Something She Said

I was thinking about something she said.

That she can’t talk to me about someone because I didn’t know who he was. It’s true. I didn’t know him or him with her. But, I know her. I know how it feels to be in pain. I am not just cursed with the ability to feel like I’m living someone else’s anguish for this to happen ultimately.

I didn’t know the person she fell for either, the person she couldn’t be with. I didn’t know a lot of the people she spoke to me about but she introduced us. The friends and the lovers and the travellers and the heartbreakers. She told me the stories, tragic or funny, tragic and funny. So I got to know them over time.

I don’t think it’s about me knowing him, although it seems reasonable to some extent. It’s more about the immense grief that a delicate bubble of normalcy is holding. Talking will pop it. Who will drown? Not me, sitting in a different city. I can live it with her, ache with her, love her, but she will be left trying to swim with her whole body cramping. That’s true for any pain, but here the intensity is overwhelming. I know the theory.

I miss you though. It isn’t something you need to fix right now, not when nothing seems fix-able.

I know you feel lost, maybe not the exact path you’re lost on, but that you do feel lost. You don’t have to tell me, for me to know it. I know it feels hopeless. Like a rage that realises it can’t fill up a space left behind by someone you love. Like a grief that knows it will sit within that space forever. Just that the walls of your mind will break to make more room, the muscles will know how to hold those emotions, but that’s so far away as to be worthless potentialities at the moment.

Right now, just being on a treadmill at a hundred is all that keeps the bubble from popping. Right now, all other ropes are taut, holding you in place though you’re ready to break. I am thinking of you, as I do a lot, my heart aching at the way this particular year is hurting you.

I wrote something:

I watch you crumble,

from a distant shore.

I watch you stagger, fall,

no boat to take me across.

I watch you tremble,

my voice can’t reach you.

I watch you

on that parallel shore…

But on this side, right in front of me,

you wave to draw my gaze back,

smile and say, “What’s up?”

I can’t smile but I do,

“Nothing much.”

Sky Memory

Ever had the sky and the milieu ask you to remember something?

The evening first turned sepia, like the beginning of nostalgia. A gentle nudge to remember something beautiful. I looked up at the curves and swishes and fluff of clouds and saw the dark flitting shapes of birds. The wind had them aflutter, tragic that their panic looked like fierce shadows moving against the sepia-grey background. I looked up, my elbows propped up on the ledge.

I realised, not for the first time, that people don’t look up usually. I don’t know why. The firmament is the most ethereal art gallery available to us and it’s free. When I looked up today and saw the birds fly by and the clouds move and the wind make it all play, I was in the now. I wasn’t thinking of what had happened or what was going to, I was just a speck under the giant mass of the sky, watching it change colour and scene.

The colour then deepened to pale red, all buildings awash with the same shade. Now the memory was insistent asking to be remembered, but I didn’t know what to remember. The world as it was at that moment was perfect. So the tint was really not helping its case.

Of Rebellion And Foot Massages.

Today my dad accompanied my mom to get an MRI scan done for her.

I’d woken up early and gotten dressed up like a groggy gnome only to be told that there was no need for a tag along and that I could go back to bed. My purpose for trying to go with them was moral support as it was my mom’s first MRI and just thinking about the process of going into a tiny closed up machine made her anxious. However, dad assured me that he’d take care of her and so I changed again and crashed off into sleep. I’d gotten about four hours of shut-eye last night.

Apparently, they first went to one diagnostic centre which has tended to remain shut most times during the pandemic. Thus thwarted, they made their way to another one. Here, my father opened the door to find a morass of people nearly climbing atop one another.

“What is happening here? Where is the manager?!” my Dad thundered into this disorderly mess of human beings, particularly at the people behind the counters. He has his cool moments. “How can you be doing this during Covid times with no order and creating a problem for everyone?!” I know it’s me writing about his experience but trust me, I know exactly how this would’ve gone because I’ve seen this happen plenty of other times.

A few people from the mess chimed in, “That’s what we’ve been saying!” “They’re not listening to us!” “We said that to them!” Rebellion incited, Dad walked back to the car to look for the next place because he sure as hell wasn’t taking mom into that shit fest.

They struck gold with the third diagnostic lab because there was a burly bouncer at the door who looked like he’d whoop someone’s non-distancing ass. As a result the counters had polite queues and were following a token system. The bouncer would call the token number and only then could someone get up from the waiting area to join the queue.

The MRI process as described by mom was daunting initially. The first time they slid her into the machine, she pressed the bell to let her out as it was too confined. The people there were patient, perhaps having to go through the same process plenty of times in a day. She then asked for Dad to be called into the machine area. There was context to this: when her own mom had gotten an MRI, she’d stood by the machine, holding her mom’s foot. So she wanted Dad to come and hold onto her foot, presumably to pull her out so the machine couldn’t suck her in or something. Dad proceeded to give her a nice foot massage while she recited three aartis (prayers) she knew in her head. It was of some comfort that the machine was open at the other end. It took a good fifteen minutes for the procedure to finish.

But I’m proud of how brave my mom was. I wish I could tell her that she’s never stronger to me than when she’s scared but still faces something head on, and not when she never shows fear at all. The latter to me feels like a lie that a lot of people are forced to live just for the sake of others.

Harakiri

My campaign is over. Which means squat, because there’s going to be a new one, and then another and another. I am burnt out crisp at the moment, and irritated with my boss. More because I don’t respect her. I just try and try but those few moments of intelligence are so rare that I’m left to deal with the idiotic part which is much more natural to her.

But honestly, I could crib ad infinitum when it comes to this job overall because it is the most meaningless shit ever. The challenges that come up when you’re doing something that is worthwhile aren’t so much of a problem. I have to make that change myself though. It isn’t easy. I am rather resistant to networking. I can’t keep in touch because someone might come in handy some day. I don’t judge those who do, heck, I admire them. What a nifty skill to have. I, on the other hand, have tried. It just doesn’t feel natural and feels like a time investment where I’d rather do about a hundred other things that make me happy.

So when it comes to things like job searches at least in my country, referral becomes paramount. You could apply through job portals or sites like LinkedIn but just based off of your resumé, you may or may not get an interview call. I’m usually good with interviews, or used to be anyway. Will have to figure if I’ve become rusty. But going back to the problem, the HR may not even see your resumé because they have tons of those to go through.

There are a few options to solve for this: cold messaging an HR professional, or a person you know via via, or the recruiter if that information is shown. But again hit and trial, I guess if you do that long enough something is bound to give. For someone who likes structure, this kind of a system is frustrating. I suppose it is also a chance for figuring this shit out in general.

Problem though is how do I stick around in this job long enough without harakiri…or homicide?

Feel like this is the kind of post one of those side characters in a trial regrets writing when the ‘evil’ lawyer on the side that we don’t want to see win brings it up and causes the jury to lose faith in the poor schmuck. I don’t want to be a poor schmuck so please know that this is hyperbole and meant in jest.

Two Sides

I spoke to an interesting person today thanks to the only dating app I am on. Yes, I’m happy to let you guys know that now I am trying to be more comfortable with voice calls to get an understanding of a person sooner, than text endlessly into perdition. I call that progress, I call that mental evolution. Eh.

Either way, Yogi guy teaches film making and is a full time yoga enthusiast. He is also setting up an eco-community in a village with five of his friends. What is interesting is the way he described being there.

“In the village, it takes at least two, three days to detoxify from the city and adjust. But after that time, you feel rich.”

I wondered in what sense, thankfully he understood, “In the city, when you’re unhappy, you tend to either step out to eat somewhere, meet someone or buy something.” He was talking of rich in that sense, “In the village you actually feel like you have everything, like there is nothing you need anymore. So in the literal sense of the word rich.”

“So is this like a communal living system?” I asked.

“Yes, we have a farm, we intend to grow our own crop. We painted our own homes, divide all the work among four or five of us and yea.”

“That’s a very different life from the city.”

“It really is,” his voice is mellow, oddly like a sine wave going up and down, “It’s what I would like to do eventually, go and settle down there in the village, and maybe come to the city if need be, once a month, maybe lesser. There are certain challenges too like if we need certain supplies we have to drive a long way but it can be managed.”

We then moved onto discuss various books we were reading, or have read and what we thought about them. I can’t tell you how rare it is to find someone to talk about books with. Even among my close friends there’s currently only one bibliophile and she’s only into fiction so sometimes it gets restricted to just that. I also read a lot of fiction but sometimes a girl wants to discuss non-fiction books too.

I also spoke to another guy, but speaking to him has been the equivalent of talking to an entrepreneur trying to raise capital for his venture. Every single thing is a pitch about how great he is, how he believes in exclusivity and how gentlemanly he is. And all this pomposity in our first and second conversation. I also noticed that he tends to be selfish based on his own anecdotes and in a great deal of hurry to advance our conversation along, whatever that means. The thing with someone like that is, I have to spend a lot of energy setting boundaries, which isn’t a fun exercise if I have to do it every five minutes in a conversation. Everything was still tolerable until he asked me in the middle of our second conversation:

“Are you sensitive?”

There was by the way, no context to this. We weren’t discussing anything remotely close to this.

All this while, I had switched off the judgement mode. I did not want to strangle a conversation because I was noting down all the flaws and acting on them. I wanted to live with the flaws a bit to figure if they were actual deal breakers or my mind in overdrive. But when he asked me this question, the switch was on again.

“Sensitive as in?”

“You know if someone says something to you, do you like start crying or lock yourself up in the bathroom? I mean like not lock yourself up but yea, you know does it hurt you a lot if someone says something harsh to you?” he expounded on this, leaving me more and more nonplussed.

“That’s a funny question,” I said, half amused at the idea of me locking myself in washrooms a lot because I was upset. The other half was irritated at the time I now had to waste on such a question.

“Yea, it is isn’t it?” he conceded, “You know whenever I have asked this question, I never thought it was odd until you said ‘as in?’.”

Dear God, I should help him, no, I should help the others he’d ask this question to.

“Back when I was in advertising, we used to do a lot of research where we had to ask questions to figure out the audience’s needs and wants. This is what is called a bad question in research. You never ask such questions directly in that manner. You use other methods to ascertain this. That’s because most people don’t know these answers about themselves. It’s like if I ask, ‘Are you a good person?’ what would you say? There are some instances in which you would do the conventionally accepted ‘good’ thing, other times not so much. But even so you’d be tempted to say you perhaps are a good person, would that be true though? Would you know if you really are a good person? Most importantly, would I get the answer I require by asking such a question? Like in my case, if I had to answer this, I’d say that if someone on the street was to say something to me, I wouldn’t care much, but if someone close to me said something hurtful of course I’d be upset. But that’s pretty much everyone. So what does the answer get us?”

“Whoa, that went really deep,” he chuckled. He knew something about this had upset me. So we moved on quickly from there.

Perhaps because it was a stupid question, no, more than that, it was a lazy question.

You gauge this about a person over time, you notice this about someone. If you want me to serve you the theory of my personality in bite-sized pieces that you won’t even bother to chew, then that’s not going to happen. I am not going to be doing the work for you. Maybe I am being too harsh, or maybe I’m seeing his behaviour in the context of all the other things that have ticked me off. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like it will work.

Working With MK

On our work group, someone shared a news article about a guy whom we worked with years ago, who had been arrested by the national narcotics control unit for buying drugs using Bitcoins. I remember him. I’d had the misfortune of working with him on a project.

MK was diminutive, slender man with a plain, hard face. He had this air about him that was restless and furtive, like someone who had better things to do. Like someone who thought others were wasting his time. I guess he did have ‘better’ things to do like purchase drugs from Europe using Bitcoins and be titled the ‘Crypto King’ in those circles. When I first interacted with him, he’d seemed all right, someone who knew what the ask was and that’s as far as that positive experience went.

After that the man went AWOL, my campaign was going live in a week and the tech aspect wasn’t in place. We had to, at the last minute, get the CTO team involved as this fellow wasn’t under CTO purview. No one, in fact, was clear on what the guy did in the organisation and who he reported to – very Creed from ‘The Office’ situation. The CTO team was so helpful and the one aspect they needed his help on, he acted like a diva and made the process like pulling teeth. He was an egomaniac who couldn’t be bothered to work with the ‘lesser souls’ in the CTO team. An asshole if I had to sum it up.

My colleague told me that he’d been a whizkid when he was new, setting up stuff for the team, meeting all tech requirements with speed. Somewhere along the way he obviously figured his skills could pay more. She also said that when he changed, he’d often book meeting rooms and then if someone stepped into the room, he’d shut his laptop screen and act as though someone had walked in on him committing a crime. Er…possibly true.

Personally, MK caused me a lot of worry, maybe one of his drug deals hadn’t gone through at the time, maybe one of them didn’t accept Bitcoin as payment, maybe the drugs weren’t of great quality, who knows the stresses of such a life. But I did not appreciate him leaving me in the lurch and acting like he’d sort the whole thing out without worries. Anyway, he clearly has bigger problems than his unprofessional attitude on a brand campaign years ago, to worry about now.

The Employee From Hell.

I had no idea that my parents were such trendsetters.

They were the ones who started walking on the roof as a form of exercise, and lo and behold, most of our neighbours have now started doing the same. I suppose it’s to do with the fact that both of them are healthier than most for their age (touch wood), internally for sure but they also look amazingly fit and way younger than their years.

Today was a decent day, after our passive-aggressive arguments last week, my boss and I clearly longed for some peace and were polite paragons of cooperation. There were plenty of thank yous and sorrys. It was rather a perfect world order. I also realised that I have a pattern of making my bosses miserable if they make me miserable. The quid pro quo is strong here.

I don’t mean in a way that makes work suffer, but more like them suffer. I’m the kind of employee that acts as a reflective surface for suffering I suppose. Well, it takes a lot to make me like that too. I usually approach conflict with the aim to resolve it, it’s literally coded into me, so if I’m propagating it, some safety valve has switched off.

I remember in my first job role I was so unhappy with my manager and his debilitating micro-management, lack of a spine in front of external teams, and his incessant haranguing on weekends that I blocked him so he couldn’t call me. I’m not sure how long I intended to get away with it, perhaps it was a sub-conscious or partially conscious want to get fired? He figured it out and nearly wept while telling me how ‘No one had ever done this to him ever!’, but trust me he had made me weep far more. Granted that it was juvenile, definitely not up for a repeat, but it’ll always be a story to chuckle over. Luckily for all concerned, my request for a change of role was granted.

There was another time when I may have employed a sharp tone with my boss with a possible elevation of voice. Again, I had been goaded beyond limits of patience by repetition of a situation. But I did recognise that I was losing my temper and stopped abruptly, but not before my boss lost his and had to talk it through with a colleague and calm down with a long smoke break. I did apologise for that one but he’d already sorted it out in his head and was truly understanding of the situation.

Closer to the present, specifically last week, my boss took important calls, calls that affected the work flow, made me liable to look like a fool in front of our agencies, threw us to achieve impossible deadlines and all of this without consulting me. She pushed up the launch for a campaign and told us it’s the next day! This, after clearly delegating that the two of us, a colleague and I, were the ones leading this project. Both of us were in the same boat, confused, unable to understand how to make things happen in the timeline our boss had conjured out of her ass for all we knew. It took a call meeting titled ‘What’s The Problem’ to resolve this. Luckily, my sister had offered me a piece of advice before it, “Don’t get into an ego tussle with your boss. You won’t win even if you do.” So I went in meek but clear about why the whole issue had happened. My boss was feeling injured and resentful by our haranguing of her, “Fine, I’ll discuss with you guys before I take such decisions.” she said as though consulting with her team was the worst thing anyone could have asked her to do.

So there you have it, I hope the growth from the first incident to the last is apparent. All of us have our work place moments I suppose. Someday I’ll write about the first time I cried at the office.

Plant Evacuation Squad

1:15 am. The wind hissed outside in a manner that could mean rain or simply the rabble-rousing of leaves.

“Whenever there is a strong wind, go upstairs and place the potted plants on the floor of the roof from the ledge. They may fall off.”

This is what mom had told me one similar night, a few weeks ago.

So while some doors and windows banged within the house as prognostics of a storm, I stepped out of my room into the lobby at the same time my sister did. I explained our mission to her in short and recruited her trusty self to carry out evacuation of plants. In the mean time, mom, bleary-eyed emerged from her room as well to save her precious green babies.

Up on the roof a beautiful, fierce wind had been unleashed. Trees were swaying and swishing, sounds of things falling, crashing, breaking…the world alive.

“Put the smaller ones down first,” I told my sister as obviously I was in command and smaller creatures like herself looked upto me for instruction.

Our maid joined us too, and that was how four women found themselves up on the roof at 1:20 am, hurriedly placing plants down on the floor to save them from the gale. We saw a scurry of activity on some neighbouring roofs. Perhaps it was for the plants, perhaps for something else.

“Mom, you go and sleep,” I said. I might as well not have for all the effect it had.

Our maid seeing she had no role to play, just laughed and went off to sleep. After saving all the plants, my sister and I enjoyed the cold, angry wind for a minute before going to our respective bedrooms.

The storm was knocking on the doors, trying to open them. Outside there was a peculiar sound, it was a ‘hushhh’, a loud angry whisper. Ah, finally, there was the tell-tale patter of rain…I love nights like those. Also, I’m pretty sure this plant evacuation squad will be a thing! More on this soon.

Of Celestial Bodies And Invisible Reasons.

Sometimes, I want to hear, to paraphrase Christina in Grey’s Anatomy, “You’re the sun.”

I don’t mind switching roles though. At times I’m okay being the planet too or a satellite orbiting a planet, or a star millions of light years away unbothered by who is orbiting who. But I cannot be a satellite always, and I cannot be orbiting around a permanent sun. I love myself too much to allow that. So, in times of greater need of someone I love, I can let them be the sun, for a while, for a long while. But if they wish to be that forever, that won’t work.

It isn’t easy to express this in words. It’s something that is understood after a while perhaps, or maybe it leads to other things, new things, good or bad I won’t be judging (or at least I shall try not to).

The lesson is the same, I’ve been failing it for a while now, which is quite annoying considering what a diligent student I was in school. So there is no way I can cry about, “Why does this keep happening to me?” without asking “Why didn’t I learn anything from it the last 2495572398340 times?” But I don’t do it like that anymore. Neither question asked is helpful and the one person I’m invested in, is me, so hurting myself by making it out like I’m some daft creature incapable of learning is not just harsh, it’s dishonestly so.

So instead I ask myself, “What is it that’s been keeping me from learning what I need to, to avoid this situation?” The invisible reasons are the most powerful ones, because no one else sees them, you may or may not become aware of them, and without knowing what they are, you can’t reason with them. The invisible reasons keep us locked up in bathrooms long after we’ve been released. And people are fond of ascribing easy, visible reasons to your condition and people are loud about it, people could be your own family. They cannot see the real thing. So don’t let them make you believe in those sophist factors, look for the reasons that no one else but you have a hope of finding (with or without help).

The Girl Who Did Terrible Things To Someone She Loved.

Do you want to read a little story?

Stay with it though, for my heart.

It starts like this:

Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived with a bleeding heart in her cupped hands.

No one would take it from her and of course that was because it was the most annoying, awful burden. Sure, it was keeping her alive but for God’s sake, it was repulsive!

Ugly. Bruised. Bleeding. A spec-fucking-tacular mess, like her mama would say. No wonder no one wanted it. For the longest time, the only option was to ignore it and go about things as though it wasn’t right there, fucking everything up for her.

She often read about all the self-love crap going around and wondered if it was in the realm of possibility for her to be a little okay with this monstrous aberration? The thought made her gag. Her mom laughed at the idea too and told her about how her own heart was the sickest thing ever and to never try to think of these hearts as anything more than the burden they were designed to be.

But then, one night, out of boredom and curiosity, she steeled herself and held the wretched thing in one palm and against everything within her, stroked it gingerly with the index finger of the other hand. It was utterly fake of course, an experiment that confirmed that she could never be okay with that pathetic thing. Nope.

However, the experiment must’ve messed with her head because she caught herself looking at that oozing, fucked up thing on quiet nights, you know, in the pauses between the babble she surrounded herself with. It was gross especially with all the other perfect hearts out there! She rolled her eyes and gave it a sharp poke with a jagged fingernail. It bled some more. Useless.

She wondered why she was even noticing it? And why more and more? Perhaps it was like how a car crash pulls the gaze in. Even when she was having a good time and the last thing she wanted was its miserable sight, she found herself watching it from the corner of her eyes.

It’s one determined fucker I guess, she thought with a shrug, keeps beating even when beaten up, even when beating itself up.

One day, watching it suffer as it deserved to, she was sullen. Unable to do anything else to distract herself, she suddenly placed it in one hand and brought a band-aid to it with the other hand. It flinched, since it expected a pinch or a poke. Definitely not a band-aid. It trembled as the cut was covered with it. It didn’t matter to the girl. It was just a different thing, and she was bored perhaps.

Idly she wondered if a balm would be better for its cuts. But it didn’t truly make a difference, because anytime she was upset or if someone needed her to, she’d do what she was used to doing – crush it, cut it, pinch it. Not that others in the world were kind to it either. Each person did their own kind of damage, but the girl was the second half of the torture. That was normal. But because she’d started watching it more, something different happened one time.

That time, for the first time, she felt guilty.

She watched it, so she noticed the after.

How each beat hurt it, how each cut bled, how it trembled silently.

How it never once asked her for help.

It just kept beating and keeping her alive like it would not do anything but.

She got band-aids then. The balm too. Each time someone hurt it, lashed at it, she stopped herself from adding her fifty percent, instead, she put the balm and band-aids.

It wasn’t easy, because she’d always played a part. Her mother didn’t approve of these soft, indulgent tactics but the girl couldn’t do it anymore. Watching the heart bleed from a wound she gave it became as painful as the idea of cutting someone she loved. It wasn’t love. But it was a little like that. It was getting to be like that.

She began to sing to it when it shivered.

She began to caress it when it bled from loneliness. Sometimes, even when it was okay.

And one day, when someone was particularly cruel to it and it was so wounded that it spilled blood all over her mother’s expensive carpet, she cried for it. With it.

She sat with it, and hugged it, and protected it.

There was no going back then because she’d fallen in love with her heart. Like she’d never fallen in love with anyone.