Musings on a Cheston Cold & Flu

 I should lessen the amount of times I cry listening to music, even if it's just for a few seconds. Sadness is a comfort now. 

I told someone about a hidden daydream. Wearing a wine-dark plain lehenga underneath a deep lilac kurta. Twirl the swirling fabric to show off my painted Vans; I hope they last until I get a chance. Aquamarine nail-polish and tattoos of flowers as thick bands on my wrists. I always loved the idea of covering my wrist, but never enjoyed the weight of watches and chafing rakhis. A tattooed choker around my neck, I think I like the idea of being bound too much. Not having to make decisions, letting go…

I remember reading once “Those who delight in being alone are either beasts or gods” and I don’t want to know who said it. Cause it would mean a man said it, and I can’t have any more memories sullied with mortality. Its fallibility. Everything would fall apart if we gave to it its history and context and author, not because of the disbelief that something created it but because it knows everything there is to know. A box, and there is no more peering out when the box holds everything. But even it must be carried somewhere, placed in storage in its wholeness. Stowed away, unknowingly fleeing citizens of a violence they used to partake in, having become it. 

Manifestation is a word my therapist gifted to me carefully, knowing I would understand its gravity and how I would begin to see it everywhere within the extensions of my being. Loneliness manifests itself in chasmatic, sudden moods. Middle of conversations and I would see beautiful men walk past, off starts the daydreams of hugs. Letting go. I would forget for a second that I am a social being and the people who have just reappeared like apparitions of a glitching future are my friends. They saw the shift. They say nothing. They smile, knowingly, sad. I smile back, the same way. We mean different things, but all that matters is that we are silent to see them. 

It is Saturday night, and my room is adorned with tidbits and trinkets past-me loved and I still adore. The child never goes away, perhaps learns to love anew each time, gives new meaning, new purpose, new eyes each time. The most formless of them all would be this painted rock I got on a trip to Trieste. There is something akin to my mother’s lace placemat for a glass-bubbled plastic flower painted, indelible on its onyx surface, ashen if the light glints off of it right. It has no meaning from me, and yet it remains. Its presence is a fact I’ve become used to. Too comfortable. Its hanger of woven twine is rough and ribbed on my fingers, having been tied and untied too many times. Everytime I make a temporary home, it and a turquoise and gold-rimmed dreamcatcher always find their way into a secure corner in my utilitous backpack. Its feathers have blackened in the two years as I bought it; faux-representation of the effort it puts in to stop the dreams of alien hometowns that keep visiting me from time to time, dropping in uninvited like old friends who raid your fridge and camp out on your sofa. They will never leave. They never leave.

My nini blanket is the same way now, never having left my side in nearly twenty years. Its sky-coloured cotton is worn smooth and familiar against my cheeks and lips and the tongue that makes a tuk-tuk sound: the only memory I have of being one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight years old. It blankens easily with my falling hair and smog-bathed faces, its threads slowly loosening and fleeing as it tries to get away from what I am, at least I think. I can never be too sure of childhood mementoes - would they screech in horror in their inanimate silence as they recognise the dirtied lakes that decorate me now. Pond scum and tadpoles. Or will they see the moss covered cottage that lies at the bottom that I have made a home in, and join me?