Eventuality.

I think too much.

Sometimes you have so much to say but you bite your tongue and say it all in your head instead. Or you type out a long long mail or a text and delete without hitting Send. For a moment, you read the entire thing, reflecting on the raw truth of every word written. That's truth right there, in your hands. Its your every thought in words, uninhibited and unrestrained. You read it, all those words you will never allow yourself to say out loud, and you delete. You erase every evidence of the existence of your insecurity and your fears. You start afresh on a blank page, blocking out what is true. You pretend like it never happened.

Slowly you start doing it more often. Concealing more than revealing. Choosing silence over uncomfortable confessions. Wrong over right. Easy over difficult. Lies over truth.

Till it all becomes easy. Till its not a concerted effort anymore. Till it is hardly an effort. Till it becomes you.

Until you are left a shadow of what you were, and your relationship is just a delicately fabricated web of lies borne out of good intentions. And you are caught up in the irony of living a life entirely manipulated by you, but one you have little control over.

I think too much. That is my excuse.

"Jealous? ME?! No way!"

The jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads.  ~Dorothy Dix


My laptop crashed yesterday. Now I hate the usage of the word "crashed" in this context. Like it is somehow being implied that it met a much gorier end then what was actually the case. And mine certainly did not go hurtling down into a ravine or knife sharp rocks. It just decided to stop functioning. Like it has a mind of its own and has had enough of starting and hibernating and what not. Which is a little exasperating considering the fact that its not even 8 months old. My faith in technology (SONY) deteriorates with time.

The quote up there is interesting in how it sums up a fear within a fear. I am so paranoid of being jealous, when it comes to relationships, that I do everything that I possibly can to not indulge in it, and in the past, defying karmic logic, what I subconsciously feared or possibly foresaw eventually turned out to be true. Cosmic cruelty much? Oh yes sir!

Sometimes I also wonder whether is it just me or have we women, as a gender, unanimously agreed to let go a lot of things in a relationship just so we can avoid that neverending poisonous trip of jealousy we are prone to. The fighting is okay, it can get sorted. The misunderstandings are fine, they can be correctly understood. But what about that which is just restricted to your mind? What about jealousy?

Talking only for myself, a LOT of times, when certain fleeting comments hurt me, I would just pretend to not have heard. Or worse, I'll try to overcompensate for it and end up making it a little worse for myself. Because obviously I can't show the other person that I am insecure! Or that it actually does hurt me sometimes when they make stray remarks. It's like the unspoken Woman-Code.

You don't show it.

You are allowed to do whatever you wish to, in order to make yourself feel better. Anything BUT telling the truth. You can complain about it to your girlfriend on the phone, you can convey your irritation in disguised ways, you can retreat in your shell and be hostile for a while, heck..you can write in your journal about it! But not a word. And those of us who ARE bold/stupid/classy enough to give their *insert relationship here* a good (and much deserved) mouthful are invariably termed as "insecure psycho freaks".

Its a harsh harsh world out there. But its best to treat it like a mouthful of wine. Keep it on the tip of your tongue, swill it around your mouth cautiously, taste it with even more wariness, and finally, because there's not much else left to do, swallow.

The Only Way Out is Up.

Familiarity can give you such a pleasant high. Reading the words written by a very dear friend, seeing your name mentioned there and knowing in a fraction of a second that it is you that she refers to...that instant warm glow it floods you with...safe to to say not many things come closer to making you happier.

This if for you, if you're reading, Thechemicalengineer; those memories are irreplaceable, that time so sublime. If I start to think back, I can't point out a single period of my life before the age of 17 that didn't have you playing a significant role in it. How many people have the joy and the fortune to still know and love the person who saw them on their very first day on Earth? You probably didn't make much sense of what was going on either then. 8 months of existence doesn't equip you with a lot of understanding, especially when it comes to seeing another much tinier baby in a hospital bed. Do you sometimes wonder if our friendship was sealed by fate right then? It is so easy to believe it was meant that way. That we were in fact destined to connect so effortlessly, with an unspoken promise of forever?

It has been much too long. But can I just say that the distance and time doesn't really make me feel any less for you? I love you too.


I got back home early today from college and after a few futile attempts to take a nap (once bitten, never shy), I am here, reading and writing. And even though there are so many times when I crave for some other way to occupy myself, for now, it is enough. It is all I need.


LATER

And because I cannot seem to properly gather my thoughts before I begin to write, I am back to making my edits. I used to call them just that in my old blog. "Edits". Although for the most part they hardly ever were anything more than a two page long rant about something I had forgotten to mention the first time around.

The last few days have been consumed with introspection. With my best friend away from the city, I am left with hours to myself. Needless to say it fills me with an emptiness I cannot describe. You don't know the true worth of someone till they aren't there, a phone call or a text away. But like I keep mentioning (and annoyingly so), I am in a constant effort to lessen my dependence on other people. Companionship and co-dependence threaten to merge tracks for me all the while, and experience has taught me to be wary. It's hardly ever about the other person too. I honestly believe if you need to find the answers to most things in life, you have to turn inside. That's where you find them. And yourself.

I was talking to this same amazing person, my closest friend in Bombay,The Delhiite (and we shall refer to him as that from this moment forth) last night for a good few hours, and it just got me to thinking about how much I have changed as a person, as opposed to what I used to be. Of course, moving to a new city, living away from family and home and your friends changes you, but more so than anything, I have made a concerted effort to change. I have had more than my share of wake-up calls in the past year, all pointing towards the same urgent necessity; I needed to change. And fast.

The last two years of High School saw me transform into everything I had never imagined myself being, and yet I assumed the despicable role with effortless grace (and I am being as sarcastic as I possibly can here). This was carried over to college where the first few months were spent in perpetual melancholy and a very very profound and deep sense of non-belonging. And then finally after about 4 months of trying to fit in to a niche that was never made for me, and a trip back home for New Years that changed everything. It was one week of recklessness and a complete disregard for sense or safety which ultimately left me with a very loud message;

I was a mess. I had to do something about it. And very fast.


Nothing sets you back on track like faith lost in yourself. Nothing delivers a harder blow than a shame that powerful. And I can vouch for the fact that I am not being dramatic here when I say I did not recognize the person I had become. I was no longer the person who preferred to read in the silence of her living room, who wrote in her blog when her thoughts overwhelmed her, who had any sense of what was ethical and safe and in line with her principles. In the simplest words, I did not care. For anything and least of all anybody. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this kind of attitude doesn't take you very far before your knees buckle and there is no ground beneath your feet. Rock bottom is not a pleasant place to be when you didn't pay heed to the journey down south.

But then there is only one way out, and it is up. You either keep lying there for a while and wait to gather strength. Or you get up any way and take a shot at climbing out. I chose the latter. I couldn't bear to be there anymore with myself. I knew what I was capable of being, both the extremes, and I wanted to go back to being what I was for the first 17 years of my life. I wanted all of it back, along with the flaws and the quirks and the insecurity.

And when I think of it, these last 3 months or so have been a journey back, for me. I can recognize the heavily flawed and yet much MUCH nicer person I am capable of being (and had been) coming back eventually. And I am so very proud. When I told my friend Kaypee about this, coupled with a few dozen apologies for sounding too smug, all he said was that I deserved to be.

Sometimes you do need to look back and give yourself credit where it is due.

And in spite of my strong urge to go back and delete the last paragraph, I think I am going to let it stay. As a testimony for the future, and a remainder, that a lot is left to be done. But I am sure getting there.