backtobasics

This was the default title here, and it was too simple, so exact that it was almost beautiful and too nostalgic for me to ignore it. Last time I authored content without actively promoting it, yet wanting it to be secretly discovered was 2013. I was heartbroken, idealistic and procrastinating on the whole adulting situation while dreaming rather large, and doubting in between.

I was a student in London, heartbroken from her first true love or what she thought could have been that as the setting, the plot, the characters were perfectly aligned for it. He was a dreamy human turned into my personal nightmare with a fast car, at times short temper and a whole lot of life outside of me and before me which I did not belong to and would never be included in.

As cliche as it sounds, I used to cry for years , in the shower, on park benches and while listening to the song we first listened to, wearing his white wired Apple headphones in a crowded pub in Piccadilly. I never hung out in Piccadilly , and he was not even a Londoner but we happened to be there and happened to touch hands and cross paths just for a short little life , almost a rushed one.

The mere idea of experiencing romance, as childish and un sophisticated it might come across, pushes us to be in the moment, to ground our bodies and feel. It is the furthest you can get from numb and for ten or more years since the day at the pub, I was chasing the anti-numb state in various ways, being myself and being someone else and finding out what I want while actively pursuing what I did not.

I always lived through the greats and treated them as mine or pieces of me. Writers, artists, composers. They consoled me, when no one was there and listened to my madness when I couldn’t hear myself and gave me hope, hope that I was a part of a plan , that we all were, or that at least we had the agency to be, even if we chose to drift. The drift itself contained so much poetry. Today, coming back to writing, unimpeded, raw and quite terrified, I am bringing Thoreau with me .

When he was a small boy, Henry David Thoreau often lay awake in the trundle bed he shared with his older brother, gazing out at the night sky; asked why he wasn’t sleeping, he told his mother he was “looking through the stars to see if I couldn’t see God behind them”.

As my master of life intentionally lived, someone who never closed chapters but gave me courage to turn the page, I am still eager for a Thoreau-esque routine , that of sucking the marrow out of life , embracing the mess and laughing at my own broken-ness. Perhaps then and only then I would dare to look up to the stars, to look for God, the one I carry inside.

As for today, I am tired, caffeinated and a royal mess excited at the prospect of feeling through the written word again, in a lonely corner of the web where I can be anyone but choose to be this version of myself : guilty , chaotic , seeking forgiveness while craving for love and cake. I haven’t had a real cake in years.

Thank you for reading my typing. Wrapping you in a Thoreau quote before I go, as you deserve it. It’s been a long day.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion”.