Loiters, but more.

I remember telling him how I felt like Sylvia Plath on certain days when I was back home for the winter break after the first semester of college had ended. I told him how I felt an incessant rumbling inside me, that I’d feel like tearing down my present like a million-dollar painting because it resembled my past more than I’d want it to. He had jokingly asked I remember, if I had the ingenuity in me to kill myself as wondrously as Sylvia Plath did; she killed both of us actually.

That December was wintry, ghost-like, and lonely, as the rest of winter that year. I had spent a month laying around my room, doing very little and wishing every moment that some friend or force perhaps, hit me across the face with something; I wanted something to happen to me, some solitary ripple in the continuous stagnancy my life seemed too bent on to preserve. I remember talking to a friend about how we felt like ghouls when we roamed around the neighbourhood a week after I reached home. I remember telling her I felt trapped all over again in a past that I desperately wanted to end: that same heated laze of a summer afternoon that turned bitter because it delayed its departure for too long. That there was not one friend of mine in town that I could hang around with added to the helplessness. I had dreamt a life before the break began; I had imagined how this winter would be different because I wouldn’t have to study unless I wanted to, that the wedding that I was to go to before coming home, would inject some of its cacophony into my life that I could rewind again and again till I was back in college, struggling to stay afloat.

The wedding was good and I met lots of people. I loitered with certain newly found cousins of mine around this dimly lit town at the foothills of the Himalayas, laughing and giggling and watching them live a life I had wanted at their age but never could put into words. After the wedding was over and I stood in the garden the wedding fire had been lit two nights before, all ready to head home when two cousins of mine tried conjuring up images of a day out in a city where they lived. It was killing me from the insides to leave and never see them again, but this felt like a ray of hope, as happens when most South-Asian extended families say bye to each other after gatherings; they make promises never to be fulfilled, just so that the ripples of decorated venues touch their silent homes a little, homes of regularity they’d return to. I remember telling him everything that winter, both the momentary dizziness induced by a hitting silence back home and the faint promises of coming together again before this dizziness was forever gone. I think sometimes I yearn for yearning itself, because why would I hustle and make arrangements for meeting people I don’t yearn for? And if I do not hustle and make plans, what would I do with that chunk of silence that spread over me as tormenting as the burning sky of a dry summer?

Then it was January-end when I returned to college, thanking the powers above for the restlessness that was to ensue; things never slowed down at college. I noticed a change in him; maybe it was my tears that moved people away after all; he was the first friend I had cried in front of. By the end of February, it had become clear we’d gone far too far apart for me to even look at him without my eyebrows unmoved. The way his sight haunted the most intimate parts of both my past and my present all at once, I reckoned he must’ve been my ghost after all. Who could haunt me as terribly if not me, myself? And then in the middle of March, I was climbing down the stairs of my home again, going into the already-humid spring air outside. I was to meet a friend at a fair, that I was told, only rude children went to, when I was a child myself. Waiting for my friend as I stood outside the iron gates, I wondered why the colourful fair had gates that resembled a cage. No sooner had I asked this to myself, I saw my friend, walking towards me, smiling; he had grown up a great deal, it had been a long time since I last saw him. I found an answer, a piece of my childhood curiosity resided in that fair, and I was lucky I grew up. I smiled not at him, but at myself and entered the pompous cage, again.

I remember not feeling anything remarkable that evening. After we said our byes and I started walking towards home, I found myself in front of a narrow lane, on both ends of which lay the homes of two of my dearest friends of childhood. They were not in their homes however, both of them were away at college, and so was I, I thought. As I walked down that lane, I remembered that this lane not only led to my best friend’s house but also another network of lanes that used to be mixed with my blood at some point in the distant past. As I walked on each lane that held up a special memory to me, at the back of my eye, I forgot that the word time meant something, that it was not a random arrangement of four letters of the English alphabet. I felt haunted at first; I remember once when my best friend and I were walking on the road I was currently walking on and my shoelace had opened and I had stooped to tie it while he went on, I was angry as hell. I don’t know why I thought of it of all things, but I did. I heard a rustle of leaves then and the entire street looked flooded with a strong glimmering moonlight. Then I looked up and saw it was the streetlight that was blocked by these innumerable green leaves that created this outlandish illusion. First, I thought I was haunting this place. Then I laughed a little; it was haunting me. I looked up almost lovingly, I felt that my home was my past but my past is my home. I stopped running for a second and wished I could dissolve into the glimmering street, the glowing green leaves, and the propelling ether. I was a different person now, the actions of my past not tracking their consequences to my present, and yet I wanted to fall back, for the first time in years, to my past. So, I did.

I finished reading The Bell Jar yesterday, at first, I wished I could tell him that. But then I looked outside the window, it is May-end now. Last night I was again out loitering around the neighbourhood with a childhood friend. We ate ice cream and walked down dimly lit streets as we sweat profusely. It is May-end I told myself; I should stop thinking about maybe-s for once. The cool bulb on my left in my room collided with the warm light on my right. It is twilight and the book ended, I said to myself. I felt like a poem: dissolved and intact.