If, then.

If you walk with all your restlessnesses in your heart, then you are alive.

Adapting Neruda

"Quiero hacer contigo lo que la koala hace con el árbol."

"Were you Frida?"

A pretty young stranger at the next table pauses my exit with a question: "Were you Frida at the halloween party?" A city of 20 million plus and, clearly, not enough eyebrows. "No, but I get that a lot."

Was I Frida? Was I Frida on halloween? Was I Frida at a party? Prosthetic eyebrows? Plastic flowers? Failed Billie Holiday? Fitting disguise? Was I Frida at 16? Was I Frida yesterday? Halo of frizz? Mustache dust? Open chest? Was I Frida at 22? Bloody grin? Gritted teeth? Joyous rage? Radical rejectedness? Was I Frida? Pubic hair? Men's shirt? Cigarette? Was I Frida? Feckless heart? Reckless feet? Sharp bite? Slurred Speech? Was I Frida? Eyebrows met?

Every day, I thank 16-year-old me for her gumption and rebelliousness.

4444

So the thing is that I have 4,444 unread emails in my Inbox and obviously this is some sort of 21st century omen.

Atraparlo

Hemos que preguntarnos no solo por qué estamos vivos, sino también cómo estamos viviendo.

Urban

Delhi 2014. A hot morning in August. A young woman makes stuttering progress along the middle of Sansad Marg as drivers wait behind their wheels. Zebra-print jumpsuit, four-inch heels, translucent tangerine handbag, valiant bouffant. A singular vision; an urban punctuation. Like a magenta Vespa parked outside a grey building, kicking the cityscape in its teeth.

Helium

I don't know how to explain what it is to walk around
silent, deserted Delhi streets after midnight
with four girls and four balloons.

Hypothesis

Perhaps that feeling we are practised at identifying as yearning is in fact a
deep private pleasure—painful to contain, but insensible except in solitude.


The sharp tooth of desire; the dull edge of fulfillment.

Too much future to worry about wasting time

They 
never 
questioned 
the terrible 
selfishness 
of dismissing 
every 
unpalatable 
reality 
as an 
intolerable 
interference 
with their 
youth.

On Automobile Malfunction, Wakefulness, and Goofball Romance

Most everything you do has been done in Black & White.

And, I find, that's quite alright.
A slightly soaked girl on a sleeping night.

Je suis la belle et la bête.

Let us not self-destruct with longing and ennui. Let us not light the match of guilt and despair. Let us instead play records, turn on the fan, add ice, clean the cob of all its corn, and leave the rest to Amélie.

Paper Bound Solace

(Photo mine.)

 

book·worm/ˈbo͝okˌwərm/

Noun:

A person devoted to reading. The larva of a wood-boring beetle that feeds on the paper and glue in books. A person devoted to reading who begins, in both physical and virtual worlds, to resemble a wood-boring beetle that feeds on the paper and glue, margins and type, quote and blurb, jacket and spine, colour and smell, shape and size, heft and height of books.

No sense of proportion

 



I know it doesn't feel like it right now,
but the entire rest of the world is, in fact,
more important than this one little thing.

Theater of the absurd

 

 

Ricocheting from home to home, 
banging down doors yelling FEED 
ME FEED ME, never staying long 
enough to be fed, going steadily 
insane with hunger instead, always 
returning hopefully to empty kitchens, 
hands and mouth open, swallowing 
painful clumps of bitter air, still 
surprised at the absence there.

11:11 11.11.11

Sitting in a verandah haven, air heavy with the perfume of alstonia and the smell of beagle, head full of city-fragments that don't quite cohere, but insist on their own significance.

I cannot believe the symmetry of this moment.

Slowly, sadly, we became irrelevant to each other's lives.

I laugh at the jokes of others, and
don't
miss
anything.

Shattered hearts on a cloudless morning

Weeks, months, years later, here I am--damp, distant, glue drying in the cracks--
wondering what the big deal was, and how I failed to notice the absence of real loss. 

Pehle aap kurta peheniye aur urdu bolna seekhiye.
Phir hum sochenge humne kuchh khoya bhi hai ya nahin.

 ¿Qué me importa perderte? 

Nunca lo has tenido.

Perk

The great thing about distance is that it has a pleasingly poisonous effect on one's preoccupation with irrelevancies.

(In other words: I am in India, and bitches ain't shit.)

Fine Print

When dismantling the machine, be careful not to destroy its parts. They can be usefully reassembled in various new forms.

A good line

Oof, those careless boys
with their broad-spectrum charms and
quick intimacies.