my entry into writing

Life, as is told. 

I can't rely on the person that I was- though the past is inextricably linked to is, it carries with itself a haze and an aura of distance. The past never belonged to us wholeheartedly. We are its jilted lovers. Spurned when it chose to move away.

I cannot rely on who I was. The roots that define me too long embedded in the soil that the seed seems to have lost its flower (if I ever flowered that is!) And such is the nature of life. We cannot live our lives as intimately as we would want to live it. Not in the past, present or future. Each moment begun is each moment that ticks away and the time we describe the present as present it is slipping away into the past, and the future slipping into the past and present.

Yes, time is cyclic. A circle with points that never repeat themselves. But we aren't going anywhere. We're stuck perennially here. In this moment which itself is becoming the moment past.

Maybe the past is all we have, the completely un-graspable past. A past that we never access having once lived through it. A past that has this inescapable mystery around it.

I wanted to live. I wanted to live happily and closely and it did not necessarily necessitate for me an absolute comprehension of life. I was willing to find my answers along the way- my curiosity being shut by the world. I rarely asked questions after I turned fourteen.

The world never gave satisfactory answers while it also condemned you on the way with contemptuous overtones. So I started keeping mum, trying to figure out answers to everything by myself. I did not want to intrude into people's lives and spaces. I never asked my teachers questions too, having been put down most of the time.

Dialogue needed intimacy. But even in the most intimate of relationships, I fell silent. Quietly trudging along the way, hoping to find answers while my mind came up with torrents of questions every second.

I'm never empty of questions. Only one person on the planet understood this. 

This person too didn't really know me and has never met me, but he understood this complete unquiet and torrent of questions existing in me by reading me. Why did I ask so many questions? That statement had never been made about me in recent times. It was last made when I was ten and my science teacher thought that I was very curious. Inquisitive.

Slowly I lost the capacity for believing in the world's capacity to answer. It felt like I never reached the heart of the matter. The journey to the heart of things or people is lonely, bumpy and requires courage. You've to take it all by yourself and strongly. So, I tried. I'm never empty of questions. So if I never ask you how you are or what you do or if you feel like I'm not enough interested in you because I ask nothing of you, that's not the case (well, mostly).

I was once deeply confrontational. I avoid any kind of conflict situations, though. I don't now confront more people, knowing that it doesn't yield results. Yes, I'd want to confirm or ask your side of the take before I form a judgment but I've learnt to trust my gut too. I look calm. Too calm at times. People who know me well too often mistake my torrent of questions for torrent of emotions.

I do not feel as much as I think. This is not to undervalue feeling. But to me, emotions are rational things too, derived out of well thought out reasons. At least that's how I choose to react. Everything's grounded in something. Something in the past and yet the past is that ineffable smoke always disappearing into the unseeable mists.

I wanted to live here. I maintain a certain distance from life. Everything happens to me. It hits my heart so much that I build walls around me. Nothing touches this shield.

Not the past, present or future. Nothing. And yet everything breaks it, one by one, it's so brittle and fresh. Something endures because something is willing to break every moment. Because we can't always spring up, but we can still find our way.

-Udita Garg