wake up babe
new metaphor for having a life-changing breakdown just dropped
this week’s Thought (singular)
jack of all trades, master of one (i got my degree)
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they find the prettiest blouse for their saree. thank you for joining us. may you not have to go to several shops, panic about not being able to get it altered in time, worry about alternatives, etcetera.
a very warm welcome to old readers as well. may good sense continue to prevail.
before we begin
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doing some housekeeping and rearranging around here. the this week’s Song section that’s usually at the end is now media diet - a roundup of everything i’ve watched/read/listened to over the week. happy consumption :D
thank you for all the love on last week’s post?? i truly didn’t realise you all would vibe with it so hard. super nice surprise.
hi
it’s been a while since we had some uncomfortably personal writing here, no?
we’ve been conditioned to impatience, i think. instant gratification, increasingly zero friction, absolute certainty. on living like you know the future, like you’ve always known the future, like every action you take leads to something predictable, like the you you are today is the you you had always planned on being. there is no need to find a firm footing, because you’re always flying moving on your way to the next thing. slowing down is for losers. slowing down stopping restarting sputtering crashing false starting pit stopping investigating where that creaking sound is coming from is for people who can’t fly as fast, or for whom the sky isn’t made. anyway it’s your own fault for spending more time by the side of the road trying to find the right music like that matters more than going farther faster higher look somebody’s overtaking you. you better not stop or something bad will happen you don’t know what exactly but it’ll be scary and awful just trust me you don’t want to find out.
last year i stopped. i was so tired. i was so full of wretched stuttering hope and bitterness, my sheer will couldn’t carry it anymore and it drove my body into a ditch by the side of the highway and gestured huffily at the plumes of smoke rising from under the hood as if to say look i’ve dragged you down this road as far as i could but we’re going to burst into flames and also we can’t even see the road anymore. stop.
so i stopped and i sat inside my smoking car for a few weeks. i cried. i screamed. i watched the traffic on the road next to me and felt like i’d never catch up. to where? with whom? it didn’t matter. i was being left behind. i was being left out.
getting my car to start again was a matter of negotiating with the very same will that had veered me off course in the first place. i had to wait. i had to plead. i had to bargain - i swear i’ll slow down i swear i’ll find more rest stops i swear i’ll look at the clouds and not drive when it rains and wear a seat belt and stop trying to overtake people in cars that are faster than mine and won’t ignore the blinking red lights and the beeps. my will was obstinate. my will, i think, knew something i didn’t or i had refused to see. my will wanted to save me more than i wanted to save myself.
my will pointed at an offshoot from the road a few metres ahead and crossed its arms and refused to lug my stupid car ahead unless i drove there. there was a fight. there was a standoff between me, angry smoking scared bitter hopeless helpless, and my will, somehow still upright glaring firm. me, saying i don’t know where the road goes, i don’t see anybody going that way, the map doesn’t show it. my will, saying the highway will kill you. if not now, someday. me, debating it anyway. me, saying i don’t know what’s there. my will, saying then why do you think its going to be bad?
fast forward a few months. it’s not bad, but i’m so scared. it’s so scary to have a car that isn’t falling apart - where’s the excuse for breaking down? it’s so scary to be hopeful, fists clenched and eyebrows pinched in resolution. hope is a weapon, and sometimes i think i’m holding it from the wrong end. sometimes i feel like i’m driving it into my own body, blood like a gruesome murder scene shooting out of my gut like a fountain. hope is dangerous, and i’m still trying to learn how to not let it kill me. it looks shockingly similar to grief. no hope on the other road, just blue skies and smooth sailing, baby. if it’s made for you.
i’m always thinking about the other road, about the highway with all those speeding cars. surely it’s easier to just keep going, to keep endlessly accelerating? so much easier to keep moving? i feel the weight of stopping every few metres and checking under the hood. i feel so slow. i’m not flying, and i had gotten so used to flying. it was exhausting, but it drowned out the noise of being a person.
now there’s that mess of Living with a capital L. of caring hoping loving dreaming. god, what a mess. it’s so much to carry, it’s boxes always jumping out of the windows, it’s random pauses by the side of the road to do silly things like smell the flowers or talk to your friends or take pictures of the clouds or sleep under the shade of a tree or pet a cat. it’s cruising for days at a stretch at the slowest possible speed because you’re busy being introspective and doing these new activities like wondering if this is the road for you and introspecting deeply about yourself and your relationships and your feelings and your personhood and pondering if your skinbag holds all your organs properly and how you’d like to express your personality and whether a rule is really a rule or just something that you’ve been taught so there are no pileups on the other road. it’s failing meaning you tried instead of you failed. it’s exhausting and embarrassingly earnest. it’s realising with a jolt that there’s a blinking red light and pulling over immediately and watching your will fix her up as you stand like mister bean checking his watch. my will and i have the same goal now. i’m still learning to let it do its (self-)preservation. no more pleading. no more bargaining.
i hate it. never send me back.
if i crash and burn, it’ll be because i wanted to. i’m tired of flying just because somebody gave me a yoke. i’ll make my own damn yoke, and it’ll be incorrect and misshapen and the wrong colour, and then i’ll make another one, and another one, and another one, and another one, and i’ll keep making new yokes and finding new roads and fixing my smoking car, because i’m still tired but i’m so hopeful that it eats me up from inside. the possibility of a future suffused with purpose and joy makes me mad with desire, so i thank my will and i thank the passengers and pit crews on these new roads, because i’m angry and i’m grateful and i’m Living with a capital L. god, what a mess. never send me back.
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a picture!
media diet
watching - this video of harry styles on brittany broski’s royal court. listen. i indulged in a few minutes of fangirling before i returned to my usual staid and serious twenty-five-year-old self. it’s like i was in high school again. it’s super entertaining, even if you aren’t a fan of styles or broski. i love both, so i had a great time.
reading - started susan sontag’s against interpretation and other essays. it’s been a while since i read heavy non-fiction, so this is a nice challenge. also this essay from The Noösphere.
note: this month’s The Good Side of the Internet comes out this tuesday, so subscribe for more reading recs in your inbox.
listening - Cannock Chase by Labi Siffre
also this album by Hasan Raheem that i decided to check out after i had absolutely DEVOURED Post You from a recommendation. unfortunately no more bangers in the tracklist. Post You, however, remains impeccable. i will never forget how i listened to it on loop on a night bus from jamshedpur to bhubaneshwar in early february this year. it is solely responsible for distracting me from my motion sickness.
find all shared songs here.
english recitation competition
The Sound of Water, Milton Bluehouse II
The night recedes as I prepare to journey toward dawn, towarddreamscapes of memory. Flashes of light across time and place illuminating a run to the ocean and the sound of waves crashing and the tidal repetition of my name being called. Here, before the sound of people racing to an uncertain life, I hear moments in the darkness before the eastern glow lightens dark blue and then finally light blue and the sky and morning star confirm that up until this moment this life has not been a dream and it was true that I’ve seen blossoms fall gently from cherry trees at the slightest change in the sacred wind frozen in time counting the cadence of my footsteps on the graveled path and the sound of my sacred breath, my prayer that other darker memories remain hidden in the night of my soul to be discovered when the morning whispers to me Now you can journey inward to find the child who cowers in fear from lightning and thunder and belts and closed fists.
In this Poem, We Will Not Glorify Sunrise, Sarah Freligh
nor admire the apples that blossom during a February heat wave only to wilt and die in a mid-May freeze. Doom, such a fickle bitch. She’s snow spilling into Reno where planeloads of people sick of winter have gone to gamble in tank tops and shorts. Here it’s seventy-three degrees, warm enough to sunbathe on a Lake Ontario beach. Overhead a jet pirouettes toward the airport fluttering white scarves of vapor: Contrails, kissing cousin to entrails. Mine are glistening and pink as a sunrise except for one rotten spot that’s something to watch in the future. How it always starts for the apple.
Job, Joseph Millar
I’ve just come from walking to and fro in the earth, Satan tells God before they make the wager standing for centuries as metaphor of man’s existence— trapped on the wheel like an insect under a microscope: his disastrous ecology, his ravaged immune system, even his broken-veined, wine-flushed face looking back from the rearview and parked alone by the river. He should have been born with fins, he thinks as the swans arch and preen and attack one another though everyone says they mate for life and the afternoon wind raises welts of sunlight over the torqued and rippling surface and the beautiful ravenous fish.
thank you for reading, and see you next time <3