Sometimes when I am feeling jobless and just plain ignorant, I go through the contacts on my phone. I dont like playing mobile games much, Snakes is okay but Sudoku is too demanding on one's lack of concentration and that music thingy is noisy. I use a basic nokia handset. I think in this relatively pointless exercise of going through these names and their numbers I do something more productive than fantasise about my past.
Its surprising the rate at which people zoom into our lives and then fade and then in some strange cyclical fashion come back. Really strong emotions like love, hatred, disgust, lust are experienced with such Hailey's comet like personalities. You will stay up nights and talk with them, wait outside their house or hostel (if you are not let in past the curfew hour), imagine breaking into the same residence, text till your phone runs out of text balance and you resort to mycantos or way2sms. After all this talking, when you have find each other interesting and all, someone makes the mistake of liking someone else. Then suddenly the conversations stop because feelings have got involved, feelings of a definable nature. Expectations have been created, routine affections need to be expressed! And then the comet departs and we wait till the next new comet arrives.
But in all of this, there are some people we think about all the time. Or maybe things they said or ponder over, repeatedly, a moment we spent with them. It can be simply a moment when you stared into their eyes, from behind dust stained glasses, wondering whether they are thinking what you are thinking at that point of time. Or it can be someone standing outside your door, pretending to be a weight-lifter with a tiny umbrella.
Change is a vital force in my life. Its positive effects make me realise that loosing sleep over failed relationships is not really worth it because hardly any relationship fails per se. Maybe the way we wanted to remain in the other person's life changes but seldom does anyone leave completely. Because even the strongest of bonds becomes loose and transforms with time. I like the idea of stimuli jumping over synapses from the loose ends of dendrons. I have a feeling that after a point, my best interactions with people are like that. Jumping stimuli. If it comes for a sustained period, my nerves become tense.
The value of departing from a person's life at the right time, with just the right amount of information left behind becomes all the more essential now. I have embraced the traveller side of my personality. Two rejections in ten months was quite enough to make me realize that I'll not find happiness in love. And I have an excuse from God as well. One ex notes, "Being in love with you is like being Man Friday on an island, where you are Robinson Crusoe." I guess that has changed in several ways but its a handy divine excuse, through a human messenger.
So I leave. Knowing that the person I care about has other greater problems than me and I can visit other planets for the time being.
And text people or call those who still haven't appeared in their scheduled time.
"Like many folk, when first I saddled my rucksack,
feeling its weight on my back-
the way my spine
curved under it like a meridian-
I thought: Yes. This is how
to live. On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow
and Zagreb, or the Serbian white
cells of scattered airports.
it came clear as over a tannoy
that in restlessness, in anony
mity:
was some kind of destiny.
So whether it was the scare stories about Larium
-the threats of delirium-
and baldness-that lead me not to a Western Union
wiring money with six words of Lithuanian,
but to this post office with a handful of bills
or a giro; and why, if I am stuffing smalls
hastily into a holdall, I am less likely
To be catching a greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee
than to be doing some laundry
is really beyond me.
However,
when, during routine evictions, I discover
alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway
comment-on a postit-or a tiny stowaway
pressed flower and bottom drawers.
I know these are my souvenirs
and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest distances I've travelled
have been between those people. And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their lives."
Its surprising the rate at which people zoom into our lives and then fade and then in some strange cyclical fashion come back. Really strong emotions like love, hatred, disgust, lust are experienced with such Hailey's comet like personalities. You will stay up nights and talk with them, wait outside their house or hostel (if you are not let in past the curfew hour), imagine breaking into the same residence, text till your phone runs out of text balance and you resort to mycantos or way2sms. After all this talking, when you have find each other interesting and all, someone makes the mistake of liking someone else. Then suddenly the conversations stop because feelings have got involved, feelings of a definable nature. Expectations have been created, routine affections need to be expressed! And then the comet departs and we wait till the next new comet arrives.
But in all of this, there are some people we think about all the time. Or maybe things they said or ponder over, repeatedly, a moment we spent with them. It can be simply a moment when you stared into their eyes, from behind dust stained glasses, wondering whether they are thinking what you are thinking at that point of time. Or it can be someone standing outside your door, pretending to be a weight-lifter with a tiny umbrella.
Change is a vital force in my life. Its positive effects make me realise that loosing sleep over failed relationships is not really worth it because hardly any relationship fails per se. Maybe the way we wanted to remain in the other person's life changes but seldom does anyone leave completely. Because even the strongest of bonds becomes loose and transforms with time. I like the idea of stimuli jumping over synapses from the loose ends of dendrons. I have a feeling that after a point, my best interactions with people are like that. Jumping stimuli. If it comes for a sustained period, my nerves become tense.
The value of departing from a person's life at the right time, with just the right amount of information left behind becomes all the more essential now. I have embraced the traveller side of my personality. Two rejections in ten months was quite enough to make me realize that I'll not find happiness in love. And I have an excuse from God as well. One ex notes, "Being in love with you is like being Man Friday on an island, where you are Robinson Crusoe." I guess that has changed in several ways but its a handy divine excuse, through a human messenger.
So I leave. Knowing that the person I care about has other greater problems than me and I can visit other planets for the time being.
And text people or call those who still haven't appeared in their scheduled time.
"Like many folk, when first I saddled my rucksack,
feeling its weight on my back-
the way my spine
curved under it like a meridian-
I thought: Yes. This is how
to live. On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow
and Zagreb, or the Serbian white
cells of scattered airports.
it came clear as over a tannoy
that in restlessness, in anony
mity:
was some kind of destiny.
So whether it was the scare stories about Larium
-the threats of delirium-
and baldness-that lead me not to a Western Union
wiring money with six words of Lithuanian,
but to this post office with a handful of bills
or a giro; and why, if I am stuffing smalls
hastily into a holdall, I am less likely
To be catching a greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee
than to be doing some laundry
is really beyond me.
However,
when, during routine evictions, I discover
alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway
comment-on a postit-or a tiny stowaway
pressed flower and bottom drawers.
I know these are my souvenirs
and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest distances I've travelled
have been between those people. And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their lives."
