Time to collect those stories

As the smoke from my cigarette blows away in the wind billowing from the open door, sheer darkness of landscape whoosing by, i cannot help but go back to three months ago when i was on the exact same train. Leaving behind the familiar, heading towards moving on.

Life was a different saga back then!
Today, even the same people feel diffrerent. Amusingly, every time i pay attention to the incessant, soothing rhythm of the chanting train, i cannot help but marvel at perspectives, or the lack of them. That lone house by the tracks, with one little lantern lighting up the verandah? Reality checks often come in forms unapprehended!

These three months have passed in the blink of an eye. I've barely seen as many me-s in the last three years, as i have in the last three months. Each time, with a new realization, each time, holding fast a little tighter, hoping to not stumble and make a fool out of my resplendant self. And in that i perhaps bargained for a little more than what i actually deserved. Coherence. I remember thinking at one point, that it would have been a priviledge. I have only recently,  and yet again, learnt that privileges also carve out a nook only when rightfully claimed!

Exactly three months later, as i head back, once again leaving familiarity and fondness behind, I'm a little more prepared to meet the dreary, hostile city at the other end of the train. A little more awake, a lill less apprehensive.  A little more motivated by the light at the end of a tunnel. Or perhaps, just by the thought that this is yet another passing phase. In a month's time, i will merely be reminiscing, perhaps while smoking lazily on a mountaintop, looking out into the endless vistas. Or perhaps when I'm battling to not lose focus during a session of particularly bad sex.  It all will become a new set of drunk stories, itching to be retold.


Priorities,  prioties, my lill princess. Remember, self preservation is paramount?

Bring it on, you dreary city; I may still not be ready for what i am expecting, but this time, I am at least expecting.  Well then,  it is time to collect those stories.
 :)

May love find and keep you

The train has finally picked up speed. The soothing, rhythmic motion has overcome the inertia. It has taken me months to get here. To even get to this place where writing about this does not feel like a call for attention. A superfluous attempt.

Leaving is not new to me. To those that stay, leaving is always a means of escape; those that leave will always tell you that they had to. Without debating the truth of either, leaving is perhaps the toughest call you will make. Inertia will perhaps truly characterize each of those baited-breath moments before you leave. You will wait for something to happen, something that will goad you into action, or inaction, or anything. Then you will leave. Sometimes, so that you can come back, content that you left. Sometimes, so that you can find new shores. Sometimes simply so that you can leave.

I leave a sizable chunk of my life and a done up apartment behind in Kolkata today. For the first time in years, I knowingly wanted to keep alive a thread of attachment in the lanes I’m forgoing for another. An apartment that is set up as home. For those who wander to find home, will always want to keep whatever semblance they can find of it.  Going through life and my older posts sometimes makes me chuckle at my own search. Perhaps the knowledge that there is one I can call my own is a comfort. Perhaps it is only another throbbing thread of attachment kept alive for the one place I’ve always come back to; or wanted to. Time and again.

As life tossed everything I knew to be true and over time grew familiar and comfortable with, in the course of a few bad months and a few more worse instances of inertia, some that were mine, some that I took upon myself, the only realization that has stayed is that of self, and that it is to be valued and preserved over all else. Time tests everything. And many that you thought were failsafe will fail. Some, quite to your surprise and distaste. You will mourn the loss; you will then, at some point again, pick up the pieces and build new forts and cities. Inertia is only a static state of being; a stagnant one at that. New chapters and new stories will demand telling. And you ruffle through the pages before you move on to the next chapter. But move on, you will. To the next halt. And then another!

:)

As I leave, here’s to the memory of that inertia. You did me no good. But without you, I would not again so badly have welcomed the restlessness. Here’s to each of my friends who became and to each that didn’t stay; you know who you are. Here’s to all those bonds I unmade over the last few months, here’s to the few new ones I made. Here’s to the life I lived and loved and here’s to the new one I’m about to embrace. Here's to all the times I stayed, and all the times I packed up and left. Here’s to all those posts in my drafts that did not make it, here’s to this one. 

May love find and keep you!  

Paradoxes. As they exist.

“Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned; leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots.”

Paradoxes. As they exist.
As though life was inevitably designed this way. To go through the motions of the crests and troughs endlessly, indulging in each, then absolving each.

The gaping hole in the ground, that once was held together by the roots, then ascertains a new identity. Soon, the storyteller will fill it with his own stories.