I am a nightmare-ridden person. I can feel an occasional cold hand snaking up my neck, just a harbinger of bad things, sad and scary things. The coattails of mortality, hearing fate snicker, etc, though I don't believe in it, from my gut. I think that contrary to all evidence, we still have choice and will. I feel scared, bogged down, my head is reeling from so much fear, and the physical weight of so much panic, and the shittiness of leaving dog behind just because she was being naughty, and my landlady's accusation that I have kutte paal liye. Of all the places I expected this accusation to come from. And also from her other words, that she probably will look for another renter. I am tired, dear god, I am tired. Tired of so many walls to break down. And how mother feels like a time bomb. And how the possibility of being back to that night in November feels like irrational fear. Everything in me balks from it. How the maid is being an absolute piece of shit, how much thoughts of Lily bog me down. And I told myself today, I am done with dogs and cats. The two bloody cats have also started coming in: everyone wants to make a home of this place, including Soni, and my landlady, a dog lover herself, possibly wants me out. It feels like one is completely powerless. One pays good money to all these people, and they still can say and do what they like to you.
Today I thought how much I would like to er, make love, to my dear friend S. But I wouldn't want to come anywhere close to any of the random guys.

I think this is the closest to contentment that I know.
Mother's BP is sort of (hopefully) getting under control.
I made a list of chores on Friday evening, and completed most of them by Saturday, and also took her to the doctor. Chores included washing clothes, buying vegetables and fish. No dry groceries this week, really. Also fixed the sink pipe and the shelf doors (a bad job, though).
I'll still take some time getting used to how washing clothes in the machine is the opposite of labour-consuming. It's like magic: how you can put in clothes and carry on with other work, with only the occasional looking-in. And it uses so much less water than the semi-automatic. Or maybe it was me who was filling the water till the given mark when it would have worked fine with less water too.
It's getting to be 5 on Sunday, and I have eaten, bathed, washed my hair. I took a very long bath today, and mixed the last round of water just for pleasure, though I was washed and done, otherwise. I would enjoy baths more if I had running hot water from a shower that pelted down thick beaded strands, like it was at the hotel in Chandigarh, and if the bathroom stayed warm for a while afterward, but this will also do, especially because that wastes a lot of water, plus it's not as cold as it was these last few days.
Mother saw a painted stork in Sanjay jheel today. I am very glad that they have begun to go to the lake and the park. She looked very nice in the bright, rani-coloured shawl I had bought her from Chandigarh. She wore a warm violet salwar, kurta and a white sweater with it.
I made doughy pasta yesterday, but got the sauce right. Ate lovely crunchy toast with butter and jam, a recent discovery. It tastes even better with honey and butter.
The poet (fawh!) texted, asking to meet yesterday. But I have no interest, and the days have been too full to accommodate that and also content. Of course I woke up remembering the Kolkata douchebag and I was texting a drunk guy who talked about how cool it was to meet his ex-girlfriend, but it's all fine.
I kept thinking of the luck potion, Felix Felicis, in Harry Potter, and how he kept having this feeling that something good would happen, but also how it was actually a placebo.

Ma's BP is still very high: 170/100. I have been panicking since last night. The doctor added another medicine. But now she feels discomfort after the second Nebicard of the day. I just don't know why this is happening. I so so don't want to go through a major event again and don't want her to.
Looking at Facebook, I feel incredulous at how many people are completely untouched by such loss and illness and how for some, it just doesn't seem to end. And also incredulous at how I am not allowed someone to depend on. That others are also going through parents' illness but they don't panic like me because all their stakes are not in one person. 

I am going to write a series of short posts about all the things I had meant to write since I meant to write so many things, then didn't.

I feel SO SO cold. Temperatures are supposed to have gone up from today, but after a bath and change of (I think) month-long home outfit, I eventually piled on the following:
a t-shirt
a woollycot shirt
a thick sweater
a padded jacket
a shawl worn like a skirt over woollycot pajamas
half-fingered gloves (because, why not, when the aim is to be completely warm)
tupi
double-layered shoe-like sockers from Nepal

C had bought these lovely double-cover gloves from Nepal, which is infernally stupid since she lived in Bangalore at the time, and is now in sweltering Singapore. I was shivering on my way back last night and thinking that they must be languishing and forgotten somewhere in her vast cupboard, if not given away without being worn. It was also stupid of me to not have bought a pair since I could have made good use of them, but I wasn't into gloves then.

I went to Sri Lanka. My travel companions were quite a duo. I don't plan to travel with them again, though half a country away, I am happy to be friends and exchange pleasantries.
I am growing embittered with how things have fallen/are falling into place with most of my friends while I stay stuck and get ever more mired in my life which I don't want. Though if I weren't so discontent with the bits I don't like, I would see that it's purposeful and challenging, which I really need, because I am not really self-motivated. Also, my self is untarnished by compromise which always make me treat myself badly.

Two of my authors have fallen through this week. I am struggling to come out of a half-year haze. Things are becoming like at my last place of work, and it's hard to care. I recently went on a work trip and laughed and said mad things like I don't have the chance to do much of anymore. Perhaps it's because the person I was with is new to the company, and is not a little mad herself.
I am actually very scared about the work situation.

Ma's pressure, we found at the cardiologist's, yesterday, was 190/90. He increased her medicines and said it would come down, and maybe it's the cold. Also said the way to check the condition of the heart and arteries was to do a stress echo once in every two years. He also pooh-poohed me down when I asked about testing microalbumin. The treatment won't change, he stated, while staring at me like I'd asked him to eat a horse.
I now pray like I used to before, for help, for her health, for my work. I have broken and have no room for that anger for F anymore.

Office has so many people. So many that one has to speak to and deal with, who annoy you, bore you, whose speech is like white noise but who have made themselves important.

I feel so lost. It's like my life is only about running this house, and listening to ma's tantrums when she's in a mood. Things are happening at work which no one bothers to tell me about, and which I am not that ambitious to keep regular tabs on. I get intimations of things going very wrong, which, just give it a bit of time, will tell very badly on us, and it makes me even more hopeless. I could sit on the Internet, and do chores all day, and go to bed, and not register beyond a point that things might slip away at this rate.
What resilience do you muster when at the end of two weeks, your mother tells you, amar khabarey kichhu meshabi na. Jodi amay merey pheltey chao, tahole mishiyo. I think I need to get away, from this house on a daily basis, and for a holiday. Imagine living in your own house, paying your own rent, taking care of your mother, and feeling pushed out of your own house, as a bloody single woman. I would really like to ask those people who tell me to find someone and settle down, HOW?

How do you remember the face of someone you fucked just once?

I'm so tired, I haven't slept a wink
I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink
No, no, no.

I'm so tired, I don't know what to do
I'm so tired, my mind is set on you

Not.

You know what happened, don't you? The massive internal bleeding in the lower GI tract? We came back yesterday, and I hope, dearly hope she is getting better. I think I am losing my mind, my health. I am so overwhelmed, there is no method to my day today: I am just dealing with things as they come. My plans cover, I think, 30% of what needs to be done. 

My mother gave me no quarter in the second half of the day, and I was again close to tears. I want to work, I am very worried about work when I have time to think of it, but where's the time? Today I spent 2 hours intermittently, I think, trying to find my glasses within the house, until ma suggested I check the phone table, and there it was, one arm poking out, looking like a phone wire. So much groceries later, I rush in after finding and feeding a cat and decide to make the chicken stew myself. By then it was 8.30, and sugar checking (down to 115) and panicking about insulin and gyan from O later, I am totally disoriented with no plans, ranting on WhatsApp to M. Monsieur K calls and I am so tempted to give him a piece of my mind in language of my heartfelt choice but I instead talk in clipped tones in pretend how-do-I-care mode. 

Eventually I randomly match with two OK-ish dudes on Tinder, because, who actually cares, and then start swiping left mechanically because, why not. 

I am scared about not finding a full-time maid by the time this attendant goes in 6 days, and with my luck, I might not. There are the doctors to check up with, the surly cook will come tomorrow and make faces and cook horrible food, and the whole gamut of tomorrow will start and go on and on like Groundhog Day, except there's nothing to change but only to put on the best possible face and deal with it. 

What is this, what is happening? How does one change this, make it better, bring the situation under control? Please help, please help.

Tomorrow is chhoti Diwali (rolling eyes, here) and I am going home. Kanna pachhe, because there will be so much chaos, at home while leaving, and then on the way, at the station. Because I wanted to send off the syllabus to my author, scan and send chapters to another author, speak to someone who might help me find a series editor, and all my bloody office forced us to do today was celebrate Diwali. We had to dress up in the shinies, play musical chairs, eat the lunch organised, and then everyone went home before 3, barring a few. Of course I didn't play musical chairs. I really really resent being forced to conform to someone's definition of culture, fun and celebration, that it has to be so loud and shiny, that shitloads are spent on what is a smokescreen to take focus away from shitty increments, and a reorientation of focus from quality work to loud show.
I have hardly worked. I mean, I have, but it's more like dragging the weight along, rather than rushing ahead to do as much as I can and sneaking in some more, if possible. I feel angry, tired and bored all the time. Oh, and also cold, since we are in the season of is it/isn't it winter.
My loud and attention-needing colleague really annoys me, my boss came wearing a wedding sari, for heaven's sake, and I know nothing will get done the moment I push away from this dusty, dirty, smoggy, awful city.
My mother is a constant thorn on my mind. Where would I even start if I have to write about her. I have a photo of me which has distinct hints of mortality. My hair is silvering in sad and different ways that it didn't before. And there is no boy in sight. I wish I could go out on a fun date with someone normal: not really an obvious asshole, you know? I have felt so old and unpartnerable these past few days, like, how could I even imagine that someone might want to spend their life with me. 

I want to speak out about the supposed taboos of friendship once and for all.

As a friend, you are expected to be delighted when your friends announce their weddings, their pregnancies, when the kid is born, when the marriage happens. But when you are single, don’t have plans to wed and are not particularly interested in kids – even when you feel all of these – you feel left out of life, you feel like life is passing you by. I wish I had more friends my age who felt this way, who were still looking, you didn’t feel like jumping on to the bandwagon because – middle age. I wish there were avenues in this our society where you could channel your energies as a single woman and have your very different achievements recognised just as much as important milestones as those two above. Like, hitting the 1 lakh mark in salary, yay! Was made manager, yay! Was given a team of people to manage, yay! Took solo trip, has managed to keep ageing parents healthy into their 70s, sterilized X no. of dogs this year, etc.

I am tired of feigning happiness for things that mean nothing to me. It’s like I am looking in at a party which seems interesting but not really, but everybody’s at it, and it seems so happening that it’s only out of intellectual willing that you decide to stay out of it. I survived news of your marriages, now I don’t want to hear about your babies, people! Please take your smug-married things *away* from me. And quit pretending that it’s perfectly fine to expect your single friend to be excited and happy when you tell them about happenings which, by not being a part of, I am setting myself up to be a pariah. Don’t pretend that that isn’t loud, rude, uncouth and unkind.

I *don’t* want to travel with a pregnant friend, I don’t want to be have to take care of her all the time, this is also my only trip of the year, and I deserve to relax too. I’ve also had a hard year.

I wish I could crawl into a hole for a few years and come out after everyone of these smug married people had had their babies. 

Person X makes me sick to my skin. I can't believe that I choose to speak to someone who does this. This is exactly what I loathe and what I fashion my whole identity in reaction to. How can I think of Person X as a friend? It feels so murky. I need to stop speaking to them for a very long time. 

smokies

I don't think I can smoke anymore.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/review/looking-the-movie
This is much better, actually. Though none of them touch on the Kevin bit: how much truth he speaks and the pretty fine acting by Russell Tovey.

Looking: The Movie
BY MATT BRENNAN

JULY 19, 2016

There's a moment in the opening minutes of Looking: The Movie that feels like old times, or lost youth (it can be tough to tell the difference). Pressing against each other in a semicircular booth, sipping Mai Tais under a faded mural, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and his friends revive arguments and repurpose jokes, slipping into the rhythms of their bygone days together. It's an unassuming sequence, peppered with details about the characters we've come to know, but it's also a potent one, sketching the faint outlines of a former life. A year since fleeing San Francisco for Denver, in the aftermath of “Looking for Home,” Patrick is in town for a wedding, and his return is a reckoning—with Richie (Raúl Castillo), with Kevin (Russell Tovey), with the person he was, is, and perhaps still hopes to be. In the movie, a lovely, bittersweet coda to HBO's underappreciated series, even the references to what's changed are a kind of reminiscence. Exquisitely nostalgic, it's as comfortable, and as complicated, as a reunion with an old friend, poring over the past in search of its promise and risking the sharp pang of regret.

In focusing on Patrick's desire to “close the chapter” and “bury the dead,” Looking: The Movie adopts his perspective, seeing the ensemble's successes through his eyes. As Dom (Murray Barlett) watches his restaurant grow, Doris (Lauren Weedman) revels in her relationship with Malik (Bashir Salahuddin), and Agustín (Frankie J. Álvarez), still with Eddie (Daniel Franzese), settles into a new gig, intimations of their own anxieties bubble to the surface, but Patrick's longing suffuses the movie with an idealistic glow. He suspects he's the last of his friends to figure it out, and Andrew Haigh's observant direction, floating through nightclubs and the city's streets, encourages empathic treatment of these doubts. As the image of Patrick alone in a mirror dissolves into a long, lingering pan across couples embracing and kissing, pairs blurring together into perfect wholes, the movie captures the poignant sense of incompleteness that we call disappointment. “This does not last forever,” Doris assures Patrick, seeing in his expression something she's been through herself. But for those in the midst of it, “this” can indeed appear infinite, its resolution out of reach.

If the movie, written by Haigh and series creator Michael Lannan, seems slight at times, in particular as it reduces Richie's boyfriend, Brady (Chris Perfetti), to a smug caricature, its depiction of a life at loose ends is nonetheless affecting, built from the naturalistic precision that's defined the series from the start. It may be that I, too, am in San Francisco for a friend's wedding, spending my time reflecting on the recent divergence of the life I'm leading from the one I'd planned, but Looking: The Movie cuts remarkably close to the bone—in particular Patrick's determination to go back over the preceding decade, as if the act of remembering might reshape the present. While the camera drifts through familiar locations (Patrick's former apartment, a bar called The End Up) and acute sensations (bad blood; cold feet; a steamy, tender fuck), the movie suggests the act of paging through a photo album, fingers caressing certain images, flipping past others. It's more selective in its attentions than the series was, with fewer jagged edges and more clean lines, but it mimics the ache of life's interstitial moments in meticulous detail, earning the sentimental affect of its conclusion: “What happens when you've sobered up, and the wedding's over, and you've lost this sense of romance?”

By the time the camera retreats for the last time, in a deft allusion to “Looking for Home,” Looking: The Movie can offer no firm answer, except perhaps that the only cure for the romance of retrospect is the leap of faith—the new home, the new career, the new marriage—that forces one to “adapt,” as a justice of the peace (Tyne Daly) counsels, if not quite to “change” completely. The movie recalls not Joan Didion's “Goodbye to All That,” to which I made reference in my “Looking for Home” recap, but “On Keeping a Notebook”: “I've already lost touch with a few of the people I used to be,” Didion writes, and this swansong, despite the warm optimism of its final sequence, also replicates her half-rueful remark. Move forward, Patrick urges himself. Close the chapter. Bury the dead. But his notion of the man he is, or was, remains integral to the man he might become. The one specter none of us manages to fend off is that of our former selves. We're running into them all the time.

Looking: Love, always

From here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/arts/television/looking-the-movie-review.html?_r=0



“Are you all right?” a friend asks the angsty video-game designer Patrick (Jonathan Groff) early in “Looking: The Movie.” It’s the guiding question of the film, one that refers to two inquiries, actually: Are Patrick and his friends, 30- and 40-something gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area, all right with the way greater acceptance — symbolized by legal marriage — is changing their lives? And is Patrick, a narcissistic relationship saboteur, all right as his friends start pairing off for life?
The movie, on HBO on Saturday night, is a delayed finale for “Looking,”which ran for two seasons on the network. Written by the series’s creator, Michael Lannan, and one of its executive producers, Andrew Haigh, who also directed, it has the show’s virtues — its loose, casual vibe, the gorgeous San Francisco locations and the excellent performances by Mr. Groff and by Murray Bartlett, as Patrick’s levelheaded friend Dom.
It also has its faults, including some surprisingly flat acting for an HBO project and a tendency to get dull when the script moves away from the personal and into the larger issues of the gay community. Those glitches are more noticeable in an 85-minute film than they were in half-hour weekly episodes.
The show was criticized during its run for making the promiscuous, neurotic, commitment-phobic Patrick its central character, as if he were standing in for all gay men. The film incorporates and disarms that critique, having the jealous blogger Brady (Chris Perfetti), Richie’s new boyfriend, loudly accuse Patrick of being bad for the gays.The movie belongs to Patrick, to an even greater degree than the series did. It’s a bittersweet romantic comedy, with a journey through self-discovery toward love against the backdrop of a wedding. Having fled San Francisco for Denver at the end of the series, following his latest horrible breakup, Patrick returns for the City Hall nuptials of his friends Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez) and Eddie (Daniel Franzese). The action consists of a series of encounters — with his old boyfriends Richie (Raul Castillo) and Kevin (Russell Tovey); with a 22-year-old pickup; with Dom — that force Patrick to assess his choices and gently, if not all that realistically, push him toward the one we want him to make.
But Patrick was always the show’s most interesting and affecting character. Mr. Groff always made his tics, inconsistencies and operatically scaled mistakes believable, and it’s true again in the film. When Patrick goes home with the 22-year-old — a fellow video-game designer — Mr. Groff shows us both his almost giddy delight during their (quite explicit) sex and, afterward, his reflexive condescension mixed with alarm as the younger man calls him out for running away from his problems.
While it was never at the heart of the show, one of the best things about “Looking” was the rapport of Patrick and the slightly older, much wiser Dom. Likewise, the best thing about the film is a scene between the two of them in which Patrick threatens to make his most destructive mistake yet. It’s a crucial moment — funny and terrifying and difficult to pull off — that seems to come out of nowhere, but Mr. Groff and Mr. Bartlett handle it with casual finesse. In a show about loneliness and friendship, it helps to have two actors who can so easily convince us that they’re the greatest of friends.


It breaks my heart a little when I let myself think of this series being over. Perhaps it's because it showed a different life from heteronormative (how easily the words trip off one's tongue in these times) society's, because I don't fit that life either, because I am single when most people/friends are not, because it's about friendships which has always been my mainstay. I feel this desperate longing for wanting to live more of their lives through more episodes, and to say goodbye and forget about it really hurts.
My friends too have paired up, people are starting/have started families. People are also coming back after years living in other countries: I have people to go to after like an adult life's worth of training in how to not want to be with one's closest friends. But it's also now like this review says: here you are, as prepared for life as you can possibly be, and but where do you go? Do you keep hooking up with people, do you stop because it's lost its relevance? You don't, really, because you do want to have sex and are totally not in the running for shukno mohila. But you also want your Eddie: someone to bitch to, someone to tell when you find something interesting.
I was walking down to the grocery store today evening to buy bread. Without any bags to carry, I walked fast and with a straight back, and my calves felt strong and able. I want to walk as free and strong always and with someone with whom that would not be at odds.

Here's a song from the second season which captures some of what the series is in my head:

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.