I haven’t taken out time to write recently; which is just a comment on how easily overwhelmed I get by new things, good and bad. My therapist says a normal person’s unease in instability gets amplified by many times in me because of my past experiences. Like motion-sickness, I exclaim with pride over a well-thought analogy. Or a piece of tile you clung to when you played Land & Water as a child. So I try to fix my distress/anxiety the only way I know to – fix something new/unknown by trying to fit it into the shoebox the analogous item came out of. So, I take my pill, roll down the window, look at the road, I concentrate real hard on the greens and the smiles of the passers-by to fool my mind into agreeing with my eardrums into syncing with my mind. I look for that not-shaking tile of safety. Sometimes it works, I feel at ease and even joy, I am glad for the journey and the road those days. But sometimes I am uneasy, have to work extra hard to maintain normalcy, and sometimes I throw up, which is okay because we keep going on. And every time luck permits, we turn a sharp corner that allows me a view of the journey I made so far, tough and winding, but beautiful.
Today I turned a corner, I sat on the terrace with R. The same terrace we sat on as little girls. We spoke more about ourselves than we could then, I realized. I worried for my career and health, R worried about studies and ideal body sizes. I can see that a lot has changed, the terrace isn’t clean anymore, and the corner where R cried when she broke up isn’t as comforting as before, it is all the more family for that though. It’s hard to lie down to look at the stars. But we still only looked at the stars when we spoke.
People have left, new people have come, and in our colony, buildings have been erected. Through it, when you look up, you can still see Mars, Sirius, the stomach lifting memory of a meteor shower and the alphabet-shaped constellations Prachi had named in the sky as a teenager. They were there outside the window of Neelkanth, in the sky of Pangong when I stood alone and shivered, half asleep trying to find the milky way between the clouds; I could almost understand why people refused to be out of their blankets then. Almost. They have always been there, the very fading P, the big and sure A, right next to a forced K with one arm too long, and the S that was looked for but never found, are right where they used to be. Under the decaying terraces, careers, books, and lives, overlooking breaking relationships and holding of fingers with new ones. Intact and reminding. Like R, sharing her energy with me, like she does, by touching her index finger to mine, and R who texts to worry about my dreams, the stars in their P and A and Ks and not-Ss, are in the cheesiest way, there, as the tile for someone to tippie-toe on long enough to be able to call it stable.