Love After Love

This poem found its way into my life twice this week and it was the kind of wonderful serendipity that makes you wish there was a less fancy/pretentious word for it. Simply put, it has been a rough two months...

Rains

Rainy days bring their own comfort. The downpour is almost cathartic; the calm after the thunderstorms settles down both dust and feelings. I open the window a crack, to inhale the smell of rain meeting earth. It has been constant wherever I've lived and traveled, soothing in its familiarity. I push all outdoor tasks to another day; being cozy inside is a rainy day must (unless of course, real life insists otherwise). All that matters is a steaming cup of tea and warm, comfort food. A chat window pops open, and I feel remembered for the moment. The calm is temporary but much wanted.

Shiny pink disco

I was watching Frasier and I remember seeing a Walkman pop up in one of the scenes. I remember my first Walkman, a black, slightly battered gadget. I am not even sure if the memory of it is real or stolen from someone else's remembrances. It starts a cascade of memories of cassettes, of waiting for movie scores and albums to release, of wondering if my parents would give me money to buy a cassette, of listening and re-listening and re-re-listening to the cassettes till the spools wore out. I remember making copies of tapes (mix tapes were a thing of my teenage years, only I made them for myself)

You Who Never Arrived by Rainer Maria Rilke

One of my favorite poems:

“You who never arrived

in my arms, Beloved, who were lost

from the start,

I don't even know what songs

would please you. I have given up trying

to recognize you in the surging wave of

the next moment. All the immense

images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,

cities, towers, and bridges, and un-

suspected turns in the path,

and those powerful lands that were once

pulsing with the life of the gods--

all rise within me to mean

you, who forever elude me.

On brownness and other things

Sometime in December, when I was back home, I remember drafting a piece, almost hastily, so as to not lose the words and sentences that had been floating in my head for a while. It has now been published.

Travel and other irritating things

(I was looking for a document and found a piece of irritated writing from a recent trip)

I have forgotten my charger; this is new, usually it is the adaptor that I forget. It happened during my trip to Ahmedabad in the winter and I spent a night in a hotel room, unable to use my laptop, and starting to grasp that I am partly fighting a losing battle. No matter what I remember, there is always that one more thing.I try and be so careful, I make lists and lists but everything fails when I switch bags. It is always a bad move and I am blaming Spirit (for some reason I keep calling it Sprint) airlines. I am en route to a new city, for an interview, and I am nervous. 

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