Driftwood

Evenings are for the beach. I often take the driftwood for granted as I sit down. I am so busy looking at the sea. Though, as always, after a few minutes of vacantly looking at the waters, I am at loss. Am I supposed to be looking for something? I breathe easier here. Is that not enough? I feel guilty. What I am sitting on is a relic, a message, a layered poem beneath my ass. Yet I don’t really think about it. Only now, and even now, I am thinking about myself. When we say we can relate, is that a lack of imagination? I too am drifting, more or less, carrying some of the context on the way. When I listen, when I really listen, I think I can converse with all that will not speak. That chooses not to. And when I see, when I really see, I can see that the color of absence is much stronger than presence.

And so it is. When I try not to think of something, it is all I can think about.

This year I stayed away from all resolutions like a plague. I am so distrustful of it all. I feel like I need to experience time in my own way, build an extremely different relationship with it than what we have been taught since school days. I know now why I did not want to learn how to tell the time. I didn’t feel the need to. I want to see time falling all around me, malleable. I want it to expand and contract depending upon the orientation of my mind, or how rich my coffee tastes, how my feet feel as I sit in a café, my hand on my book, looking at people walking in the rain outside, re-living a random day of my childhood. I don’t need a stopwatch to examine my life, to count it, or expend it. I want my past, present and future at hand, ready.

In a way, getting older is an anachronistic acid trip. You can feel your past, present, future—all alive at once, underneath your skin.

That one summer afternoon, washing the dishes, I remembered my nani. I saw her as a girl, playing on the grass among the trees, running, happy. And I did not find it strange at all, even though I have never seen her as a little girl. But it made me think. Maybe time is not as linear as we want it to be/ thought it to be.

There is a highway bridge of my dreams. The light of the scene is blue. Two people stand there in the middle, staring at the dark waters. They stand with their backs to one another. The stream flows from one to the other. Though they cannot see one another at the moment, they have never been more aware that they are not alone.

This is a recurrent dream. The other is of two horses, one black and one white, standing among the reeds. Absence and presence.

I wish I could write a love letter—to all the erasures of the world, omissions of all kinds, absences.

As you read this, countless erasers, backspace keys, delete buttons, and forgetfulness are busy expurgating space. Things get lost. Misplaced.

This morning, I could not find any scissors around the house. No matter where I looked, I could not find them anywhere. I realized that I do not pay much attention to scissors when I use them. I find them, as a matter of fact, and use them as modes of convenience. But today, I kept finding out how much I needed such a simple thing in my life. I could not open the coffee bag without it. I used a knife instead and ended up getting a cut. I wanted to cut off a stray thread out of my sweater and tried to use the nail cutter as a replacement but it was too small. I spent the entire day looking for replacements for carrying out simplest of tasks. And when I finally found it, I had a new sense of admiration for it. The same thing happened when I could not find my earphones before going for my walk and realized that sound added an invisible layer to my walks, without which I felt too exposed when I stepped outside. Though it also allowed for the bird songs to bless my ears and I was grateful for that.

But what struck me the most about the absence of things is how it makes their presence so lucid. In their absence, their very essence stands out in relief. It is almost as if when all the blocks associated with that one thing in our day-to-day life get taken out, it ignites a series of fissures, gaps that disrupt an overall flow of our day and that is when we notice the burden that that one thing carried, the space that one thing occupied, good or bad.

Absence can do that. What presence often cannot.

The whole narrative about learning the value of something that you no longer have—there is no escaping that. And how often we color that absence within our imagination. The mind comes across absence and feels the need to create a presence out of it and inevitably ends up making it rosier or more terrible than it was.

How vivid absence often is for that very reason.

How blind we are to what is around us at the moment.

There might be a lesson here but I am in no mood to talk about lessons. For all our knowledge and understanding we are like raccoons, watching our cotton candies dissolving in the water, bamboozled by it all. (I am sure you have seen that video).

And I don’t wish anything different. Some confusions are mercies in a way.

And what about omissions? Can there be anything more present than that? What we keep to ourselves, what we do not talk aloud about, what we type and erase, what we hide—tell me but don’t we come closest to truth in those moments? The other day I ended up sending a cat video link to my father instead of the link to a government website. So of course, I deleted it to avoid confusion and sent the correct link. And as you can expect, my father was so keen to know what I had just deleted. To know what his daughter could possibly have to hide. As if that could define our relation. The same thing has happened to me a thousand times. People feel they are on the verge of finally knowing you if they catch a whiff of what you keep in the dark.

And they are not wrong.

As Fitzgerald wrote, “What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”

For all our communication, we have not learnt to truly unlock our seclusion. The heart of our darkness.

What you choose to omit, the words you do not write down, are the ones that are most burning.

And I wonder—

Is forgetfulness absence? Or is remembering the first condition of recognizing an absence?

And we are forgetful. I guess it depends on how this works. Can we choose to forget? For often there is so much that we want to forget and cannot. And yet we are constantly forgetting so much. Erasure evades the fringes of our memories at all times. Or maybe all those memories are not lost, simply packed away, archived for now till something triggers their revival. (People dying often get flashbacks of memories they never thought they would remember again or had even registered).

All my life I have always believed that I would magically become the woman I have dreamt of becoming one day. But not all accretion is of the nature we want it to be. And that is okay. I am gaining branches but my essence doesn’t shine any brighter. My spirit hasn’t changed. It’s like my gravity is pulling together all the grit and debris of the universe. I am turning into a big ball of ego and yet it isn’t enough. For the moment, I am drifting. Gathering layers. I have stories to tell myself on the way. Push and pull. I will play along.

After all, I am in no hurry to reach the shore.

Are you?