Burning the midnight oil and assorted notes.

11:30 pm on a Sunday night. Working on PhD.
Relief from the tedium comes from:
Road noises (rickshaws - someone is going home on a peaceful eveing),
Passing traffic, (especially trucks - someone else is working, and harder than me)
and an orchestra of crickets in the garden (the magic garden, is alive and awake with song always).
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M.
Miss him.
More than anything, anywhere.
Studying be damned (no!). I hope he comes online. I could stay up all night talking to him even if I was dropping with exhaustion. And right now he is just home from taking pictures up the river. God, I want.
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Energy: Where is mine gone??
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Shopping at your favourite store: Is overrated, especially if you're doing it with a grumpy mother. (Who this time, did not tell me to turn around and walk away - but instead, almost did it herself. I think we shall avoid shopping together as a mutually enjoyable potential activity and practice macing each other in the garden instead. Still, love her.)

I can't seem to stop today.

Here's another one.

Is this greed?

I came from the greatest love story I know.
And I want to equal it in my own life.

It's not enough that it's already in every cell, every drop of my physicality comes from the something chemical they share.

I want to recreate it.
Would this be too much of a good thing for one human being? To start and end with cosmic love?
Or perhaps once you start like that, it's always with you, but in much more intangible sense than I would like.

And is it even possible?
Does like attract like, or do opposites attract?


I have no doubt whatsoever about the authenticity of the beginning.
This is true, even if it is the only true thing I will ever stake my life on: My mother and father are every great love story, sung and unsung. With all the glorious pathos, all the reverberating passion and every drop of sacred bliss.
I came from this.

There is nothing cliche about this.
Whatever they are (and they are so much), they are not superficial in any respect. They're the real thing. I've watched them. Objectively and not. You can't help but be moved. It takes a certain degree of deadness to be immune to their glow. You'd have to be the sort who can sit on the edge of a storm and as it dances around you, do your nails instead of exault and play in the wind.
I am not the second type of person.
Possibly because of them.
(Thank you, guys. Thank you.)
The effect does not dull with exposure. It sharpens. Isn't that a good indication that it's the real thing? It gets better as you go along? It is always different, yet unchanging, always surprising, yet full of comfort. It is always moving.

Now.

As to what the end will look like.
One approach would be:
You already seem to be on your way! Look what's sitting on the other side of the room as you type this! The Man! And you're capitalising the M.!

The other would be:
You cannot know.
This scares the living daylights out of me. I would prefer if it didn't. But it does.

I muse, therefore I am.

When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.

-Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist.


I remember when I first read this book. Cover to cover on a friends' bed in boarding school. Possibly the darkest time of my life so far, with the promise of happiness a very very faint glimmer far below the horizon. I'd like to think that this was one of the most beautiful things I encountered that year. And I didn't know it then, but I'd read and re-read this many many times in my journey from then to now. And I'd use it as a float, as a foothold in the rockface. As a tiny flame, trying to light a big enough fire to burn away the cobwebs, the dust, the rot that boarding school put into me. (Yes, it WAS that bad. No,I would NEVER do it again. Yes,I am glad I did it once. But once was f.ing enough.)

And having read it a hundred times since, and looking back from then to now, I can see crystal clearly, that it has not 'replaced' my thinking (I've always disagreed with that phrase. It neglects completely neglects how fluid the mind is), it has certainly given me a lens I would not have used before.

And that is:
If this is happening, forget for a second how uncomfortable it feels and ask yourself: What has made it happen? Why am I here, is there some magic I need to extract from this? This 'thing' is pushing me deep down, but can I use it to climb higher up? Can I, in other words, become an alchemist turning anything I can think about into gold?
Is alchemy simply understanding + imagination?

Hmm.

Bulleted list of recent bullet holes.

• He hates Monsoon Wedding.

• He will probably hate India.

• In fact, he will probably not want to even give it a try.

• He hates poetry, art, painting. He thinks they are pretentious.

• He does not believe in God or spirituality or the power of beauty (all synonymous in my head, but please don't ask me how I arrive at this stellar conclusion.)
  

• He hates people. And coffee shops and expensive coffees.
  

• Fashion, and inky skies after dusk and people-watching and wild dancing and noise and wildness. Saris the colour of sunsets and roses behind the ear. Colour and madness. All are lost on him.

Fuck why am I here, fuck fuck fuck fuck why am I here.

Fuck, I love this man? And he loves me?

• Oh and don't get me started on some of the things that come out of his mouth:
  

- "I will not fight for it."
- "God, why do you need to be happy?"

Fuck fuck fuck.
Shot if I stay, shot if I don't.
Fuck fuck fuck