Dead letters

[I chanced upon this post languishing as a draft in my blog. It was written around a year ago now.]

I've spent a lot of my 20s so far trying to recalibrate myself as an independent person. I was 23 when I broke up after a long (and mostly immensely fulfilling) relationship that started when I was 19. I wasn't sure how to go about my newly-single life around then.

The shakiness of being by yourself, the singular texture of feeling when you're the only one at a girls' night out who doesn't need to whip out her phone and text someone or check for texts from someone, rushing into and forcing love out of people and situations that may have thrived beautifully in lower intensities; I cannot wish them away.

But then all these experience slowly percolated and collected into something that changed the way I looked at things. By 2015, my head was in a much better place. I've had to grow up and be there for myself and by myself for the last 8 months -- necessitated by a lover who could not and would not be there to pick up my pieces for me -- so I'm getting really good at finding emotional fulfillment within myself. Being around couples in love throws you off so much though, because if you let it be, every gesture can become a judgement of the lack of it in your life.

I now think, even as I prepare to go to Canada -- that you can seek physical intimacy any time you like. It is easier than emotional fulfillment. For that, you have yourself.
     
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I'm borrowing from stories that aren't only my own, but also partners from my past:

I used to joke with K. about how he could sleep through a nuclear explosion in our initial days. When the months turned to years, the affability of that joke changed into a proto-complaint. "If there was a robber who broke into our house, you'd sleep right through it" I'd tell him. But soon enough it hit me: why did I need anyone to protect me at all? People used to joke about how K. was slender, waifishly thin and short and I think the implication always is that someone like that will not be able to protect you. But why should anyone else be responsible for my body's safety? I think we take that on, out of love, as lovers, as partners, but I do not think it is the basis of a relationship or a marriage that the other person "must be able to protect me from danger". You're dating a human, not pepper spray.

I must register, at the moment that I recognize this, that home for me right now is the 500 metre stretch from my bus stop to my house that takes me through the neighbourhood park and kindergarten.

While I always hold dear the rooms and houses I have lived in, all my life, this stretch is the first time I have known the feeling of possession, of feeling completely impermeable, of homecoming. 

I'm listening to local Vancouver hip-hop band Swollen Members as I type this. I got the insane chance to attend Tedx Vancouver today. There's something about well-formed, articulate, amiable and accessible people that makes me retain some sense of faith in this crumbling world.

At a UBC talk I attended, Teju Cole referenced lyrics from a song by The Game which went, don't do four favours if you can't do the fifth.

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I realise I am a writer in a world of wonderful social scientists. It is freeing to realise that about yourself so definitively, so giddily, so crystal clear.

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This is not to  make any causal implications, but being forced to live in a whole new country on your own, completely on your own, has changed how I deal with crushing heartbreak and disappointments or any issues. I'm too pressed for time to sit and cry over things or feel bad about them and myself, because most times, it's not the only problem I have.

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I enjoy the rain.

Certain days, you just wake up on the edge of tears and teeter there the whole day. There is no reason. You just want to cry. Produce something entirely yours in a new world, starting with your loneliness and fears.

Cry for home, cry for comfort, cry to sad hindi songs, the abundance of kadipatta and dhania, but mostly just for not having been hugged in months. With a start, you realise how much of a difference physical contact makes in making you feel engaged with the world.

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I don't quite know how to place Vancouver in my heart. Vancouver's always made place for me, the minute I entered it. Overwhelmingly, resoundingly, my experience so far has been a kind one. But it often feels like the city has a definite glass ceiling. It's demographic tends to be rich and old(er), so the city doesn't really have an insane nightlife. And things are always going on, it's not like nothing happens here, but there's a ceiling you can reach up and touch. One day I might get sick of it. For now though, this is home.

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Away from my previous home, and snowballing through the 27 years of existence, I acknowledge fully now that I always carry home inside me.

A tweet I've favourited:

Nein. ‏@NeinQuarterly  Aug 18

The bad news: you can never go home again. The good news: you're from here

It's that time of the Huge Life Change graph where I get up at nights with nightmares. Unlike my younger self though, I find myself calmly waking up, resigning myself to the fact that immediate sleep is perhaps not possible.

Like a patient parent, I wear the feeling of exhaustion and loneliness out. I chat with friends back in India, read a little, watch some funny things on YouTube. I let the ill-feeling do its thing in the background and eventually pass out.

I know this is only transition. It's been two months almost that I haven't seen a familiar face or place. While I don't exactly miss people, I do acknowledge the ease of their presence in my life so far. So much of our daily lives is securely and comfortably padded by the people in our lives.

A study found out a couple of years ago that the butterfly that metamorphosizes from a caterpillar, still remembers it was one, in another life.

But otherwise, most other times, in my waking life, you must understand, I am one or the other form of happy.

Filtering

Moving all the way across the world and living alone makes for a very effective sieve for your friendships. The ones who matter pass through your laziness filter and you drag yourself up to reply to comments/emails/pings and then email/ping/comment/call some yourself. The rest just tend to collect in the sieve -- not entirely useless -- because if you look at it, the tea powder isn't ever meant to be a part of the drink, but it is irreplaceable. Just temporary.

Things you realise when you don't have an active phone

1. You're under the radar, fully and finally. All those times you groaned inside at the thought of replying to someone on WhatsApp because they probably have seen you online and will wonder why you're not replying, all those times you've wished you could just burn your phone instead of the complicated dance of blocking/being invisible/avoiding someone in your daily online life -- it feels exactly like you dreamed it would.

2. When you're in a bookstore or a metro station, and your cousins browse different ends of the huge-ass vastness that is most things in America, you realise how handicapped you are without a phone. If you lose sight of them completely, you can't call them. They can probably call each other and discuss how stupid their cousin is while they search for me.

3. The times when I didn't take my wallet with me, I realise how pointless I am as a subject. Without money or a phone, I am pretty much useless to this economy. It's fascinating roaming the aisles of huge stores that way. Like an empty kernel of possibility, disguised as an interested buyer.

4. You're lost. Even in conversation. Before, when your phone worked and data plans were cheap, you peppered conversations with google search results, quickly accessing information that slipped your mind, putting to rest heated disagreements between people over niggling details, once and for all. Now though, interestingly, conversations are longer. You have to rely on older methods of verifying a fact. You ask around, you postulate, you deduce, you speculate.

The answer is still a google search away, but that doesn't come until hours later, in the comfort and familiarity of your relatives' house where your phone comes to life like a brain-dead monster only under the spell of WiFi.

5. Your fingers don't ache as much.

6. Once you lose the drift of real time -- coupled with time zone differences -- the phone ritual is about catching up. You get WiFi, wait until your phone un-hangs because of all the sudden influx of data, respond to everything you've missed in the last few hours/days. By the time you're done with emails, chats, texts, wall posts, tags, comments etc., you're done. You understand finally, that you shouldn't and cannot wrestle to be in the same dynamic as your life before.

7. Because you choose not to take the dead phone outside, you end up missing on a lot of photo opportunities. Sometimes, you'll ask someone else to take a photo on their phone and send it to you later at home. But in principle -- is that even the same thing? If someone else takes a picture and sends it you, does it even validate your presence there?

After a point though, you stop doing that. You go for a day, two days. You make a mental list of all the places you've been to, as a sort of log, to tell people about it later. But without pictures to prove it, it quickly becomes an exercise in realising how easy it is to lie about it. What stops us from lying about the fabulous places we've been to? Pictures I've realised are just tiny proofs of everything we say.

You text a friend "Dude I'm stuck in traffic, I can't make it in time" and the difference between it being received with hostility and with shared resignation/empathy, is the picture you send next -- as visual proof.

Disjointed notes

This is how things are different:

I'm in America, for the first time in my life.

I technically visited Germany.

I am typing this out on a Macbook Air that I bought in dollars.

I will not be seeing my family for a long while. 

It is currently my birthday in another time zone.

This is how things are the same:

I am susceptible to sinus attacks.

I get less productive and conversational as exposure to people intensifies.

Birthdays remain mostly disappointing.

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After the first Skype call with my parents, I immediately identify how our overseas relationship will be. Mostly text-based, we'll all avoid Skype as much as is possible. I remember once again that I don't constantly miss people -- this is perhaps the greatest gift my family has given me, and where our strength lies.

Of course, well meaning people keep wagging a finger and admonish: you must not dismiss things, you never know.

But sometimes, you do. And not making mistakes is dependent on you finally knowing a few things.

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All families are complicated and tension-wrought. Some more than the others. 

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I'm learning how to balance my irritation with constant company and no personal space with gratitude for being so warmly welcomed into another family, temporarily, on another whole continent.