It's that holy time of the year when birds fly home, when warmth becomes the only comfort..

Even Christmas is a  thing  of choice  – you see, there is an option you can sink down under the blanket thru’ the entire light of the day and wake up to a cheerio brunch and throw your aching knees on the recliner and watch television, thanking heavens for a day off  –  or – you can outdo the first light of the day, crawl to the Christmas tree to reach those tiny, shining boxes with the restlessness and the impatience of a child and have some loved ones over to cut into that fruit cake you spent an entire evening on and let the glasses spill some eggnog and make smiles and laughters of love.  Everything about life is in reality a thing of choice. Everything – happiness, love, laughter, friends, holidays, or a simple scoop of ice cream - any single thing of beauty- if you see is never an accident. Neither is it all simply sachets of gifts thrown from above. It is what you choose, what you make of. And we all have potential as gigantic as this universe to turn an empty window of time into a bracket of sweet memory....to make our own stories....to fill our heart with love. And no matter how brutally life hits you down on the head with a sledgehammer, make yourself a promise to fearlessly come back for a lot more of life and never ever give up on happiness and to create many smiles and laughters of love. Happy holidays.

Cancer & other disasters of life...(2)

Memories from mom’s last days, you know, from the hospital, are kinda like those dementors from Harry Potter – they come in masses, knock every ounce of strength away and blow me down to tiny, wobbly, brittle pieces until I become nothing but a miserable puddle of tears once again. And I succumb another time, this time worse than the last, until I’m so blind from pain I can only weep like a child, lost in the woods, not knowing which direction home is. All the resolve to be strong fails. All of life’s logic flops in front of my own eyes into ripples of nothing more respectable than some cheap magician’s humbug. All of it, like God and other animals of life, seem such a spectacular waste of time. 

I'm so damn bored of green tea & tears

I want to be happy. I want to forget and be just sage enough to keep the good things. I want to go to bed and not be afraid of thoughts and loneliness creeping in from under the pillow. I want to sleep so sound my lips part open to eat all the air, one cheek dug deep into the pillow. I want to listen to the radio and shake a leg. I want to sit with my closest confidantes and cry my past out, empty out the Kleenex box, wiping every drop of tear away and feel like I’m through. I want to wake up at dawn and step out in my tennis shoes to feel the sun on my shoulders. I want to see the birds and the geese and the squirrels and the pink sky slowly rising; it’s been so damned long I can’t remember what that feels like anymore. I want to walk so long and feel the strength, feel the youth, feel the love, like I’ve still got it all. I think I just want to be happy.

Even when the sun goes down, the moon covers the dark...it's nature's way of life

I think I never understood or appreciated that having a baby is life’s extraordinary way of helping you to get out of your own way, to move you into a different point of view, to make you believe that you are capable of offering a world of love, everyday for the rest of your life, to a tiny individual who put you through many hours of the most excruciating, agonizing, I-can’t-come-out-of-it-alive kind of pain you have ever physically experienced or you would in future (unless you go on to make another or some more). It’s the only means of experiencing what your breasts are truly for. It’s a reassurance of the fact that life, even over hundred thousand years of existence and evolution and failure and death and all the helpless mayhem, does begin again and bring in just the same magnum of wonder. It’s the finest way of God to bring balance in the voids of a world that is big time screwed up in chaos and heartbreaks.   

When the going gets tough....what do they say?

In desperate times, I have discovered it’s rather best to turn inward, run around the maze like a mad bull and dig out everything I have buried deep under - vague dreams, a few things I might be good at, the darkest memories, unfinished little projects, old friends, fears, some broken relationships, happiness – everything ! The kind of things you would find unleashed inside your own inner world - I mean, my God, it’s a jungle out there !! But for once, I don’t wanna stop digging, I wanna go under the mess and not be afraid of getting dirty. You know, dig those degraded plastics out. Clean out, explore, detoxify, just don’t stop until I feel like I’m making something out of this. It may not take me anywhere. I may not unearth any prized gems from there. I’m not on an exploration, just a quiet weekend trip without any expectations. Sort of. That’s okay. But I wanna know what I’m made of, what lies within the ordinariness of everyday living, what comes after loss and a lot of pain, what I’m capable of, what my innermost places look like, bring out everything. Don’t be afraid, just pull them all out, one by one. At least, get out in the sun and run. There is a good chance my instincts may come out alive there. It might not be a bad project.

Because eventually, it always leads me to you..it always has.

We are not entirely our heart. We are only half of it. The choices we make are based on the desires, boundaries and ego of that half a piece of what we call 'heart'. The other half of it is the soulmate we seek, it belongs to the one who will tell us in the face how wrong our understanding was and how correct our mistakes were; the one who will make you believe life hasn’t started yet and that you are willing to travel a lifetime, learning how; the one with whom, it’s impossible to deny truths; the one without whom, life could be all misunderstood. It’s the irony of life that such an intense, passionate, life altering relationship could come and leave at an utterly unprepared time of your journey or could last for a long, really long time. But once it has touched your life (and perhaps gone), everything prior to that experience becomes meek and everything after turns out stronger, better.

Even the mistakes.

 

'Something's always going to keep us near each other...even if we aren't together.' 

                                                                                                  -Unknown   

They say walk over a lemon and your curses are cured

In your way through finding answers and reasoning and justification for every single upheaval you pass through, you will discover that the greatest human being you are ever going to know personally and so intimately is no one but yourself, because through every single moment of the journey you made, as a person, you have taken many chances to believe, to understand things and understand them so wrong, to make mistakes, to stumble and trip over yourself, to feel mortified and pained.  But at the end of it, you did pick yourself up from the stinky little ditch and carried on, blind or otherwise, still answerless, straight into the future. When you look back, they were not just stops you made by failure; they were moments you lived your power and used that opportunity to put your ego together, pretended to smile and moved ahead. It was simply an act of unsympathetic courage. You better be fucking proud of that.

Even if you catch it behind a garage, a sunset is still gonna blow your mind.

Now, not all things in life have a logic. Not all feelings in your mind have an explanation. Not all people have a reason to be a certain way. If you asked a hopelessly romantic teenage lover girl, why on earth she would give up her entire being for a man she loved, she probably wouldn’t have a reason any more than the fact that she just loved him. She loved him. Period. That was reason enough for her love. There, justified, certified and signed.  I think we all are like her in some way or another. We grow up, yes, to strong, mature, bright adults but keep a little bit of that girl inside our heart. We remain crazy about something. We long for something for years and years. We give up on all practical science for a delusional belief that no one in this world can understand but us. Because we simply love something. A lot of love without a reason. That’s how love should be; without reasons, without boundaries. And as I have learnt, nothing in life must seem more important than that random, irrational, senseless share of love. I’ve been looking for MY random, irrational, stupid love for a long time and I think after years of trying tads of this and that, I have it figured. It’s travelling. It’s one experience that I fall in love with again and again despite coming back many times with bruised knees or sleepless nights or irreparable tan. It doesn’t always treat me so well but nothing in this world gets me more delighted than a novel place of beauty. It’s a companion who has never let me down. It’s the only place I could hide under when the world gets shaking underneath. I could go, sit in the woods and go over my life for hours with no one around, or I could go, feel the water in my ankles and deal with the cold replies life throws, or I could sit by a dock, swallow the emptiness and accept that mom is gone, or I could simply lose myself to the frenzy and the laughter of a wonder obsessed crowd and leave the world behind, loneliness et all. I could just go, some place, any place. That will do.  Travelling, I figure, is truly the true love of my life.

 

'That's because true travel, the kind with no predetermined end, is one of the most selfish endeavors we can possibly undertake-an act in which we focus solely on our own fulfillment, with little regard to those we leave behind.'

                     - Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author

Something to keep me, like from life..

For once, I think it’s worth my time to get serious about something: writing, health, books or perhaps yoga for a simpler start.  Anything. Just SOMETHING! It all seems pointless though. But more necessary than ever. Mom left behind in me, apart from, of course a LOT of other tormented things, astonishing amounts of empty spaces in my mind. Really, my God! For days after her passing away, I sat through those hollowness of hours in complete disbelief, wondering ‘Oh God, what am I going to do with all the time everyday for the rest of my life?’ And it’s driving me crazy!  It’s still a clueless feeling for me because for more than 31 years, I’m simply used to living around her - sending all my thoughts her way, cracking every single morning with her, calling her up around 3:00 AM to ask her if she still had in her cupboard a favorite kurta of mine that I probably used during my high school year (of course, she did), going over memories of the good and the bad days we had had, collecting souvenirs to later gift her from my travelling to let’s say, an artless Amish county by the suburbs, getting mad at her for not watching a movie I loved, quarreling my way thru’ all the frustrating moments when I just couldn’t get her to agree with me(on a lot of things),  laughing stupid about some random, really old holiday memory, crying our heart out thru’ her initial days of diagnosis, hoping against the darkest odds that we would make it, sharing every tiny little secret of life, dark or funny, trying to create small spasms of happiness, as little as it might have been, as much as we could, whenever it was possible– my God! It’s unbelievable the way my entire life axised  around this lady. 

Sometimes I pick up the phone, dial her number and let it ring a couple of times before I end the call. It has never happened that I called and she never picked up. I won’t let any reality disturb that feeling. Nothing ever.

Cancer and other disasters of life..

I think one side effect of cancer is really underrated – the aftermath it leaves on the family watching their loved one losing it all in the battle. I mean, losing it all – health, happiness, hope and hair. I remember when they put those kinky wires all around mom several times a week, she would muster her petite, left over portions of energy up to ask, ‘so how long should I keep my hands steady?’ The nurse would smile and offer her reassurance a.k.a sympathy, saying ‘until we get the medicine in, not long.’ Things constantly beeped around her or threw some random numbers. Sometimes the doctor took pity and decided to skip a test or two. He would look at us and fake it, ‘she’s fine for now.’ We would nod, faking it back. Those days, I saw a lot of her hair up close. Mostly because she lay facing the wall, most of the day. It was growing back from the last chemo. Many little spirals that resembled Fusili, they curled up and snuggled all around her little head now, like every strand there was trying its luck at every chance left to fight back to life. I have a feeling her hair really loved her back, the only thing about her body that cancer could not really conquer. 

But in the end, it’s a war we were going to lose. It’s a meaningless war. It’s a meaningless disease.

I need a little more room here..

Mind is the trickiest place ever to be in – volatile, wild, deranged, vast, hazy, aggressive, strong, maternal, disordered, fertile, combative, stupid, strong, courageous, fierce, weak, generous, vulnerable, funny, vague, capable, romantic, fearless and of course, incredibly a lot more. It is all yours, so completely, no one else can ever be there with you in that place, sightseeing.  It’s your own big empire. You run it. Nobody cares if it is pretty or gawky. No one is ever gonna come, take a look at it and say ‘That’s a nice place you have in here.’ What you wanna make it into is a choice you make, make, make and make again, every single day of your life.

Time up..

You know people say, ‘Get back to life. Look you have a future.’ It’s like you are given a small window of time to mourn the loss, to miss the life you used to have, to cry or whatever and when the time is up, you have to turn your stuff in, whether you’re finished or not and move on, like the exams we had in school. But in a way, they are right. Someone needs to cap the time off your hands and firmly show you where the exit is. You are never going to be done otherwise. You are never going to stop crying. You are never going to stop missing. You are never going to stop wishing that life were different.

The story in between.

 

When you lose something so big from your life is when your true grit comes under real test. Not only does it leave you depleted of your strength and hope and happiness, it simply throws you into an ocean of uncertainty without making an allowance for the fact that you don’t even know how to swim. But I guess that’s life. It’s full of nothing but tough, grueling, amazing uncertainties; it’s always going to be that way. It always was.

So when it does happen and when we do get flung by its power, what do we do? Learn to swim? Try and stay afloat? Try to hold on to anything that might keep us from drowning? Cry for a lifeboat? Or do we simply surrender to the invincible force of the tide and let our soul fall away? I think all these options require courage and an incredible amount of human effort (except for maybe the last one where you let yourself drown, but even that takes courage; no effort perhaps).  If you are lucky, a lifeboat might just cross by. But the irony of life usually is that the lifeboat is moving in the opposite direction and does not hear you.

The kind of place I feel I am caught up in right now after mom left is pretty much bang on.  It’s the exact feeling of trying to hold my head above the water, gasping every breath, constantly getting pulled by the undercurrent. When I think of it, it’s astonishing that life would work under such a sadistic sense of humor. On one hand, I mean, I was losing this person who simply meant EVERYTHING to me (in every definition of the word ‘everything’). I knew I was losing her and that I couldn't do anything to stop that and on the other, I had this new person, basically a newborn and practically still a stranger to me, who smiled at me in wonder while I wept in despair. It was like life’s way of telling me ‘you can’t have it all, baby.’ But I wanted it all. I was not asking for the moon and the sun to show up at the same time. I just wanted my mom. I wanted her by my side as I was entering the big world of motherhood myself. I wanted her with me on that ride. Just a regular, simple, amorous, dhal rice-eating family, that’s all I wanted. I thought that was every individual’s fundamental need.

I thought that’s what everyone had. I thought that’s the way life worked – to be a child, to grow up, to make your choices, to build your future and all along the way, your parents were going to be there for you, watching your back, holding you from behind, taking care of you, loving you like no other and alive! BIG MISTAKE !

 

A little shy of six hundred words, about thousand days later - that's not terrible. No.

 

 I think I am going to write. For a while. For a few days. I don’t know how long. I don’t know if I can sustain the thought of it for long. I haven’t written in two years. Probably more. Not even many emails.

It's like, things look different. Those smaller things of life that mattered and made it all beautiful – summer, friends, birthdays, a roll of canoli in a baker’s case, a stranger’s smile, surprises, cappuccino, sunshine, purple leaves in fall, a kiss, a gift box on the table, that one phone call, a baby’s touch, a spoonful of ganache - I don’t know if I can love them the way I used to. I miss those days. The only experience I believe I can honestly write about now is possibly how it feels to live in a world without mom. It’s perhaps going to be a sad blog. Maybe forever. Or maybe until one day, I just decide to become reformed or have the energy to write about the newborn in my life. But I will write. 

 

In every sense, I just need to get myself to one end of that string I’m looking for. The right side. The good side.  Really, what is there to lose?

 

So, the way people resolve to go to gym to get into better shape, I am choosing to use this space to get into better shape – a happier shape. It’ll be like a regimen for a random number of days. Like a few odd days of finding my way through writing again.  Who knows? There is a chance I might dig out something from here – some piece of my soul – lost, yet to be found. In life, there is a least bit of chance for everything.

 

But this is a good start. At least, I am able to write.

 

It should mean something good.

As you become more clear about who you really are, you'll be better able to decide what is best for you - the first time around.  – Oprah Winfrey.

 

 

Day 1.