I spare a thought for Icarus.

Perhaps that says something about me, 

that the first thing that comes to my mind is that of a fall.

I struggle with flights of fancy, just as I struggle with flying blind

and fight-or-flight situations.

It’s easier when things don’t take off too soon,

and maybe you feel shackled by the ground,

but I don’t like risking a fall from great heights.

And maybe that means I prefer being tied down (or held back).

It feels more... grounding.

You prefer soaring, and love the wind beneath your wings.

I suppose it’s ex-hi-la-ra-ting:

I wouldn’t know.

All I know is that looking at you feels a lot like

the silver lining in a cloud,

and maybe that just means you’re better suited for the skies,

and me?

Maybe I’m better off on the ground.

After all,

you’re better venerated from a distance.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

I remember you telling me you didn’t think flowers were a great gifting idea. “Give me art,” you said. “How could I possibly find the now-dead remains of plants that maybe served some reproductive purpose even remotely endearing?” I don’t think I had an answer to your question that was not laced with laughter.

And while I can’t give you answers, I can give you art. It just so happens to be that giving you art is so much more terrifying than giving you flowers, and that feels that much more right. It’s like I woke up one morning and said to myself, “How do I gift somebody a part of myself and make myself wholly vulnerable to them?” Think about it a little more, you’ll see what I mean.

Every time I think about giving you art, I clam up because I fear you won’t like it. And it’s easier on me when you don’t like flowers or chocolates or those terrible knick-knacks I find, because we can both laugh about it in the end. My words, however, are infinitely more difficult to part with. When you reject my words, I can feel a physical push that feels a lot like the rejection of my self.

And I suppose I want you around too much to be able to allow that for myself. And so maybe, I’ll give you flowers and maybe you’ll laugh at them, but I suppose flowers can have their stories to tell too - and those are tales that only your gifts and I will share, and maybe these stories will stay inside of me for eternity and that’s okay.

(Is it?) 

And that’s okay.

(I guess it is.)

[between-hurting-and-healing]

The unfamiliarity of conductor anna hit me today.

In a city that feels like home and yet is only learning to be,

I rely on people to make the grounding feel more permanent.

Home hurts more like this, but feels better too.

7 am bus journeys are usually punctuated with the beats of Unfamiliar Music:

I don't need hugs in the morning as much as I need discovery.

7 am bus journeys are also about familiar faces,

I now know that the aunty who sits in front of me gets down at Koyambedu,

and that she has a smile to offer to me,

a smile I've now begun enjoying returning.

Conductor anna knew exactly when I'd get off the bus,

and nods and hastily issues my ticket before I even say the words.

I feel remembered in a rush of people when that happens.

The (non-)answer to “Where are you going?” becomes a source of comfort.

A different bus will take me to my destination today;

for reasons I don't understand, I won't be sitting in my usual spot of the window-seat-of-the-tyre-seat-whose-window-I-need-push-up.

The windows in this bus don't go up.

I had to tell anna where I was going

and breaking the habit was this easy,

but I feel lost at home.

So I'm back to Familiar Music instead,

and maybe, just maybe, I need both hugs and discovery in the morning.

[between-hurting-and-healing]

I look at you and realise you are partly obscured to me. You use your hair as a shield and - and maybe it protects you as much as it protects me - and MAYBE maybe we’re both better off when we can’t see each other completely (I don’t agree).

And you say you need that net around you, like you only see the world right when something blocks what you see, like that imperfection of vision is anything but you-not-believing-you-can-see-yourself-and-still-stand-tall, like you are blind to your own blindness. Squint a little and maybe you’ll see what I see: you think that caging yourself into such nothingness can make you nothing too,

and that isn’t true,

and that it isn’t true isn’t a bad thing.

Squint a little and you’ll see what I see. Darling, what you are isn’t just a veil that’s meant to stay hidden from the world. You are so much more than what jails you,

and that means you are greater than

you.

There is lightning running across your skin and there is lightning under your skin. And that means you announce the arrival of thunderclaps. You boom across the skies and resonate on the lands and are felt in hearts. You strike terror in some hearts and strike longing in others but you CAN strike,

and don’t you EVER forget that.

I (try to) look at your face and I see maps. The crisscross and the chaos you often hide your eyes behind have stories to tell, like the hidden tales in the lost streets of a vast city. I worry about you sometimes, that you hide so much and so often, that like these tales, your stories will soon become forgotten.

You are history and nostalgia and comfort

coupled with

exploration and novelty

and 

the-excitement-of-a-story-unheard. Don’t narrate your story otherwise.

Squint a little bit more (yes-just-a-tiny-bit-more-DON’T-shut-your-eyes) and you will see you are made of ley lines. You see yourself as sharp and harsh and rigid - and you think you’re just a collection of lines that didn’t go as well as planned. You are more than that. Your lines

meet

cross each other

create points of significance

and you’re just the right intersection of ley lines for them to create magic. You are significant and magical,

and that is true,

and that it is true isn’t a bad thing.