honey, i’m still free, take a chance on me

:)

One of those moments when something you did, or said, or saw in the past comes back to you suddenly, crystal-clear, and makes you smile, right there in the street. A self-deprecating, self-indulgent, inward-looking, happily bittersweet smile.

Hands in your pockets against the cold, someone stops you on the street, makes the music stop for a moment:

“Can I borrow a cigarette please?” “Yes, of course”

And you walk on.

Thoughts, like people, whirl around your brain. You’re walking roads with people who don’t exist, whose existence is in your memory, who have never seen the streets you’re on. Alternate versions of events march past, one after the other, in an orderly chaos of might-have-beens. You don’t dare close your eyes, for fear of what you might see.

The breeze blows away the evidence, but the question, unasked and unanswered, lingers in the air.

Faint, fading.

—

We do strange things in the night that the morning makes us question. But which was more real, night or morning?

chasing away the hours

Tomorrow’s the last day of college – thank GOD for that. I’m tired of Stella, 7.00 am mornings and listening to (mostly) insipid teachers.

As usual this post is only so that I can kill time and take a break from my essay [on Existentialism and the Absurd in the plays of Sheridan, Shaw and Coward, if you must know] because I can’t write more than 1400 words of garbage and keep going without a break.

Soumya was over last night and we baked into the wee hours of the morning. The result = 1 chocolate pear pie, slightly burnt with a crust that could have done with a tiny bit more sugar but overall, quite enjoyable. We also, in true empowered-single-women style, stayed up watching Love Actually and spying on ex-boyfriends while simultaneously dissing them royally and wondering how we could have ever stooped so low as to bestow ourselves on the aforesaid scum.

Needless to say, we concluded that we ought to save ourselves for more exalted stuff, though Sou still thinks Mr. Darcy is not worth it. I will not give up though, and will continue trying to educate her.

But one thing we agreed on is the strange and arbitrary nature of modern relationships. I mean, one minute you can be so close to someone that you tell them everything, from the act of brushing your teeth to the latest (and unfounded) rumour about your best friend that you can’t tell anyone else because it’d be condemned as bitching…

…and then, one day, you’re bitching about him to your best friend and vowing to never let anyone get that close to you again. It’s quite fascinating to go from intimate to i’d-rather-be-dead-than-see-you-in-the-street.

Ah, the absurdity of life! Let’s all go live in a comedy of manners.

where is the love?

A very run-of-the-mill couple of days. College, home, birthdays, shopping, tv and conversations. Nothing much has changed, since the last week. Or the last month. Does there have to be drama in order to make life worth living? There’s absolutely nothing I can possibly obsess over but that appears to be a problem rather than something to rejoice over.

Hence, I came up with the utterly stupid idea of being set up with someone. Just to combat boredom. Apparently, this is not a good enough reason to find a boyfriend. But I simply can’t bear the thought of emotional commitment, a semi-serious relationship (how serious can anything at this point be anyway?) etcetera. But on the other hand, I don’t want to turn into one of those callous, i’m-only-in-it-for-the-sex (haha, if anything!) types. Lol, as usual, the dilemma is everything.

Maybe the best solution would be to stick to my fictional men. No reality = no messiness.

Snippets:

- I wrote a 1500 word assignment on a book that I didn’t finish reading. Needless to say, I quoted extensively and made up a lot of nonsensical ideas.

- I almost burst into tears this evening when I found myself at a tiny handicrafts exhibition with no money. Not that any of the stuff on display was particularly fetching; I just felt horrible about not buying anything from the earnest salesman who assured me that he and his fellows were going through a very bad patch because of the recession :(

- Never, ever go to the Dhabba buffet on a Saturday. Pradipti and I did, and ended up fighting off great dirty men for space to sit and a chance to grab some of the food before it all disappeared. I was never more disgusted with the race of men than when I saw a pile of at least thirty odd naans disappear about three feet in front of me… all because I didn’t want to get into a fistfight for them. Hmph.

- Minus 1 is, contrary to expectation, MUCH nicer than Star Rock. A little more expensive, but they played better music than at nearly all the clubs I’ve been to in this city.

- Saw the Ex on Sterling Road, looking as supremely blond as can be expected. And, wonder of wonders, ran into the Ex’s blond dad the next day, outside Dhabba. Luckily, no awkward situations occurred with either since in situation 1) I was inside a car with tinted windows and in situation 2) the man was engrossed in a nasal conversation with another North Indian and anyway, I hardly think he’d recognise a girl whom he’s seen in his house a total of twice.

Oh the excitement of my life. I’m almost ready to escape from it.

steeped in history

Somehow, I’ve always felt the past was a more beautiful place to be in. In retrospect, things seemed to have been simpler, people were less self-involved and life, though less convenient was more… lively. Or maybe that’s just my perspective of something that I can never truly experience. Anyway, I’ve been reading the biography of Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire in the late eighteenth century – and what a woman she was. Braving slander, ridicule and censure on a huge scale is something to be admired, especially when the cause is as worthy as hers was.

Incidentally, one thing I realised when I was reading the book was the importance of the lost art of letter-writing. The sheer volume of correspondence between people, especially around two or three centuries ago, is what shapes our understanding of how they lived and what they felt. Sure, they probably wouldn’t have imagined their innermost thoughts and secrets being divulged for public consumption on a large scale, but at least they left something for us to remember them by.

It got me thinking – what would people of future generations remember us by? Blogging sort of performs the function of letter-writing in this century, but it’s all online… who’s to say it will survive? Plus there’s something so wonderfully personal about letters – imagine exploring an old attic and stumbling across letters written hundres of years ago. Letters containing declarations of love, of news and gossip, of advice, of confessions and forgiveness… just reading them would be reliving someone’s entire life.

Maybe that’s a rather idealistic, Romantic view to take of it, but I’d like nothing better. Ah, for an old old crumbling mansion, fully equipped with squeaking wooden floors, chairs that sigh in the night, a wailing ghost in the cellar and a secret passage in the library!

I want nothing more than to live in a place that has seen history happen.