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[stayhereforasecond]

CREMATION GROUND

As a kid, I only saw, knew, and heard about cemeteries and cremation grounds in movies and on TV. It’s not something that your parents deliberately discuss with you when you’re a kid. It’s not something MY parents would discuss with me. For the most part of my life (almost 13 or 14 years), I was not even aware of the cremation ground near my home. It’s only a few hundred metres away. There are a lot of things that have surrounded me my entire life which I was never aware about. Anyway, even after learning about the existence of this cremation ground, I did not think much about it. I don’t remember it ever crossing my mind. It was only when I was about to turn sixteen when this turned around. This was when I lost someone close to me for the first time in my life. Before that I never really struggled with death. It was a natural concept of life that was very realistically acceptable to me.

The cremation ground was on one of the routes I took coming back from school. Generally i would just pass by without acknowledging its existence. However, I remember one day there was a dead body tied to a wooden ladder, covered with white cloth and some marigolds on top of it. Few men, some in white clothes and some in old washed up shirts, were standing around. I guess they were waiting for something. And that was the first time that place caught my attention like never before. Maybe it was because around that time I started paying more attention to dead bodies. I thought about it all day. After that, every time I rode alone by that place it was hard not to pay any attention.

It’s weird and striking that a place near my home, a place I was not even aware about the first 15 years of my life, and a place that crossed my mind only a few times in 18 years is so visible now, that it’s hard to not be aware of it. I wish I was speaking metaphorically. And this time i don’t even have to ride past it. Just like college and work, I get to be aware of it from my home.

I’ve lived in this city my whole life. I’ve seen this place change. I’ve seen roads being destroyed and constructed over and over again. I’ve seen trees being taken down. I’ve seen homes slowly turn into apartment buildings. I’ve seen the whole landscape change. I remember seeing hundreds of houses from my roof and now I can’t see past one house. When I was very little, maybe 5 or 6, a carnival was organised a few hundred metres from my home. On the same road as the cremation ground actually. I live in a colony and even though it was more than a decade ago, I could not see the carnival from my roof. But what I could see was its light in the sky at night. And sometimes we could even hear the music. For a week or so the sky was so pretty because of the lights of the carnival. Even on days we didn’t visit, the carnival made me happy.

This is one of the oldest memories I have of living on this earth. I didn’t think about it this much but for the past few months I can’t stop thinking about it. 2 months ago, when we all knew someone who urgently needed hospitalisation but could not get one. When we stopped watching news because of our mental health. When someone we knew was dying every other day. This is when this beautiful childhood memory became the realisation of how life has changed for all of us. The road from where the lights were lighting up the sky became the road painting a picture in the sky of all the deaths and the grief they left. Some, not even acknowledged. Just like I watched the lights in the sky all those years ago as a 5 or 6 year old, this time I was watching the smoke coming out of the cremation ground non stop in the sky as a 18 year old.

(I wrote this when the covid cases peaked)

[stayhereforasecond]

On the cusp of a new year

In some ways the same woman

In many others, changed

She is no longer gasping for air

She has her sword put away

Carefully placed at the top of her closet

There has been no need for war

All she’s had to focus on

Is flowers

She never thought she’d get here

But somehow as she gets a bit older

Her biggest worry is where to set the vases

And how to celebrate the peace

No longer crying

Nor begging on her knees

There has been no need for war

All she’s had to focus on

Is flowers.

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Love is everything I feel and everything I'll never be able to put into words. It drives us all. But it’s not the biggest feeling ever. Grief is. But I wonder if grief can only be tied to the dead and deceased. Because he’s not dead but what I feel, it’s a lot like grief. I once read that grief is just all the love that we have nowhere to put. Knowing that even if you ripped your soul out and offered it to god, they can never come back. Grief is just love intertwined with helplessness. So the question is, can you grieve for people that are still alive?

[stayhereforasecond]

Hoax by Taylor Swift: A rant

I’ve spent countless hours overthinking ‘Hoax’ by Taylor Swift and what it means. Of course I’ll never know what perspective she wrote this song from and what the lyrics originally meant but that’s the beauty of it. I got to find out what they mean to me. It was clear in my mind what I thought the lyrics meant but then I watched the long pond studio sessions and my mind was blown. Not just because of how poetically beautiful this song is but how far away my interpretation was from what she was conveying. 

One of the things that really hit me was when she said:

“I think the part that sounds like love to me is ‘don’t want no other shade of blue but you, no other sadness would do’, it sounds like what love really is. Who would you be sad with? And who would you deal with when they were sad? And gray skies everyday, for months, would you still stay?” 

This makes perfect sense and it’s absolutely true. However, to me the same part sounded a little bit like self damage  at first. Because I interpreted it as toxic love. In a way of ‘Oh, I’d forgo every shred of happiness just to hold on to the sadness, if that’s all you have to offer me’ and ‘I’d rather choose you crushing my soul than to not have you at all’. 

When the song starts with “my only one, my smoking gun, my eclipsed sun, this has broken me down”, it sounds like when you end up making someone the center of your universe instead of yourself. Then she continues to sing “my winless fight, this has frozen my ground”. This lyric makes me want to scream my lungs off. Because sometimes there’s no escape for you. No matter if you leave or you stay, your heart is going to shatter either way and you’re not moving on, you’re stuck in the same place. 

Then again when she sings “Stood on the cliffside screaming give me a reason, your faithless love’s the only hoax I believe in”. I’ve weeped on this part for innumerable times. This sounds like the peak of toxicity you can get yourself into. Where you know you’re hurting, you know it’s breaking you apart, you know it’s not healthy for you and yet you’re not able to leave. You know it’s not real love but you want it to be real so badly that you’re making yourself settle even if it means suffering miserably. Then you’re just begging the other person to do something so extreme, to “give you a reason”,  that you have no choice but to walk away. You want them to make you leave because that sounds like the only way out. 

And finally comes the bridge at the speed of a train and it hits you. When “You knew the password so I let you in the door, you knew you won so what’s the point of keeping score” comes, I officially lose it. To me, it feels like this: the same person who knew exactly how to make you smile through your toughest moments is now picking you apart piece by piece because they know exactly how to. It’s the only part that was similar to what Taylor said. And it also resonates with the situation where you give all of you to the other person and you open up completely. Then the other person could either make you the best version of yourself or they could break your soul. You can hope for them to choose the former but they choose the latter.

Taylor swift said that while writing this song, she wasn’t sure what exactly she was writing about but she ended up summing everything that I never found the words for. 

[stayhereforasecond]

I’ll be my own end

This internal need to thrive every time I lift a finger or open my mouth is going to be the end of me.

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Mystery of love

Alexander the Great, the king of Macedonia, took over most of Asia only to be defeated by the grief of losing Hephaestion. 

I’m no scholar to comment on the manner of the relationship those two had. But what I do believe is that if soulmates truly do exist then those two were it. What love must Alexander have had for his companion to declare him as a god just to reunite with him in the afterlife. Was it truly the grief that made his body succumb or was his mind, body, and soul too tired to wait for the afterlife? 

Maybe they were lovers, maybe they were not, but they’ll always remain a part of each other’s soul.

[stayhereforasecond]

The memories, though vivid as a video, will never be more than visions of what could've been.

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Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.

The picture of dorian gray

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Skin of gold tarnished by love.

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Unquestioned Freedom

A few days ago, I was out with a friend buying some groceries and we got into talking about how unrealistic it feels that we’re now adults and it seems like it was only yesterday his little sister started her first grade in school. She’s 14 now and halfway through 9th grade. I asked him how she was doing and everything. Then we started reminiscing about the time when we were in 9th grade, going to tuitions for the first time, starting the teenage life and acting like adults, going out for the first time, crushes, our friend’s boyfriends and girlfriends and how at the time we felt like we were grown ups when in reality we were just stupid. 

As we were talking and laughing about the past, I started teasing him saying how does it feel now that his little sister is in that phase and he’s so old. He laughed a little and said how it’s weird but it’s life. But then he said “It’s also strange”. When I asked him how, he said that now he’s slowing seeing a side of his parents that he did not see when he was of that age. I said “now the lifestyle has completely changed so it makes sense-” but he interrupted me and said “not in that way yaar”. So I asked him what he meant. He said “You know when we were that old, I had you and other female friends and some of you often talked about how you can’t wear this and that, your parents won’t let you do this, you hid from people that knew your family, you had to get home before dark, etc. Whenever I heard these things, I knew that it was because of your gender and safety but none of these things were ever mentioned in my home so I thought my parents mustn’t be that strict. But now my sister is going through all of that, the subtle remarks, the restrictions, everything coming down to her body,  she should avoid being with boys too much. I hear things and concerns that were not even mentioned once when I was 14 and it’s just so strange. It just never seemed this real to me and it makes me think how oblivious I was.” The words coming out of his mouth were not unknown to me, just like her sister and probably every other girl, I’ve also been going through this as long as I can remember but the way he was talking, his face, his eyes and everything about him in that moment was screaming how the reality and depth of all this was coming to him just now.

Since that day I’ve not been able to stop but wonder how that unquestioned freedom must feel like. 

[stayhereforasecond]

"do you love tragedies and everything that breaks the heart?"

— Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

[stayhereforasecond]

Personal growth is dancing to the songs that used to make you cry!!