forgetting or not remembering
you’d think it’s the same, wouldn’t you?
that not remembering is forgetting.
i wrote the title and the above two lines on Fri, opened this yesterday to get back to it, and then opened it again today.
right now, i mourn, downright mourning to forgetting whatever i wanted to say here. i forgot a good line here, a decent paragraph there, and a golden page at that spot. and, maybe, that’s what this is going to be about.
forgetting lines, forgetting your cues.
messing up and mixing up mocktails of memories.
missing your older self and not missing your close friends.
mattering and not mattering. muttering under your breath, all the things you want to care for and then not finding the energy needed into shouting at the top of your lungs.
superficial, shallow, shadow. these are just synonyms now, out of a dictionary and into our lives.
i told a friend about leaving India in April and all i got was try to meet before that, if you can.
there’s no expectations. there’s no force. there’s no “you MUST come and visit and meet us.”
another friend first told that, “oh you’re leaving”, and then he right away changed it to something that was on the lines of - it doesn’t matter much, because now we hardly meet and we always get to talk on call. and i was numbly sad, when he voiced my feelings and thoughts about not missing people anymore.
everyday is just a text/call away, even when they are far away.
we almost know things, superficially about people in our lives through social media, even though we don’t know how they exactly are feeling in life, what’s keeping them awake at night or what wakes them up with a start at 2.37 AM, but we’d know which hotel they checked into.
we are all performing for a life, for an audience.
and, we’re all trying to live our lives, for ourselves.
i have chopped-off anger, salty sadness, dried out tears, and empty heart and hands.
even with all this information out there, all the generative AIs to make ourselves smarter and better each day, help us live THE DREAM LIFE, are we able to make sense of any of it?
it all feels like being in a Russian Novel.
this sadness that has no reason, this rage that has no source.
i want to tell so much about how everybody just wants to build, create. not being left out of this, whatever menagerie we have put up here.
and this one was not going to be about all this, and yet, i can’t remember what it was going to be about?
i woke up today remembering my Sunday from school days. how mummy would give us all a head-bath, classic mummy-style, we’d smell of cheap lifebuoy and clinic plus.
how my papa would then cut our nails, sitting outside the railway colony quarters, in sun. how we then went on to play our cricket and then a hearty meal of vaghareli khichadi with the whole family. how then everybody would sleep and the siblings and cousins would be putting up a show for play and how when the evening would come, the doors would be open again to go out and simply play.
empty pockets, filled hearts.
i don’t mind my friends not feeling sad about me leaving, but i mind very much, when i know how that feeling is so mutual. how i don’t feel i’m going to miss anything. how i’d just be back in some time. and how things are going to continue going on, as if i never left. or my presence didn’t matter at all.
all that matter is after all, matter. just that.
you,
me,
these stars burning up inside,
this universe.
what i’ve written feels too shallow for what i have in mind and what i feel inside. but, for now, this shall do. this shall have to do.
- flaky sends that old feeling that’s now a distant, blurred memory of how it used to feel before all of this, before any of this.
P,S. shouldn’t the real title now be - it’s all matter, after all!