Married woman

I am a married woman,

I have a black patch on my eye,

The swollen colors of the night past,

The tears that refuse to dry.

I am a married woman,

I get ready for work,

Only to have that money taken from me,

All for a night's worth of mirth.

I am a married woman,

I get out of my room,

With horrors unspeakable,

That go unspoken with a wry smile.

I am a married woman,

I don't want to go to bed,

Because sleep will follow,

But a sleep I wish would never end.

I am a married woman,

I have the glittering sign around my neck to prove that so,

The tightness that continues to choke me,

A life I wish I could escape but I cannot.

I am a married woman,

With all the riches and fancies that you may see,

My own parents refuse to save me,

From this hell that has become my reality.

I am a married woman,

With the red lipstick that glows,

With pretty fabric that follows the curves of my body,

What could you possibly know of the life I am living.

This is good for me,

Good for the family,

Good for future progeny,

Perfect answer to the expectations of this inescapable society.

I have always asked for it,

I should have known.

I could have escaped.

I would have believed.

What's the point...

In the end, I am a married woman,

A woman, whose words just don't matter anymore.

Broken Cellphone

I learnt that a lost heart may not be very far from a lost cellphone.

You keep waiting for it to come back to you,

Telling yourself you'll be better with it,

More careful, more loving,

More aware that it exists,

You wouldn't take it for granted,

Not that you did before.

You go around looking,

Hoping for one last glance,

One last effort to do everything it takes,

But it is gone.

And you feel broken, devastated,

All that loss of time and effort,

You just want to give up

And you do.

And then you receive a call,

"Your lost cellphone has been found..

But it is so broken,

It looks like it has been crushed by a car."

If I could only count the number of times,

My heart felt crushed by the pain of its loss,

When it knew it was broken and yet,

It refused to let go.

But, they are different.

Because even when so broken,

That call,  the sight of that cellphone,

Provided me closure to move on.

But a broken heart?

That's a wound you're gonna have to heal all by yourself.

The real me

For 24 years I lived,

Believing I am who they told me to be,

Who they told me I really was.

A people lover

A mother figure

A kind soul

A happy woman

A dependable friend

All positive, all adjectives

That you couldn't possibly complain about

Or could you?

And here I am,

Living in a world where I didn't

Have to be anything they said I had to be,

I am all the things they didn't ever say I would be.

Sad, angry, frustrated, truthful, lonely, inappropriate, lustful, nerdy and quiet.

This is what seems closest to my discovery of me,

To feel all that I could never feel;

I no longer care about what they ever said or will ever have to say,

All I know and care about

Is that I am the real me today. 

Conviction

Conviction is a funny feeling. You almost always hear it in an positive context. 

You have conviction for where you want to be. 

You have conviction in who you believe you are, what you can be. 

But what if your conviction is for something that doesn’t exist? It used to, but along the way it went awry. You still guard it, so carefully, even Gollum would be put to shame the way you consider it "Your Precious". 

You tell them how much it means to you and pay a deaf ear to anything they might say against it. You know it's escaping, like sand through your fingers, and it keeps flowing away, grain by grain and yet, you run, trying to figure a way for it to stop, finally finding a container you can put what's left in. There are days you don’t even think of it. But the moments you do, you go back to check if it is safe. If it is still locked in that heart shaped box of yours; the one that can only be opened by a key possessed by the very idea in itself. 

You are so sure you’re meant for this, that this was always meant to happen. You try so hard, you give it everything it takes. But it just seems to evade you. It moves 10 metres away with every peek you take. But you convince yourself, "Hey, it didn’t move farther than that now, did it?" in a tone so feeble, only you can hear it in your head. You talk about it to people to assure yourself that it is the truth, that it is not you being unreasonable. Confirmation bias, I tell you. 

Conviction feels like the rope that you have to hold on to, so that you don’t fall. The more you tug at it, the faster it weakens, loosens. It breaks, inevitably, and you fall; a fall where you know you will die the moment your body hits the ground. Thud. The ground doesn’t feel so hard. You’ve fallen back on the sand. You are not dead. But you tell yourself, “No, I am sure I am dead. No, I should have died”. 

Days go by. You see bruises in places that you didn’t see before. Every step seems smaller than the ones before. Every breath feels harder than the ones before. 

Slowly enough, you begin to realize, you were only meant to fall, never to die. You're walking on the beach; on the same sand that once passed through your fingers. Would you even remember the pain? Or how it felt? Or would you say to yourself it made you the person you are right now? 

A small stone amidst all that sand.

( I had written most of this about three years ago. About the time I had seriously begun to consider doing a Ph.D., and wasn't sure if I would manage to make it through. To answer my own questions, I do remember the pain, enough that I never wanted to go back to it again. I also say to myself that it is the reason I am here right now.

An insight I was weirdly wise enough to toy around with then, that I can say for sure now, is that conviction is good but sadly, luck plays a big role. And I am thankful that I was lucky enough to get here after all.)

The many small questions and the few big answers

I am ushering in the new year on quite a high really. I think it has been quite some time before I felt this childishly happy. There are a few legitimate reasons for the same

1. I had one very good last week of the semester.
Something I have kept referring to for the past few years is about how it feels alien to have a good thing happen to me. I'm almost on guard for a bad thing that I believe, will most definitely follow a good thing. I might have finally given up on that this year. That week, was a week of too many snippets of good news ( which i will now tag as the good-news-week in the post). I passed two of my classes with grades that ensure I don't have to take them again and grades that might have been too good to be true. Yours truly, as usual, was happy to deny she had anything to do with it. But I am learning to give myself credit, so I might have come around to accepting it. This was followed by my flight being delayed and missing my connecting flight and reaching Mumbai 2 days later. But I got to spend the 2 days in my own home and not in a dingy airport gasping for fresh air. I guess I should consider it enough proof that good things can last by themselves after all. :)

2. I am okay with being an adult

It began when about 10 days ago, I wasn't asked for an I.D. while entering this lounge (which is unusual given if you don't look above 40, they do ask for it). And amidst jokes of looking old enough, I realize it didn't matter to me. Mostly people hate the responsibilities that come with it, but I guess it has been long enough that I have come to accept those the way I expect myself to brush my teeth every single morning. I learnt that adulthood comes with its share of turmoil, especially during this phase, where most people are going through their quarter life crises. That I definitely do not have solutions to most problems, that conflicts are unavoidable, and the fewer people, the better.

What has also changed, is my perception of my parents. I now see them as fellow adults, with a little more experience, of course, but nevertheless, stumbling through each day. I see them wondering how to let go of us as adults while we ask to be treated as kids when home. It is so much easier to talk to them, to be understanding. I give them a lot of credit for having transitioned to this mode of being with us, treating us back as fellow adults. In fact, I had this detailed conversation with my dad about love and emotions in a very different capacity, where I found this side of him that I knew existed, but something that never came through before now. That was interesting and a lot easier than I had imagined.

Majorly, I realized I am now in that phase of my life where I see my parents once a year and otherwise, we continue to live individual lives, hoping the other is fine.*sigh* Maybe that slightly hurts.

3. I am home
I won't deny. Coming back home was scary. I know it has only been around a year since I left and I should have been dumb to think that I would remember nothing. But the truth is when you adjust to an extremely foreign place, creating an alternative reality for yourself as a coping mechanism, you often don't remember where you belong, if you belong at all. It was an eye-opener when the typical American politeness in an Indian shop returned embarrassed responses from the employees who felt they were just doing their job. Either way, being welcomed with the smell of bhaturas, being rejected by the autowallahs, and just driving around with my family, was therapeutic, to say the least. I think I had forgotten how good home can actually feel. My sister and I spent time with our parents, and that is pretty much all that we did; making family trips out of tasks to be completed, playing music and eating food.

I came home with ideas about being extremely logical, especially about love and other such emotions. But just being around my family, I realized that maybe, I need to let the feeling of safety and the calmness that is home just sink in, not seek to define or articulate these feelings. Trust that if someone feels like home, maybe that is a relationship to uphold, that is a person to trust. These are very redundant thoughts maybe, but to me, it feels like a lesson I am relearning finally getting out of a few constructs I had built around myself.

4. I now have a U.S. drivers license #good-news-week

   (which is apparently a big deal, I hear)

  

5. I am now a Ph.D. student #good-news-week

I don't even know what to say. I was mostly stupefied, even though it was kinda expected given how things worked out. I know I did work hard for it, it didn't just land in my hands. But I know I got extremely lucky in terms of the work I am getting to do and the people I am getting to work with, from what it seems right now. I think it is finally sinking in, that I am in fact doing what I have wanted to do, for almost 10 years now. Right now, that can actually overwhelm me given my personal expectations of myself, so I am trying to take it as it comes, just focus on work like I always have, and hopefully, that results in good things. I am happy. I jump between extreme calm and extreme excitement for most parts, but I guess it is gonna be a satisfactory 4 years, at least I hope it will be.

I happened to meet Sanaya ( my first ever friend) on New Year's Eve and I think I could not have began 2017 in a better way. Based on our conversation, I think I am done being so serious about everything, I know a lot of my light heartedness came from being home, but I really think I need to start enjoying the good times I have in order to be able to brave through the difficult ones. Maybe something to consider seriously.

My year definitely started out fuzzy and happy. A blissful content happiness I haven't felt in a long while. And the two resolutions, if at all, that I have for myself, is to have faith in the good times and in the good actions of people and to truly be happy when I can. Simple to advise about, difficult to implement. :)

Wishing you a productive and hope-filled new year as well. :)

And here's the happy song I want to share. A song I loved when I could hardly talk and I recently realized, it is definitely a guitar song I have to learn. Big plans for the future, indeed. 

(Mr. Big - To be with you)

P.S. Technically, this post is 10 whole days late. But given that this is the first post of the year, I haven't really missed a "deadline" now, have I? :D