Number 62.

I use the busride to think. Mostly maudlin bullshit. Faux profound. But still.
This afternoon, on the 62, I thought again:

Attachment,
Non-attachment.
Desire is pain.
Desire is beautiful.
How to reconcile these?

How to be utterly non-attached, but still entwined in the beauty of his cheekbones? How to feel the throbbing pulsating Utter connection I feel when my mother holds me? How to feel, like I sometimes do, like flinging myself across the earth, arms outstretched, hugging the mud and the roots of trees?
I love it here.
I love the ones who're with me. And some that have passed. How to feel them across that divide except through my awful Missing?

How to be an environmentalist, to care, to feel pain, to scream, if I am non-attached?

And yet, how to be peaceful?
When every desire, every beauty, every thing is transient, fleeting.

I have to learn how to look that in the eye.
I can't, yet.

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.

Eureka.

The reason I jump, too fast:
I believe:
If anyone should break my heart, it should be me. Not circumstance nor callous people.

I should stop doing this.
Other people - save one, and he is long gone, now - have been far more careful with my heart than I have ever been with it.
I throw it up into the air and forget to catch it.
I box it when it gets strong enough to soar.
I push it when it wants pulled. Open it when it wants closed.
Reopen healed wounds and leave them bleeding, disgusted.

Only I do this, no one else does it to me.
I really, really should stop.

This isn't really an ahha! moment though. I've known these things for years now.
And still, I do it.
Thornbird, etc.

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.

Worth Admitting

Sometimes, everyone is irritating. Irritating. IRRITATING. Itch-between-your-toes-when-you've-got-gumboots-on Annoying.
Everyone (me included!) has Problems.
Everyone is 'struggling'. Or 'fighting a great battle'.
I get that.
What I don't get is what I am supposed to do.
Listen? Check. Empathise? Check. Advise, if asked to? Check. Shake person by shoulders and give them a kick up the arse? Check, if we have that sort of relationship.
Do all the above indefinitely? Check, if we have a deep and enduring sort of relationship.
I feel inadequate. But I have to admit that I can't actually do all of the above (or even a few, in isolation) for several people at once over extended periods.
Sometimes I go through good spells. Sometimes bad.
But there are some people I know who always seem to be down.
I developed my sense of self-preservation early, and I know that sadness sticks. Sometimes I come away from conversations with 'them' feeling... inexplicably down. Again and again. And unable to do anything to either help them, or register the slightest positive change in their countenance. I leave feeling irritated. At myself, for being so easily infected with their Morose. And with them, damn it. For being so one-sided in their interaction.
They feel blah.
They feel sad.
No inspiration.
Life is awful. Difficult. Tough.
Yes, yes, I get it. But can we make it better? No? Ok. You want to forget about it for a while? No? Ok. You want to talk it out? No? You want me to leave you alone? No? You want me to tell you what's up with me? No? You want some perspective? You want to talk about why problems with bais or work or college or colleagues aren't as earth-shaking as, say, genocide, or war, or Iraq, or oil, or climate change, or whales, or starvation or food crises? No?
Okay, tell me what the fuck you want, damn it!
And admit it: you're annoyed with so many little things, so much, that you completely miss out the big picture. You're a little thing. In a vast picture. Colleagues, work, shoes, bais, they matter to your life, sure. But they're not worth missing out life for. And I'll be damned if you want me to miss out on mine to constantly keep you company as you miss out on yours.

*Big huffy puff.
Rant over.
Thanks folks, back to the sunshine.

Tintagel: Highlights

Climbing to the top of Tintagel Castle (or the ruins thereof), and realizing that a long held, deeply held wish to visit a place I've dreamt of as a child as finally come true. In the same category as visiting Afghanistan and Mongolia has been the wish to visit Tintagel, the place where King Arthur was said to have been conceived (and perhaps born; but there are many places that claim to be his birthplace - no one knows). I sat at the furthest edge of the furthest cliff that I dared to reach, and swung my feet across the other side. Seagulls were wheeling overhead and in the spaces between each cliffhead, and the waves were pounding at the mouth of the caves below me. The ruins of the castle were covered in wildflowers, and in the distance, there were heavy grey clouds over the town, but shafts of sunlight bathing the ruins. I sat there for ages, feeling the throb and pulse of all the time that has passed since the castle was built, then ruined, then rebuilt and ruined, rebuilt and ruined. All the time since I first read about King Arthur underneath my grandmothers' rain tree. All the time passed since I talked about Arthur and his knights with my father after finishing my school homework and snuggling down in bed, dreaming of a faraway stone castle on foreign shores that at age 5, I never even dreamed of going to. Dreaming of it in Bakhtawar. All those times and spaces, stretching centuries and continents, converging in a single moment and at a single point, right there, inside me. And finding out that actually, it's far more beautiful than I could have imagined. Far more powerful a place, actually mystical, not just marketed. People have written about Tintagel for centuries. I found references in the bookstore from the 10th century. Just over one thousand years of fascination. Utterly justified. I collected tiny bits of rock, and scratched the names of my grandmother, mother and myself, and the date, and put a bunch of tiny yellow, pink and blue wildflowers underneath. A tiny monument to the three of us, all of whom seem to have had a yearning to visit there.

I walked through wide open fields, jumping over tiny wooden fences and low stone walls (and stopping again to take a picture with a rainbow, and scratch names into the rock), through a huge, windswept graveyard, and then through the church, and sat there for a long, long time, and lit a tiny votive candle for each of the people I love. I read the tiny, almost-gone lettering on the stones (one to a soldier killed in the Afghan War in Quetta in 1898!).
I stared at the stained glass and marvelled at how old it is. And then, after finally returning for the night, I sat outside the hostel, watching the sea breathe in and out against the shore and a tiny lighthouse on the far coast glimmering (every six seconds!) faintly against the darkness. And when I shut my eyes, for ages and ages the sights I'd seen all day flashed past me, and seeped deeper and deeper into my bones.

I thought whilst leaving that I must go back. But now I feel I don't need to. The whole place has gone right in. I have it.

Whoosh.

These versus Us

I love using this space to be utterly bitchy and ranty about some of the things I hear, in a way that I could never be in my face-to-face life.
Don't get me wrong: I call the B.S. in my face-to-face life. Just in rather less corrosive terms. So why put up the bilge here? Dunno. Perhaps I don''t call the B.S fully enough, or it just makes me maa-aad and I need to vent.

Here is something that has been prickling me since it happened.
An exceptionally close friend and I went out last year to the village I did my research interviews in.
For me this was a chance to revisit my friends there, get a day out in the fresh air, let them know that I was finally! writing! up! and eat some great village food. It was also a chance to chat with some of the people I'd interviewed and ask them to clarify some of the things that they'd said during the interview that I didn't fully understand, but thought I had at the time.

Here is a snippet of the conversation we had on the way home. I began by mentioning how much I loved some of the people I'd met there, even though I barely knew them. I felt connected to them, to their place, to their warmth, generosity and care. Romantic of me, perhaps, but so what..
The next few lines of our chat went something like this:
Me: ...and you know they're so incredible every time I go there. They always have time to sit and talk to me, even if they have to go meet someone in Parner (the nearby town), or go to the market that day, or take the goats out...

Him: *scoff

Me: What was that?!

Him: You know, they really have nothing better to do. These people (that's the part that stabs at my mind: these people) will take any chance to just sit around and do nothing. No matter what you try to do to help them (another stab: help them? How patronising!), nothing will change. They're just all incredibly lazy.

Me: I beg your pardon... I think that's a totally condescending thing to say. And you have no idea whatsoever about their lives, lifestyles or priorities.... you've never even been here!

Him: I don't need to have been here. These people are all the same. Seen one? Seen them all.

Me: So what do you do exactly? What do you do that demonstrates that you're not just a lazy sod yourself?

Him: How dare you... (with no further qualifying answer, I assume he couldn't answer and left it at that.)

You know what bugs me the most?
This is a fairly typical set of opinions. In conversation with friends about my fieldwork, I've often uncovered incredibly condescending opinions about rural lifestyles and people, lurking just under the surface of seemingly egalitarian, open-minded, cosmopolitan people. People who are curious about the world, relatively non-judgemental and god damn it - imaginative. So why the spillover 'these people' opinions that so many of my parents' generation seem to have?

What bugs me also is the fact that the opinions are never qualified by experience or example. They must be lazy because they're poor.
They must be miserable because they're poor.
They must be poor because they don't have houses in the city and can't read or write and eat fried chicken at will until all their arteries clog up.
They must be miserable because they don't have the opportunities 'we' do: to see museums and shows and dance all night and drink and picnic at the weekends and watch documentaries and sit around discussing national politics and art and philosophy and manicures.
And if they're poor and miserable, it must be their fault! They're lazy! They don't work 14 hour days in an office, so they must be lazy. They enjoy sitting under neem trees? Wow. Lazy.

All the assumptions are grounded only in ones' own personal agendas. You know one life - your own - you've known them all. Apparently.

What I've loved discovering during my fieldwork is that 'these people' are just like me. Equally, I've loved discovering how they are different: each one of 'them' is different to the other 'thems', and to me. Individuals. Yes, with some conditioned attitudes, prejudices and agendas. Just like me. But also with entirely individual and powerful traits, personalities, destinies and hopes.

There is no them and us, there's just all of us.
And if there were a them and us, the powerful condescension inherent in 'these people' almost guarantees that them and us will never ever meet, even if we sit next to each other under a neem tree.

Gah.
What does it take to shatter thems and build us-es?