I resolve...

• Don’t use credit card where you can use the debit card
• Don’t bunk work unless you absolutely have to
• Don’t drink coke or eat chocolates or even chips. Avoid gaining weight
• Keep the drinking to a minimum
• Read at least two books in a month
• No more retail therapy. Actually, stop buying clothes, shoes and bags altogether.
• Save majorly
• Learn the guitar
• Do horse-back riding
• Try learning Spanish, again
• Give up smoking
• Ideally, do not have anything to do with men for a year. Detox. Give your life some semblance of order
• Stop wanting to be in a relationship. It's all a lot of pain anyway
• Stop being impulsive and angry. So angry
• Keep up low-expectations-from-everyone bit.

It's that time of the year again

The unspoken

I need to go away, not give in again. It's a vicious circle i need to break out of because the love isn't strong enough to keep us together. Not forever anyway. And i want a forever with you, or nothing at all.


I wish i could tell you how much i love and miss you. From your silly smile, sarcastic smile to your mocking smile and the heartfelt laughter that i saw so little of. I miss everything about you and i wish i could have you still, like i had you once, a lifetime ago.


Remember how i once said you are an ocean, i am sand on the shore, we meet but aren't meant to be? Just to reiterate, i meant that. We are that. No matter how far they want to go, try, and do go, they come back to each other. The ocean will be fine but without it the sand would cease to be what it is. You define who i am. That's what you meant to me. That's why i came back running to you, and you never understood...

I killed the love of my life.

T.
That's what i used to call him.
He was invariably the first person on my mind when i woke up, and the last before i went to bed.
He changed my life in ways i can't begin to recount, and he made me what i am.

He was the one person i could do anything for, live and die for.
He gave me hope, made me feel secure. The one person who i thought truly cared, and always would.

We had our issues, we used to fight. Everyone does. Perhaps we did that a little more than was healthy.
But then we had our good times too. We stay in different cities, but i would go to him or he would come over and for a few days, he would define my existence, be my world.
When we were together, i would have eyes only for him. The smallest of things would bring a smile to my face.

Just looking at him and knowing how much we loved each other seemed to be enough. He was the reason i lived, warding off the plague of existentialism.

His love was enough. That was all i really wanted.
His love, the knowledge that he was mine. Only mine.
And then he took it all away.

I got a call from him the night before, apparently a mistake, and i heard him make out and then have sex with this girl. Heard every word that was once said to me being repeated for a different girl.
He said he did it because of things i had done a year and half ago.
He told me that now i'd know what he has been feeling for so long.

He said he was sorry that i heard all that and told me that it'll hurt a lot when it does finally sink in.
He said he knows what it'd feel like from first hand experience and said he'd be there, standing by my side, through this.
He said that while he went through the same, i was too self absorbed to look beyond myself, to his pain and anguish but now i would know. Because now i'd go through the same. He ensured it'd happen.

He was right.
I have been heartless, even as i love him to death.
I have never been able to understand him, even as he was the core of my life.

I was wrong, but that, somehow, doesn't right his wrong. I can't bring myself to look at him, to believe that the man i heard making love to that girl is really the man who has held me through thick and thin for so long.
I refuse to believe he's the same man. He can't be. After all, that man loved me too much to see me in pain, least of all be the one causing the pain.

I asked him what happened to my T.
He said T is dead. For good.

But only i know i killed him.

Sand on the Shore

I put pen to paper,

words flee from me

With you not around,

Nothing is how it used to be.

The days are longer,

gloomy and dull.

Sobs and silent prayers,

break the midnight lull.

I stand alone, wondering

If we could be one still

If I could see you sleep

And be around when you’re up

I lay awake, yearning

Wishing for your face by my pillow

I spend the night praying

Hoping for a happier tomorrow

Yet I know it is not to be

How will we one be?

For you are an ocean, I am sand on the shore

We meet but aren’t meant to be.

Back

I want to go back,
back to a happier past.

A past where smiles outnumbered tears,
and each day had something to look forward to.

A past where future was a mystery still,
But none that was with tears filled.

I want to go back,
back to a happier past,

Only, i cant remember one.

Loss and other miseries.

This last trimester will go down as the worst of my life of 20 years. Even as it's hard to believe that i haven't written about it anywhere, it's appalling that so much has happened. Recounting it takes me back to the little personal hell that has been my home for an uncomfortably long time now. I am not complaining though, i deserve it; i asked for it.

I lost my dadi very unexpectedly in the last week of January. This was the first time i experienced "real", irrevocable loss. I remember being okay and in control during most rituals. There was grief but it was tempered with rationality and sanity. Ironically, i have been worse when it isn't half as much pain- or at least it shouldn't be. A fight with my boyfriend has given me more pain, elicited more tears and howls from me than my grandmother passing away just like that.

That, obviously, speaks volumes about the kind of person i am and my priorities in life. I give precedence to a man i love over the person who brought me up when my parents went to work. I worry and care more about having this man in my life -- who i can't seem to stop fighting with -- than the only one person who loved me unconditionally, in spite of me, all my life. Thinking of her, i'm amazed at her patience, her resilience. Her love for every one. Her faith in the God she went back to, and the husband she devoted her life to. It is sick how when i came to Delhi, she was the first one forgotten.

I must be a horrible horrible person for having done that, for having not given her the importance and attention she commanded. I loved and respected her with all my heart but hardly ever expressed my emotions. I cried with her in her pain, when she lost her eyesight temporarily, but i also didn't meet her for days at a stretch even after going home. I wish i could take it all back. I wish i could tell her that i loved her, and that i'm sorry.

It's no surprise that i couldn't see her when everyone else in the family and even people who couldn't care less got to see her one last time. I couldn't see her because i didn't deserve it. I have done horrible things, things that i'm sure would have disappointed her alive, and did in death. All my misery is but a logical and justified punishment.

I just wish i could have a day with her. To just talk to her and sleep with my head in her lap while she moved her hand rhythmically through my hair. I miss her and it's weird that it didn't sink in until now. I have, for the first time in three years, stayed away from home for two months without wanting to go back except once. I don't want to go back to a home without her.

My nani would, of course, say that i'm over reacting. That we mustn't cry irrationally for people who we gave hell in life by not speaking up for them. All of us did give her hell in her last years. For most people, she died a gracious, painless, quick death and lived a fulfilled, happy, prosperous, ideal life but i know better. My family knows exactly what we put her through, even as none of us wanted to pain her, we put her through immense misery. I know that howmuchever i look to shirk away from responsibility, i had a small role to play in it too. I added to her agony by not trying enough to decrease it.

I miss her, and i feel wretched. I'll miss her on my birthday... My first birthday away from her. The first one without the 100 bucks she invariably gave me-my first gift on most birthdays. This year, i don't want to do anything for my birthday. I only pray and hope my life will sort itself out.
I'll have my last exam a day before, and would be fresh out of college, awaiting a degree, but a part of me will still be that little girl who made her proud once, and then lost her way somewhere along the line.