The night the clock went back

I turned around in bed last night to see the Man curled up beside me, in a deep sleep.  A wedge of streetlight came in through the window and splashed across the foot of our bed, and  the chestnut tree rustled in the wind. Two leaves gone, four, golden summer dropping away one leaf at a time. The clocks went back silently, but I think I woke up at the moment that they did, and saw the timeless things around which the world turns. Golden leaves falling in the wind, streetlight, the fan of a lovers eyelashes.
I took it in, in the half-dark: Time passing, time stopping, time moving backwards. And us standing together within it.

25th December, 2011

Christmas day, 2011.

My father upped and said he wanted turkey, and commanded my mother to get dressed. They had a five-star turkey in five star restaurant with five star company (well - my sister is on good form in five star restaurants as a rule).

The Man and I, on the other side of the planet, are having turkey too -

500 grams for a fiver, so we'll have to work on making it five star.

2011 is rolling to an end.

I got so thrown, so quickly, into such a deep end, it's taken a while to be able to say that I'm getting just about coming up for air. I find myself talking about it in the past tense. That's how I know.

Soon, we'll be at New Years Eve.

I'm celebrating with the Man and a dear friend, come visiting from Belgium, a long silk skirt and a bottle of champagne.

Whatever you're doing, I hope it's magical.

Another Beginning story

One day, a long time ago now, a girl I knew was deciding on what to wear to a houseparty she was going to. She knew the host, but none of his friends, and was going with a small group from university who'd asked her to tag along.
Black silk top, floaty to a fault, and a necklace bought from Goa for all of 100 ruppees, cascading glass beads of every possible colour.
At the party, she met loads of new people, and one boy in particular, a shy, quiet young man in a blue and white stripped shirt, who was in the kitchen cooking. Something about him struck her immediately, but apparently the sensation was not mutual. He carried on cooking and actually had the nerve to not answer when she asked his name.
Unreasonably hurt and suddenly intensely lonely, she disappeared into the garden for a smoke, and then went upstairs to the bathroom to escape everyone. She sat the edge of the bathtub, her heart somewhere in her shoes, staring at the porcelain door handle and feeling on the edge of tears.

Soon enough it was time to leave, and with the light of dawn and the pleasant cackle of drunk friends walking back to campus with her, she forgot all about the boy who wouldn't tell her his name.

But I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.

Six months later, they met at another party, the stars were aligned, each atom was in place and a simple hello turned into a conversation, a kiss, and four years of togetherness.

To be in love, rather than just outside of it, peering in.
Language is deadening and hopelessly clumsy, sure. But underneath clodhopper words that trample across white spaces, there is something sharp and crystalline.
To be in love is to recall the touch of a lovers skin, sitting here in the office, and to be transported in a lightsecond to yesterday (or tonight!), so that you are no longer in the office, the phone is not ringing, the last few weeks and months of thinking suddenly dissolve and that was not the security guard who just locked you in. Fuck.

Tiny things.

• When I woke up this morning, there was a cup of hot coffee by my side as soon as I squeaked, coffeeeee.
• On the computer, freshly downloaded Season 1 of the Secret Diary of a Call Girl. We watched Episode 1 curled up in blankets and crunching loudly on our toast, giggling and kissing.
• A packet of Oreos were folded up near my laptop to take with me so that I can munch on something during this odious, tedious, damned chapter.
• And a second cup of coffee was steaming on my dressing table to keep me company whilst I did my make up.

It's always the small things he does that shows me how he out-classes almost everyone else I know, myself included. There's thoughtfulness, finesse, care, of a quality and consistency that is only just about matched by one or two other people in my life. And on the edges, the roughness of his cheeks in the morning and the tightness of his hug at the door. Those are unmatched by anyone, past or present.

(Yes, of course you are excused if you have to go and vomit.)

Thank you, God, thank you thank you thank you.

To practice:
Shrugging, and saying, Ok, this feels like this. Great. Now carry on. *shrug.

This is not something that I am good at doing. I plan to get very good at it.
Not because I want to turn into a cold hard bitch. Because I want to stay sane-ish through PhD submission, job hunting, making decisions about moving to India vs. staying here, moving with the man vs. moving without him.
The last one, especially. Makes me want to stop breathing.
That will not do.

Sigh

This blog has always been sort of my personal diary, about me and the things I think (shoddily) or notice, but lately it has been turning into a lust-fest (cheekbones) and a corn-factory (wedding vows and teary soup).
I shall change that, though really, is there anyone reading this? If not, why not just type whatever I like!? (Come to think of it, why not just type whatever I like anyway).

Anyway the point I wanted to record was this.
M. came downstairs yesterday evening post-dinner. I was at the dining table wrestling with a bit of proofreading on the laptop.
He wore a deep red kurta that I bought for him at Westside when he came to Pune and flipflops that I bought at Koregaon Park.
When he dresses like this he looks like a social-worker-phirangi-prince.
I am approaching my 28th birthday rather rapidly, so this is perhaps a juvenile thought (hehe) but I would just like to say:

Dear M:
Wear nothing.
Alternate nothing with that kurta.
That is an order.
Love.

From a facebook note. Beautiful bit of script.

Couple fighting, about to end it for good, realising they don't know each other, and trying, last minute, to save themselves:

Mariam, thinking to herself, after she's said the horrible break up words: "... it's not easy being in a relationship, much less to truly know the one and accept them as they are with all their flaws and baggage... It always fascinates me how people go from loving you madly to nothing at all. Nothing. It hurts so much. When I feel someone is going to leave me I have a tendency to break up first to avoid having to hear it all. Here it is. One more, one less. Another wasted love story. I really loved this one. When I think that it's over, that I'll never see him again like this... Well yes, I'll bump into him, we'll meet our new boyfriend and girlfriend, act as if we had never been together. Then we'll slowly think of each other less and less, until we forget each other completely. Almost. Always the same: Breakup, breakdown. Drink up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another. Fuck around to forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness, start again to look for true love. Desperately look everywhere and after two years of loneliness, meet a new love and swear it is the one. Until that one is gone as well.

There's a moment in life when you can't recover from another breakup. And even if this person bugs you 60% of the time, well you still can't live without him. And even if he wakes you up every day by sneezing right in your face, well, you love his sneezes, more than anyone elses kisses."

Cut to: Them dancing, post-fight, laughing and kissing in the street, break up forgotten, and love re-remembered, because "There's a moment in life when you can't recover from another breakup."

Beautiful piece of script.

I am:

Maudlin.
Magpie.

_________________

This morning, sauntering into the room, I saw that his cheeks have turned golden brown like the darker curve of a nectarine.
I kissed him there, and said happy birthday.
He half-smiled, half-frowned, and turned over.
I left his birthday present on his computer chair and a birthday card on two pink post-it notes.
One of the presents is a fabulous pair of shorts. He has blue legs. A tan is essential, if only to avoid severe vitamin-D deficiency. Vampire.
The other is Silence.
No more: When're you getting a job, why aren't you happy, are you happy? What can I do? What do you want? Do you still love me? Why do you love me? Are you sure?
The last, especially. For his birthday present, I am boxing up those questions. Topping the parcel with a big red bow. And throwing it out the window.
Que sera, sera.

Love, what else.

Now should have a million names,
one for each of the infinite directions.
And we should marry them all off:
paired, at last, they'd stop screaming and fighting
get bored
make love
sleep.
And I'd have some peace, at last.

But that's not what I really want, or I'd have it, by now.

Last night I wrote my wedding vows in my head. Silently, in the kitchen, while the Man was upstairs being sick with a stomach bug. They spilled out, in the space between the bean plants on the window sill and the kitchen counter. I had a light blue ceramic bowl in my hands, full of bright red soup.
I imagined saying them very softly, underneath the mango tree at home. I imagined the grass on the lawn. The softly cobalt sky. I looked straight into his eyes, and said, I love you. I love you. I love you. And I promise I will never stop.
I tried to change the never. Superstitious. Unholy word. Awful, if you break a never promise. The word is hurled back at you and it shatters into your face - You promised you would never...
But I couldn't change it.
A tear pricked the corner of my eye, and I said, out loud, Wow! Sentimental ass!
But the tear always wins, and it rolled down my cheek, fast, and into the soup.
He ate it, and I didn't tell him.
He has absolutely everything now.
Which terrifies me. I keep trying to change it. But I couldn't.

Amen

The fall that is really flight: That is what I have always looked for.
All it takes to remember that I already have it is to recall that the second I saw you, it felt like soaring, and all my walls came crashing down.

Don't make me rebuild them, na, please.

Banal, but so real in the moment

So M. and I had another old-couple quarrel this morning. We go through patches (well, they last for months at a time, so I should call them phases, shouldn't I?) where we don't disagree on a single thing. And then for weeks and weeks and weeks, it seems that we rub each other up the wrong way. Focus only on each other's cracks. Stamp over each other. Misunderstand. Snap. Scream. Walk away in the middle of the street with a sharp BYE!!
Today, I turned into Accessorise and he continued down the pavement. I switched my phone onto Silent, fuming all the while that he wouldn't call. But just to be perverse, hah! the phone's on silent so I wouldn't be able to pick it up anyway! I made mental lists of all the shops I could go to, to kill time and make him wonder where I was (knowing full well that he wouldn't wonder, he'd just assume I was still out shopping. Which thought made me fume even more, but no matter...)
And as I was walking to River Island, the winter sun bouncing off the golden trees in the churchyard and people swarming around me with their lovers, friends, babies, families, shopping, laughing, smiling, holding hands, I suddenly thought: Well this is nice. What if one day after I do that sharp-as-glass BYE, my words suddenly turn into my reality and bye actually turns into GOODBYE?
And you know how, when you're a kid, and you think about losing your parents for the first time, and are surprised by how quickly that brings tears to your eyes? I thought about my bye turning into a goodbye and suddenly felt tears pricking the back of my eyes, all on their own, instantly.
And all the rubbish about my tone versus your tone, our juvenile differences of opinion on God, the nature of the universe, the nature of people, the role of dancing in a happy existence, the right way to walk down the street, the right way to be a boyfriend or girlfriend just... disappeared. And all I wanted to do was run to Sainsburys and hug him and say sorry.
So I did. And the next time we part ways sharply in the street because one of us has an attitude or a tone, I hope I remember what I felt this morning and back down, say sorry and just hold his hand and shut up.

Fuschia Rain

A note to the future:
I want to do insanely sexy things with your blue eyes. Tossed onto foreign shores by a fuchsia rainstorm and dripping flowers I want to hold your ribs above mine and crash into those shores, high tide.

Where shall we run away to? Where is the sky blue enough, where is it littered with stars, god an errant cleaner who forgot to sweep the floor. Trapped in fluoresence and words about faraway worlds, the girl hears the runaway sounds of: seashore, breathing, wooden beams creaking, high tide, low tide, crabsong, flute dances and the vibrations of rain-soaked fuchsia flowers humming their brilliance into an acid blue sky. Leaching delicious desire out of your finger tips. Against the hardness of cushioned computer chairs, she feels: The edges of wet leaves, dark green as forest hearts. The silkiness of warm saltwater in rock pools. Sand. The edges and crenulations of the landscapes that hide underneath your skin.

How do I stop planning holidays with you when all your colours are runaway gypsy songs?
The lover in me wants to roam the world.

Some day, far away, if I am ever left behind, I will dance across the silkiness of a map - a map of countries, or of sky - and pretend that it is your body that I traverse.

Once upon a time, a man who was leaving university to go out into the world had a party. It was August, and hot, and dissertation time in England.

A girl was in her room that afternoon, piles of books and papers strewn over her window sill, her desk, bed and floor. It was too hot to breathe. The oak tree outside creaked in the occasional breeze. A dove chortled with it's mate and the grass swayed this way and that with a low gentle swishing. The muslin curtains were hot with the sunlight. White hot and still.

There was a violent blue in the sky. A violent green in the oak tree. So green, the very principle of green.

Everything so still, the breeze making only tiny punctuation marks in the quietness.

The girl's phone beeped. She was invited to drinks that evening, to bid farewell to the man who was going out into the world.

Dusk. Showered, dolled up, a tiny peach camisole because it was a hot night. Her grandmother's apricot shawl flowing over one arm in case it got chilly later. And then, the day swirled and gave up it's stillness and spiralled into the glittering of cocktails and ripples of cigarette smoke and the nameless enlivening laughter that is the background to all good party-memories.

A beautiful boy sat, one leg tossed over the other knee. A black shirt to match the black night and starry blue eyes. Violently blue, softly glimmering against the black.

The girl forgot the stillness of the day and had a drink and smoked and laughed and her eyes flashed and she danced.

She danced alone and poured out the stillness of the day, gave up the locked-down quality of the afternoon's heat, swayed like cigarette smoke. Twisting through the music, the boy with the black shirt found her like this, alone on the dance floor and smiled at her.

"There he is again," she thought, and reached out for his hand. Not realizing until much later what that thought really meant. There He is. Again.

And we're still dancing.

I do not understand

I'm saying that not in the spirit of a lost soul in the forest, plaintive and pathetic. But as concession to the fact that it's the first step on the journey to understand.

I do not understand how:
I can have a fight with the Man, over something so stupid and idiotic and utterly pointless (utterly pointless because we both know that we will never agree on this, but instead of just agreeing to disagree we have a tacit understanding that we will scream each other's brains out and then slam each and every door in the world before going into a sulk with each other for a week).

And then.

Post-fight,
I go out and have a lonely but lovely day.
And then.
Meet a friend and have a GORGEOUS evening with her, full of giggles and much mutual understanding and hand holding and spontaneous, loving, utterly enchanting adventures.

And then.
I can walk home in the dark feeling uplifted and smelling the sweet spring air and having a bounce in my step and looking at my own shadow and admiring the beauty of my own legs (:P) and feeling that all is alright with the world.

And then.
I walk into the door and I know he's home and I expect him to mirror that feeling.

But.
There's a black cloud in the room and, suddenly, and, again,
a black cloud around my heart.

Bah.
I do not understand how this can happen.
Bah.

I have learnt:

Not that it's of the least interest to anyone, but an obscure demographic: The state of Maharashtra, in India, is the second largest sub-national entity in existence in terms of its population.
This is the perfect explanation for why, unless I extend this PhD into a ten year full time job at the head of a team of 20 highly trained and better paid researchers, I should be perfectly happy to smirk that I can actually cover one measly taluka.

------------------
Men are despicable.
No exceptions.
_____________

It's my mother's birthday today.
Also the anniversary of her mother's passing.
Generation 1 slipped quietly into heaven on this day. Generation 2 is celebrating life and love and inshallah, yet another year of happiness, health and joy. Generation 3 is wondering if there's a priceless life lesson embedded into this particular date.
But mostly, she's instinctively grasped it, methinks, because she lived today to the fullest, wished her mother a happy birthday from the bottom of her heart and vowed to keep 'waking up' in the middle of the day every day and appreciating how precious it is that her loved ones are alive, happy, well, safe, warm (mostly), and, well, that she has more than she can count on the fingers of one hand. Which is twice more than anyone's deserved share, and infinitely more than hers.

---------------------
Those silk cushions I mentioned in the last post?
One of them has turned into a spectacular success. She is a snow white square (particularly apposite considering that the whole of England is currently this colour), and with a large square of blindly brilliant glittery flat silver sequins on the front. She's sitting in front of the other cushions on my bed and heh heh, she single handedly lights the room. And doesn't come with an off-switch. Goody.

-------------------

Just to reiterate:
Men are despicable.
No exceptions.
(Except definitely Papa and perhaps the cat.)

Hyperbole.

Having fancied Herself a maharani in all matters amourous, and kicked many a hapless suitor down the stairs and straight to hell, She now finds herself in the throes of the most callous n'er do well in all the land. He sleeps - sleeps!! - and peacefully at that!! - as she tadpaos herself to a shrivel, and only has to raise one sleepy, Scottish eyelid and look at her to confuse all her thoughts, scramble her soul and set forth a tremor through every cell.

What a wretched, devilish nuisance, she thinks to herself. I should go away! I should abandon him to his peaceful pillows and his football and his.... his... silky cheekbones. I should break them before I go!! Not for nothing was She once called the Queen of Sheba. And here she is now: from princess to puppy in one flash of a kiss. Shee.

But then he opens one eye and looks at her typing and shifts lazily amongst the pillows and says, almost inaudibly, awwwww... stop that racket and c'mere.
Mummee.

Bah. Grownups. Men. Princes. Whatever his affliction, I once had it. Calm, controlled, no trace of mad urgent rushing desire. And here she is now; she's had palpitations for 2 years while he sleeps all through the night. Peacefully. And chuckles after kisses instead of falling gloriously to pieces alongside her. Boff. Why can't he fall apart at the seams like me?! Why do I want to make him?!

Merry Christmas

First Christmas at home with The Man, the last two having been spent making tearful long distance phone calls and vowing, next year, next year.

We trudged home with a black Christmas tree. Shiny black papery leaves. He sits now in the drawing room, full of black and gold baubles. On the stairs there are golden twinkly lights and burnished gold tinsel. Inside a golden box at the base of the tree, amidst the wreathes and wreathes of black and gold tinsel, there is a huge amount of chocolate, and a fat, black, glossy tree-book. For the rose-cheeked bookworm-prince who loves having tree-books and creature-books and star-books and all manner of other books. In the kitchen, a bottle of Schnapps and a bottle of wine.

Quiet day at home, full of firsts.

Round Number I've-lost-count.

I know I've said this before, but let me say it again, since hardly anyone is listening anyway.

Desire is the root of all evil

Versus

Me.

Theme Song.

Que sera, sera;
If it happens, I will come to India.
And if it doesn't,
We'll part ways;
I'll stay here,
You'll go far.
Que sera, sera.