This is an update post, which basically means I am bringing the world to pace with what has been happening in life while I was not writing about it. At least not on the internet. I know most of my posts have become these recently, but what is a girl to do in this world of ‘life so short, the art so long to learn’? But give this one a chance, don’t write update posts off yet. I was up to some good, I promise, you will want to know. In this one, I get a new home, a Yellow Vespa, a new piercing, catch a tune with a cab driver, lose a wallet, get a new tattoo idea, go to Ellora, do not go to Kolkata, try to hate on people, am made to cry by sick old people and young sick people, but most importantly, in this one, I do laundry and eat grapes.
If we were to start bigger things first, since I wrote last, I started living in a new home. For the second time in my life, I feel like I have a space to go to when nothing feels like my own. My room walls are white, my bathroom is blue, my home has 2 balconies and a backyard. It was lived in by a family once. You can always tell when a house was lived in by a family. The places nails are drilled into walls, the things that are left behind. Sofas that can be made beds, wall clocks. Nothing says home like a wall clock.
If I were to start chronologically, I should start with all the things I wrote in my diaries, and the poems I read when I didn’t. About poets, in war worlds, foreboding-stricken, writing about rats that die in wet drums, who write about supermarkets and about sunlight, or the lack of it.
If we were to talk, recency-wise, I would have to tell you about my trip to Konkan, about sleep-deprived nights that made me discover a new feeling, about Ellora and how I want to marry it. About selfies. If I were to write of things recent first, I would also talk at length about my last session with my therapist, and how I laughed and we laughed together. Of how when I left, I heard a married couple fight, but that would mainly be about how worried I am about marriages. And about drinking bhang for the first time. Last time.
But I don’t want to. Can I just keep talking about the home? And how beautiful it feels to say that word. And to type. Home. I, while driving back from the airport, accidentally went with my bags to my old house, and I laughed when I realized home is somewhere else. I went home home home home, as I climbed the staircase, I smiled, of comfort. I lay in my bed and did not feel like I was imposing myself on someone else’s comfortable. I was there and the comfort was mine and there was my study table in front of me. With the coloring book I bought. And the plants, I got in spite of insecurity of killing all things alive. The pots, I so painstakingly chose and the cactus I think fits the name Peter Waltz. And my homie, what else do you call someone who makes a wall-clocks home (home home home home), who makes rice, brown rice, for me. Who I get to say ‘you need anything? I am coming home’, ‘can you get grapes on the way?’ to. Who knows to love my family like her’s. To say just the right thing when I am anxious and to know when I am and let me bury my face in her tummy.
To my home home, my parents are coming next week. Parents have never come to houses. I have risen in Maslow’s hierarchy and now worry about education. A home provides earthing. (Proper earthing provides an alternative and easy path for leakage or faulty current to flow. It ensures that any exposed conductive part of the appliance does not reach a dangerous level of potential or voltage that endangers the user’s life – Times of India)
The other day, I scrubbed my blue bathroom. I scrubbed, with my tired dizzy body, the cement and the paint stains off the floor walls seats. I scrubbed it, till it sparkled. I put fairy lights in my bathroom and made it smell nice. You must know by now that some things in life have come the hard way for me. The most important of those is my ability to believe in happy things. And I want to tell you something about life I learned in the new home home home home: If you scrub enough times, hard enough, try just one more time, it sparkles.