I was looking at my 2010 posts, just after I came to Delhi. And found comments by Madhura, Poushali, Oli. Such warm ones, such a lovely sense of community. I also rather liked the way I wrote. I don't seem to have changed so much in the way I thought, though I think I was closer to well, my core, then, more centred, if you will. How precise I was in my dislike for Delhi. I wrote of living intensely: the groceries, the chores, the accent I spoke in, the way I scanned the crowds, the dogs in my last flat, but how like an outlier I felt. How things have changed. I am assured of my presence in this city now, but there seems to be a haze when I think of how centred I am. I don't really work to be at one with my core, anymore. In a lot of matters, I take things as they come, and I forgive myself and let go of a million things in which actions don't match intention. I don't know where I come from or am going wrt love, having greatly become a creature of circumstance. It's greatly on the surface: I try to embrace an intimate moment entirely and then work to not attach value to it. I can't, though, not really. So there is the inevitable hurt, and you hurt and hurt until you can't understand clearly anymore what the feeling is directed toward. You look for another distraction, instead of recouping and coming back to yourself. It's rather frivolous, but how much can you care? Look at the viscerality of me: look at my body, I feel the pain in the middle of my spine as I sit, the need to pee which will have to addressed in five minutes, the complete acceptance of the desire for sex with a person I am attracted to, how I muster my energy to make rotis at 10 in the night, how I am physically unable to care about my mother anymore, how I realise it's finally time for bed when my mind seems to go on and off at about 2.30 in the morning. I feel it with every bit of my body, and it takes precedence over the need to revisit, revise and summarise my actions in my mind. I just let it hang out and move to the next thing.
I wrote with wonderment about liking to do groceries in 2010. Now, the novelty of that liking has worn off and I can repeat ad infinitum that I like grocerying and hate cooking. I know the prices of most vegetables and pick up the week's groceries fast without luxuriating in the lushness of fresh vegetables. Yesterday my mother proudly declared that all the spinach -- a kg's worth -- had spoilt. I gulped down the information physically and kept my mouth zipped: that's 20 buck's worth of spinach, I felt its weight along with the rest of the 10 kg of vegetables I carried home that day. Swallowed down my mother's blankness about defeat of the hard work it involves, that it feels bad, that it hurts that she does not understand or care for it. I made rotis over a prolonged period, texting a dude who likes indulging himself with mush he does not mean or understand, smoked a cigarette sitting on the balcony afterward, texted some more rubbish, hurting meanwhile for the reason I was hurting. The hours just whittled by, Puti coming in to lie down in my room for a bit, until I finally got up, took a bath, ate and to bed. And was far, far, far too tired in the morning to go to work. Went after half a day, and here I still am.
