Dear me, I never seem to cry enough, or cry. I feel like I could do with a good cry now. I am moving on. There is nothing to move on from. I felt more than I hoped I would. I see how facile it is. I see I am only being reasonable to myself, by saving myself time to be sad about other things, if nothing else. There is breeze on this June evening, it's still light out, I have moved into a flat that I like. The dog situation might become more manageable soon. I am kinda worked out with the parade of deadlines: I can't care anymore. I expect to have sex soon, but side by side you think, what's even the point? Who is this person, does he matter to me in even the smallest way, is there any need to have sex with someone who doesn't matter to you in the smallest way?
Why can't Melissa Bank write my life: divide it up into disjointed episodes written up as nifty short stories filled with witticisms and a busy-in-the-head city life? Why am I here, sitting in an empty office, wishing I could find an occasion on which to peg the completely bearable hurt and have a good cry, a cry with not enough pain or the least bit of desolation, just a keen pinch of pain, over, I dunno, someone you would have wanted to at least be on the same page as you? A lot to ask, I know. Imagine how terrible it would have been if it were someone with more selfhood, ego or spine.
Here's Gerard Manley Hopkins:

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Do you ever have the desire to stalk the shit out of someone? If only it would make them come to heel and make them fall in love with you.

I feel sad, and a little mad, that this is how it will be. That we will fall out of touch. It has already begun. I wish it could fastforward itself and come to the end of the road. But I've already accepted that I'll have to live through the slow, dimly hurtful, painful process of it: such an emotional chore, really. I also accept that you are not special, often lame, nondescript, someone whose ways I would notice and ignore, or grit my teeth against. That nonetheless you know the art of boundaries, of carving out and guarding your own time against demands on it by people who are good to you. This is something I haven't mastered. If I did, I would also be another person. If I want someone, it seems they can have me until I am almost falling apart.
Unfortunately, you are not so stupid that you don't understand what I say. None of O's new age men are. Va, va, va-t'en! Or better still, as the dictionary says, Prends tes affaires et va-t'en!

I have pain on the right of my chest. Enough pain for it to be a concern. Let me get through the night, God, and tomorrow I'll go to the doctor. I'm rather scared.

Someone teach me how to live, not to be a sponge for hurt. Someone teach me to figure out this maze of heart stuff, how everything eventually becomes heart stuff. Someone tell me what happens when one turns 35, 37, 40: how does one deal with being alone, does one remain alone, is it like having the ground beneath your feet taken away, does one find friends, does one discover support systems, does one remain strong and capable? Teach me how to live, show me what to do. I keep going from disappointment to disappointment. In fact, I go looking for it where I can.
Please make this stop. I am not a serial dater. I don't have it in me to live frivolously. There is only so much I can give of myself, and I seem to have spread myself thin to people even I don't care about. Because rejection hurts, even when it's a wishy-washy thing, where you don't care about the person, and have absolutely no intention of taking it anywhere.

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.

I love a clean slate. I like nothing as much as I like a clean slate, even if it means erasing a tonne of beautiful memories: photos, texts, any sign of personality. There's one very hard moment when you do it, but it feels healthy and refreshing the moment it's done, and I watch with interest if there is anything to build upon without the evidence of past moments. It feels fine to move on too if there isn't.
Milton is beautiful with it. Fancy, me, the illiterate, holding Milton as a talisman:

 'Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay;
And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropp'd into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.'

I have always loved the uncouth swain who twitches his mantle blue and moves on. I imagine that he smiles.

Men, such fuckwittage! If you are reading this, please don't anymore. Don't come to my blog, don't violate my very own corner of the Internet. Such infernal stupidity one is capable of in moments of weakness. Giving random person address to one's private blog, I tell you!
Anyway, the awful pigeons are calling their awful call, the mater has awakened me because she wanted to listen to music at 7 am and then, when I was trying to go back to sleep, 'PUTI BHETORE ASHCHHE NA!' The big boss is coming from the UK today to spin his spiel, I have an evening planned as cheap and instant escape, and I is generally tired with myself, own actions and stupidity. Not least about the blog.
I wish it were not so expensive to hire a cab, I wish I had slept longer, I wish I had worked more this past couple weeks, I hope I get to go away to McLeod this weekend, I hope I find a book as nice as The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, I hope I get to watch Masaan soon, and Inside Llewyn Davis, I hope I meet the weird Punju guy and we get to discuss poetry, I hope I sleep better this week, I hope I get a cook fast, I hope I go to meet Katyal auntie this week, I very dearly hope her leg is alright, I hope Puti's gha isn't serious, I hope for poetry, weather like the past week's, I hope I speak to A.

'Fuck you, fuck you, and especially, fuck you.'
Tumi jodi amar shathe na jao, ami mone kore, shomoy niye, nije giye taj mohol dekhe ashbo. Ek shathe dekhar chukti tumi korbe honour. Haha. Hahahaha. Etoi jodi buddhi hoto, bhogoban tomay meye baniye pathaten prithibitey.

Do you remember going to sleep with baba? Reading that zombie story in Shuktara and being so scared that I slept on the same pillow as him with my hand (or shoulders) touching his lightly, just holding on to some part of him while I slept? How he was so completely OK with his daughter eating up all his space?

Here's a song:

Rehna tu, hai jaisa tu
Thoda sa dard tu, thoda sukoon
Rehna tu, hai jaisa tu
Dheema dheema jhonka,
Ya phir junoon
Thoda sa resham, tu hamdam
Thoda sa khurdura
Kabhi tu ad ja, ya lad ja
Ya khushboo se bhara
Tujhe badalna na chahoon
Ratti bhar bhi sanam
Bina sajawat, milawat
Na zyaada na hi kam
Tuhje chahoon, jaisa hai tu

I have had enough of you

Now please leave me alone

To reclaim my life, my nights,

My thoughts, my head.

Don’t let’s fall

Into my old pattern

Let me not build myself

A prison of togetherness

And choke myself inside.

Give me time.

If I must come back to you,

I will.

If we were together

If we were together,

Instead of you in H--

And I in Delhi,

Here is a list of things we would do.

The thought is delightful,

Because I see

The sun beating down

And us walking down a hot road beside a lake,

You in a kurta and I in my faded salwar kameez.

It is a summer love.

Summer is when the best things always happen.

Then we watch a film

In a cooled cinema hall.

I come out feeling angry, while you

Drown in superlatives about the director’s mastery,

The actor’s dedication, and the ‘deeper meaning’

Of the film,

While I am like, ‘Duh! Everyone knows that.

Does it even bear saying?’

You ignore me, maybe even ask me to shut up.

I am a little shocked, then delighted.

What would we do,

If we were together,

Instead of you in H--

And I in Delhi?

If I had a room of one’s own,

If I were on my ownio?

On a hot, hot Saturday,

The fan would swing above our heads,

We would get bored and banter,

Make out a little,

Watch a film,

Be a little desultory

And fall asleep.

If it were a balmy evening,

Like the one on which we met,

We would smoke a joint

And get high

And laugh a lot

And argue and fight,

My heart would sway a little in fear,

But then hopefully it would relax

And I would go to bed at peace.

(What a shite piece of writing this is)

Added:

If you were in Delhi,

Or I were in H—

We would go to the old city.

Since it would be summer,

5 o’clock would find us

On the courtyard of Jama Masjid.

Before that, the moment

When the vastness of its symmetry

Reveals itself for the first time.

Inside, tentative steps,

Sharp breaths as the hot gasps of heat

Hit your feet.

Wind in my hair, the sun going down,

The sharp outline of an arch

Against a darkening blue sky.

As not knowing newer roads

Make one end up in Rome,

We would walk into Karim’s courtyard.

Selfie [sort of]

By the *sexy sadistic spanker*

Selfie [sort of]

It's okay to feel sad.To want comfort. To feel the urge to make contact, physical or otherwise. It's okay to cry. It's okay to feel like shit, like you just can't go on. It's okay to want to hope, to have hope, to feel betrayed. It's okay if it is an emotional roller coaster. It's okay to want to get off and yet not be able to. It's okay to want to hold on and let go at the same time. It's good to write. It's good to feel. It's good to numb the pain, with ice cream and watchseries and cats. It's okay to want to escape. It's okay to bother friends at odd hours. It's okay to feel angry, try to feel angry and fail. It's okay to indulge. It's okay to feel depressed. It's okay to have mood swings, to sing songs in voice subdued by tears. It's okay to once again love oneself with that old, newfound tenderness. It's okay to indulge in the breakup ritual of gifting oneself Calvin and Hobbes. It's okay to write letters, carefully composed and recomposed to oneself in one's head. Love letters. It's okay to want to escape into that reality where you can erase all your memories and yet have a happy ending. It's okay to want to move on, not want to move on, to be undecided. It's good to run, to laugh, to cook, to eat, to scratch the chins of cats and hug them to sleep. It's okay to long for a room of one's own, metaphorically and physically. It's okay to cry. Really, it is. It is okay to feel like shit. It's okay to take comfort in small things like the softness of the pillow and the purr of cats and watching cat videos. It's okay to feel banal and profound, melancholy and manic, hungry and satiated, hot and cold, driven and bored, inspired and insipid. It's all okay, all in a day's work. And it is going to be alright even if it that doesn't quite feel right, you melodrama queen, you deluded moron, you hopeless romantic, you wonderful, complex. complicated human thing. I love you, as always.

Living is so difficult. I am completely tired and out of my wits. I wish someone would show me the way to getting what I want. Today, I am not even sure what I want. My mind is an emotional void. Someone I like does not seem to like me back enough, or my liking switches off abruptly, which is almost as hard to accept as not being liked. I am too tired to want to meet other people. Online dating is so tiring: what are we looking for in such frenzied fashion? At such speed, you can barely even seek out sex, and that does not seem to matter soon enough. You are left with the rag and bone shop of the heart and the one thing you don't want to do is work it some more. But there is the anxiety that if not this, then what? It's exactly the very worst thing to do in the circumstances: go running about when you should be recouping. I feel stupid and non-adult.
I can barely register the 2 things that matter and prop up my world: my work and ma's health.
Scary, no? Scary, scary, scary, scary, scary.

Darling

Darling,

You are half a stranger.
How does one fall in love with a stranger
Over three conversations
And one night when everything
Came together perfectly?

Your fillums,
Your love
For talking about yourself,
Your voice on the phone
As deep as when we spoke
In my room
Through the night,

How you go on
And on
About the same thing
How miserable you are
How bored you are
How desperate you sound
When you call me
(On those two nights)

It will pass
When life starts
For you again.

Will you forget me
Ignore me
Will I be an adult about it?
Will I push you away
From today
So you can
Never hurt me?

Will it be
A weekend love
Played out over the phone
Drawing on the memories
Of a perfect ordinary night?

I am falling in love with you.
It is a very uncool, uncouth
Thing to say
In the world of flinty singletons
Protecting armoured hearts.

I might hate you tomorrow,
As I already do a little
In anticipation
Of the pain
I am about to inflict on myself.

But now,
Deep down,
Loving you (what I know of you)
Feels perfect.

P.S.
Filmmakers are a sodden, self-obsessed lot.
They get depressed, they drink
I think you are a borderline alcoholic,
Or going that way with bold and sure steps.
You have no idea how to hold someone
So much smaller than you.
But we played very well, and very long
That night.
In that, we were a perfect match:
A size ten and a half.

Everyone has gone home and my floor is completely silent. It's Friday.
But how does it matter? When the sky outside can no longer be seen through the blinds, it will be no different from the other days of the week when I go home at what seems the dead of night.
The world outside registers only cursorily. My visual registers are this office floor, daylight seen through the room adjoining the kitchen at home, and the kitchen at night; maybe the bathroom when I have to take a bath.
The head registers are (now) in Jo Nesbo -- Harry Hole's self-proclaimed rictus of a smile -- I am waiting for him to kill the antagonist in gruesome fashion as I slow-read the remaining one-sixth of the book the second time; The Vague Woman's Handbook which is stalled in Delhi February winter before the Metro cut permanent tracks across the way we planned our days; ma's doctor's appointment and the delayed tests; my friends. Rubbish Tinder occasionally bobs up, the Internet leaves its mark in everything, everything. And oh, WORK, and the fear and anger that go with it.
I am not unhappy, there is still always the peace that comes with your heart being yours, your decisions independent of others' selfish, selfish desires. The actual happinesses seem magnified manifold, as if one were on I dunno, ganja, LSD? Like the KJR trip. The passing minute heartbreaks that happen seem to tear up the heart, so terrible it feels to want something from someone and to not get it. Then, that is cut away, and peace restores itself, like finding your balance again after swaying briefly on an aal.
One grows up, one grows older.

Another new thrill, another sadness.

I was talking to this really really cool person. The repartees (not mine) were like whiplash. And you know how rare that is, and how much I love that. My internet vocabulary, derived largely from urban dictionary, has increased manifold already since this person only speaks in such. So I know what the following mean:

Strong short hair game                  Lulz

And through my own initiative, have discovered the quite horrible Encyclopedia Dramatica.

But it’s complicated, and I don’t really go for ‘index-finger only’ lulz, so I feel rather morose. And really wish I could talk some more. But the ball is not in my court.

Nothings

What is it, this attraction? This brain fuzziness that makes you act unlike yourself, makes you regress to just ego, the need to satisfy a desire?

I tell myself that we won’t meet again. He seems like a pseudo-liberal, entitled bigot (I am sure!), not even attractive, but my stomach is churning, churning, churning the whole day, and Anu finds me mooning on the wall-encompassing bathroom mirror, and I wasn’t even saying things aloud this time.

I tell myself that it’s nothing, that it does not matter. That he won’t message, I won’t message, that I will forget.

But knowing this won’t make it hurt any less when it happens, when the time comes, and I won’t ask, he won’t ask. I won’t confirm a meeting, and he won’t.

Only the longing, longing, longing, at the end of long days,

When I come home, unslept, lay down my tired body, and watch myself give over to sleep. But before that, there will remembering, of imagined kisses and love bites, and oh, hello! I liked this and this too.

There will be texting, to another someone I have not even met, but her north Indian casual nothings, her good mornings, her bad English make me feel warm and wanted. I wonder what she is using me for, but I am happy to be a part of it as long as it lasts.

Until that too goes away, and the days resume their usual, sassy appeal – of knowing that I can kick ass, that I will get the job done, that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

No more doubting, wondering if I am good enough, thinking whether he liked me, whether I was boring, why he did not call.

This is not a paean to anybody, definitely not to a man I don’t even know. It’s just a moment, and that it happened is no less real because it was fleeting, and because feeling this way is not particularly rational of me.

Similarities between Weekend and Looking, and ultimately with the auteur:

Chris New’s Glenn is very much the central figure, even though it is Tom Cullen’s character we are supposed to follow. Tom often becomes the foil against which Glenn’s antics stand out. Glenn has obvious similarities with Looking’s Agustin: the art project about sex and the uncertainty about its artistic value or even what to do with the idea, though Glenn’s is apologetic about what he thinks is narcissistic and the tendency to act precious. Agustin in season 1 is the cunt that Glenn could have been. Both he and Glenn share that energy contained in pint-sized bodies. Because Andrew Haigh has spoken earlier about how sex holds up a mirror to a person in many ways, and his preoccupation with sex in his works, I wonder if these characters are not born out of some aspect of Haigh himself. There is a scene where Glenn talks of coming out to his parents at 16: ‘Nature or nurture, it’s your fault. So get over it.’ I could imagine Haigh saying it to his own parents. It’s projection of the most facile sort.

I think there is a certain amount of artistic development from Weekend to Looking. There are similar preoccupations in both works, and you can see how the exploration in Looking is, well, more engaging.

I also think of similarities between Haigh and Patrick. Haigh speaks of Patrick’s self-humiliation at his own Halloween party: he ends up screaming from a chair. We’ve all had those moments.’ Cut to Michael Lannan: ‘I haven’t done that. I hope not.’

I wonder if Haigh was not unlike Glenn: barely contained energy and a lot of anger, and the artistic maturing from Greek Pete (a rent boy’s coming of age!) to Looking and now, 45 Years. It makes one very curious to see where he is at artistically (2 Silver Bears must mean something), and how he is exploring those same preoccupations.

I watched Weekend in its entirety today. And a bit personal, the ending. Where I am today, I don’t expect or really want to be tossed by pangs of love. Of course one wants them, but not to the extent that you go seeking it out. The ending, which is all of that, is a bit of a shock, and very life-affirming. That older people also get wound up over feelings, over love, but that it does not demand as much of a sacrifice of control, reason. Glenn’s heart might be breaking, but he will go about his daily business.

When I read about Looking getting cancelled day before, I was surprised at how much it hit me. It was as if a world I craved, wanted like a drug, was snuffed out and taken away. I was shocked at how much I wanted it: Andrew Haigh’s world, his sun-leeched Instagram-filtered San Francisco. In my head, it had become a place I could vicariously inhabit, and now I don’t know where to direct all that feeling.

She had always known home as the place of conflict, as the thing you put a calm face to when you went to work or sat in class. She had found herself being surprised as a young girl, when she found that for a lot of people, it was a place of comfort, happiness and welcome. She did not really believe it.

Today, she realised that she had managed to recreate that mental space of distress as an adult.

But it could not be her fault. It was her mother, not a husband.

Today, she wanted to break down and cry, because she thought she could not take the stress anymore. She wanted to put down her burden and feel light. The weight felt hard and solid, no shooting pains that came and went. This weight would bear down on you, grim, unrelenting, and bring you down on your hands and knees, no mistake.

She could not put it down, no more than Atlas could put down the sky, not to sound too full of oneself.

So she knotted herself, and knotted herself, round and round and round. Cursed her own guts, died of guilt again and again, and dropped off to sleep when she could not do it anymore.

A most unsavoury state of affairs it was. But she now knew herself to be compulsive, knew that breaking out would not be easy, as the clock moved slowly towards 12.30, and then 1.30, closer and closer to the magical hour, when tiredness vanished. It was like Cinderella's transformation. Born again and again every night, before wilting away for another day.