LIMBO

I have been working on this piece for a few months now. In fact, the very first word was written on June 16th: I haven’t closed this tab on my computer since then. In editing this, many of things I wrote in the present have now been changed to the past. I’m not afraid of change. These words are the things I grasp for in the dark, reaching for every speck of understanding. Are you ready?

This one is dedicated to my friend Eli, who reads every word I write and who fuels me creatively like no one else. Thank you.

Recommended soundtrack: 

• GINGER — BROCKHAMPTON

• Houston — Jean Dawson

• How many miles — Mk.gee

• Pyrite — Frank Ocean

• See you Soon (Live in LA) — beabadoobee

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The centerpiece of every opus I’ve written is rooted in consideration. For life, for people, for the sake of understanding. One of my bigger fears in life is not being understood by other people in the same way I understand myself. Or being seen in the same way that my close friend see me. One or the other. (By this, I mean both).

I wanted to write it all down, but the paper stayed empty. Yet, this emptiness seemed to describe the feeling perfectly. The words didn’t come out with all of that hurt. For a three-day limbo period, I felt like I didn’t exist at all. The days were on repeat, and I did nothing but talk about the same three things to my friends and those who wanted to listen. 

I moved from the west coast to New England for college and so much has changed. These days, walking through the town, I often find myself curiously mimicking the gaze of the people around me, switching my focus from the cracks in the sidewalk to the lack of skyline sightline of alternating rooftops of colonial homes. I keep finding familiar faces in every stranger. Every time a rooftop and sidewalk crack hitches so goes my breath. Plummeting into the ground quickly, so much is gone and so much more was here. I’ve discovered so much more beauty happens with a falling leaf by your side. No better words than that, I fear — it’s just falling. 

It’s fall now. Many people travel from far and wide to New England to look at the trees. I can see them right in front of me now. I had a conversation with my friend a few weeks ago when we both agreed that we desperately want to feel part of an artistic something, here more than anywhere. The logistics of this I may never specifically figure out for myself with what precious years left but I do have a sense that I am no longer rowing a boat upstream, but rather being sloshed around by a leaking something headed south.

My circles spin south. Spirals are born from the center; perhaps my very nature runs in a curve. In all of my circularity, I sometimes fear that I never really wanted to be cured at all, maybe only seen, maybe only being considered. 

Some days I’m on the surface of myself, some days I am in the deep waters. I fear that in the center of me I might only find someone else. It might be a byproduct of their existence rather than a result of my own. 

Imagine falling down, and instead of getting back up, you stay there, wondering why you tripped. The real power is in getting back up, not in dwelling on why you stumbled. Life is about moving on, not staying stuck in the past. The journey becomes easier when you let go of the unnecessary. Freedom comes from when you choose to release what’s taking you further from where you belong. The only way to find comfort is to remove what no longer serves you or brings you purpose. 

I write about my greatest passions and thoughts, the things that haunt me the most, keeping them in until I have no choice but to let them go in a rush of words. There are things I can never forget, stories I’ll have in my blood until the day I die. 

June 

The first week of June was incredibly still, with blanket white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much saturation. I started my internship this week—the experience of my lifetime (as much as my 19 year-old self had experienced so far) and it was quite amazing: the structure, the people, the work itself.

Let me set the scene because it deserves a setting for our posterity. Warm day, cold night, San Francisco. I could see the light glinting out the ripples. Always moving, dangerous. Out here, with the water at my feet, the sunset seems less lonely. Darkness settles slowly. There’s no rush to turn the lights on.

A long, almost 10-hour day, starting at 7:18 am and ending at 8:35 pm. I had never worked longer hours since this day. I took a stroll by the pier, one of my favorite places to be in the city. It was my second week on the job and the boss had already gotten to know me and my name, telling her own mother that I was a hard worker in front of me at an event. I grinned cheek to cheek and told my mom about it. I can’t believe I am doing this. 

I can’t help but feel how near everything is to my heart. The mind and the body cannot go on forever, in doubt and struggle and uncertainty. 

It is summer. Well, not quite. It officially starts on June 20th. But it very much feels like it. I am damp and the chlorine from the pool has settled into my skin and hair and I feel much lighter with this water in me now, ironically. 

We listened to the downpour. It was really raining hard. I wanted to laugh forever with them. I can’t get enough of this moment. 

I’m alone on the train again. Another late night. I heard her voice through the rain-soaked window. 

July

So much for hope. I hate being disappointed over and over again. It’s a terrible feeling. I miss the days when everything was, well, great. It won’t ever go back before. Nostalgia has me in its sentimental grip, but I want to feel that warmth, the steady feeling of stability. I miss the way it used to be– it’s not quite the same as it was two years ago. I’m just going to move forward and hope for the best. There goes that word again. Hope. 

July reminds me of how I grew up. Playing with my cousins in the backyard of my grandparents’ house in Chennai. Climbing the mango trees, a cobra peeking out behind the jackfruit tree. Trips up to the mountains, the most orange color carrots can get. Dog bites and bare feet. Flowers in my hair. 

You’d laugh when I’d retell my childhood stories; how I’d cry, how hard I tried to be good. 

I remember the feeling, and the taste of it will ever leave my mouth. Time is fed. Thumbs and twitching fingers across the side, feeling pulsed skin. From soft to sharp.

August

Returning to this place 3000 miles back where I came from, I am again a stranger to everyone here and to myself. 

The airport here feels different. It’s less moist and doesn’t harbor any of the heaviness Boston tends to have in the air. It’s the only air I’ve ever known them in. I have a difficult time separating people from locations. I can’t bring that heaviness back here. 

I knew I entered the bay again when I saw the Santa Cruz mountains poking out from underneath the clouds. There is something so significant and different about the mountains here; I can recognize them by the color, the way they feel. Drop me on a trail, blindfolded, and I can tell you if I’m walking on the lands of the Ohlone people. The familiarity of eucalyptus trees in a common park. I can smell a redwood forest from two miles away.

Mid-August, an afternoon spent with an old friend.

If we missed a day, there was always the next. She is so special to me. I think of her softly from time to time, of the conversations we shared and the girlish glow we shared together trying to make sense of the world as we knew it. 

Within the first few moments of meeting each other again, I felt her touch again before we even hugged. She held my face with both of her hands. You have gotten so pretty. Repeated I missed you’s and giggles in between hugs. I have never known a kind of love quite like hers. 

Our coffee had gotten cold by now, and we had gotten whisked up in hearing about cities only 300 miles away from each other’s. 

I swirled my coffee again. In the bubbles that lingered, I swear I saw the image of her face. 

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This one afternoon I was at a coffee shop across the street of a bookstore I had bought what became my favorite book from. I drove across town to buy some groceries for my mom. I drove past the familiar street signs and past my old high school. There is some sort of tenderness I feel here, something I never felt in college. Things aren’t as sweet to me there as they are here. Maybe it’s the rose-tinted glasses my childhood experience brought to me. Or maybe it’s just that the East Coast is colder (by temperature and other things). It’s the second gloomy day this summer and I think about how sometimes, I get really sad about some of my experiences. I had felt far more discomfort than I did peace lately. 

I’m sick of being too quick to forgive the things that hurt me too deeply. It makes things painfully worrisome for me. A night that was supposed to be all fuzzy and friends at some place downtown turned into me in my room alone, thinking about words I don’t even want to write. The burden was mine and I hadn’t wanted it to be. 

I have these strange flashes of clarity sometimes that I wish I could forget — moments where it’s glaringly obvious that my devotion is unearned. I’ve got to figure out how to quit this. Not because I want to, but because I need to save this sort of unrelenting kindness for myself. I’m beginning to feel the indignation of it all. 

And I’m not asking for complete happiness, I know that is nearly impossible if I am not self-actualized. I wish I had listened to my mom more when she tried explaining meditation to me instead of taking up my dad’s invocations. 

I had to pull over on the drive back from Berkeley. My visibility was starting to get blurry. I can’t imagine myself finding other people who are as good to me as my friends here are to me.  I am the only one who can take care of my own feelings. I wanted to be endured.

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My roommate asks me almost every morning if I dreamt the night before. I tell her no every time, so I don’t know why she asks me again, not expecting a different response. I haven’t been dreaming much lately. I dreamed about the night out in town. The rain, the dark walk back home. I thought I forgot those moments. It’s strange what comes up in my dreams. They’re always the things I don’t think about. In my dreams I am not the same person. And I ask for forgiveness while opening the windows.

It was a simple day. Something about self company has been missed, and I’m grateful to be with it again. The forest cleans me off again and the birds are clinging to the clouds. I find solace here. Birds beckon from the river and I linger at the water’s edge. I’ve always taken solstice in my self-identity, knit me over in my own neurons, let me sleep. It lingers in my synapses, even after it has left my thoughts. In time as she drums, those quick, urgent months, I lose this feeling of self-certainty as though my body becomes just a vessel rather than something living. My eyes might be seeing rather than perceiving, only ever on the surface of my mind (that coldness of skin). Some days I rarely dive. I’ve been all too aware of my body as a body, (heart pumping, lungs pulling), but rarely my mind as a mind (a soul underneath). It begs the question, that thinly drawn line: to what extent am I mine? I’ve built up this idea of myself: from the firing of neurons created a soul, a mind, a name, out of the body’s ordinance. Is my mind mine, or am I my mind? A voice lulls to me, you ask too much and too little in the same breath.

Sometimes I see myself pass in the reflection of a shop window and cannot find my identity in the person I meet eyes with. Does it startle you too? Reminders that you exist? I spend so many days sinking in the circularity of my mind that I can no longer conceptualize my existence as something bearing permanence, weight, skin. And in this state of separation between skin and sound, I find no ability to understand how your eyes hold me. What figure do they mold for me, what space do I consume between your temples?

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I heard about the headlines from a few friends. I could not ignore it. It’s giving me fire; I feel like I’m on fire. I am burning. From eyes that are reminiscent of dark chocolate or almonds, I hope that I am not seen bitterly. I guess some people are allergic to chocolate and almonds. My lack of presence must be easier to digest, and the essence of it will always linger. 

Is it really that hard to be kind? I am everything at once. Memory is punishment. Why is it so embarrassing? We are also every age we have been before, and the previous incarnations inside of you. 

It’s not feeling quite right.

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Are my syllables lost to the touch; like a foreign language left to be myth?

I return to philosophy from time to time. My AP Literature teacher my senior year of high school ignited something in me, and I have a constant craving towards wanting to not only think, but to understand. I have so many questions about it all. I’ve taken at least one class every semester that is rooted in philosophy since that literature class. I guess it sparked something in me that I’ll take with me for the rest of my life. It’s interesting how I have these little experiences in my life and in retrospect, they end up being much bigger than I ever knew them to be while I was living within them. 

It will be time for me to leave here soon, and I would be lying if I say I’m only looking forward to moving to London in the spring. How can I? It is almost impossible for me to bury a part of myself here and not treat it with care and respect and give it time. But I am incredibly excited to be there soon. And to be studying less than 60 miles away from my older brother—how cool is that?? One very exciting note: my dear, dear friend and pen pal Amelie is studying in London for the next few years. She visited me in my hometown almost three years ago and we had only been dreaming about the next time we’d meet: it’s finally time. Our bond will last through decades to come. 

How am I going to spend my life? How will I put in time and care and effort into making it the life I want to live? I cannot answer that, but I will try to live every day as I want to. I am a good student. What would have taken me a day and a half to finish only a year ago has taken me only a few hours this semester. I finish my work on time, I sit down and reflect and write. I spend time in nature, I show my friends the endless love I have within me and give it to them unrelentlessly.

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It’s one of those cold September days, one of those days that belongs in mid-October.

A wet towel sits in the bathroom and my hair is still damp. You are asking me what I am waiting for people to see. I am patient in my belief for contradictions, the less of me that exists means more of me is noticed. As if your ignorance to my humanness could be cured by seeing the bare heart beating behind skin, like a shadow box of anatomy, bone to flesh to blood. My sickness is something foreign. Like an oak carved by the hunger of pecking birds; the hollowness beneath makes me feel ill. Perhaps I never wanted to be anything at all. An existence without permanence.

It struck me very suddenly and awfully painlessly: this experience will be one that I’ll always look backwards at and never to look forward to. My heart aches a little more every time I write about it, but I can’t stop. I shouldn’t stop.

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I am thinking back to July. A month where it was all consistent. Work, San Francisco, trains, phone calls. 

Is it funny that I had feared the absences and the conditions of forgiveness, even then? My neurons bent at your knee, reforming. Sometimes I feared that you could not see beyond the surface of me. Was your hunger truly satisfied with the minnows swimming at my shallowness? Come closer, see whales diving in the caverns between my lungs, pale whites in the indigo. I am not only my skeleton, measurements of skin; a voice lingers here too. I want to be understood. Gut me like a fish, open me on the table, remove the bone from my back. I know you hear me, but do you see me? I am right here, at your palm. See me, see me, see me!

Every so often, I vaguely feel a missing part of me and I can’t seem to explain exactly what that is. I contain multitudes and apparently all of them are anxious right now. 

I would like to think that people are doing the best they can from their level of awareness. Forgiveness is relative. What hurts us the most may be something very small for the person across from us. But the repetitive intentional hurt is pinching me harder. There is no role worth playing anymore. There is no approval and no admiration. Is awareness a form of change, is metaphysical close enough to the physical?

I’m letting my emotions sweep my feet from under me. There are moments where I’d be better placed. A life ideology my mind sinks to in sleep. There was a moment, between the hurt and the retreat, where it actually started feeling better. Like salt in the sea, these moments become part of me and I’ll carry them with me everywhere. I’m taking in the grief. How slow the body is to realize. 

Before bed I am thinking of coffins and if anyone begs for a kiss goodnight before being lowered to rest. You tell me what I feel is natural and this both soothes and stings. Should the knowledge of pain’s commonness somehow strengthen me against it? My thoughts thicken like fog, hung up like jewelry to the neck and observers know me like the hunger of a fish is known by a split stomach on the butcher’s block. All their pity is passive, a sentencing rather than a mercy. These days I’m commonly silent, you hate this, I know. Shake me until I speak like rattled fishbones. Most mornings I am not certain as to why I am still breathing. Certainly my chest has been split open from neck to hip, why else would I have felt such a wound for days? You let me apologize like someone ignorant and this in itself is forgiveness. I long for the lacking, for some awareness of the body I sit in. I feel the absence even in my breathing, like a lung lonely for its other, like the tongue lonely for the sweetness of honey.

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I wish I could be more peaceful in the passage of time. But some wounds bruise the same skin twice and you knew this once, too. 

I’m feeling better about it again. I just need to make this feeling last a few more weeks. Then, the mountains, the park, my city. The ocean. The pull of a wave as you stand in wast deep oceans. The world could slip right under you. Hair across your collarbone left untouched from sleep. A face only seen in the slits of streetlights through my blinds. 

Seeing just how beautiful things could be seeing you smile with your eyes closed. Smile at me without thinking I’m watching. Let me see you for you because I love through and through. Genuineness is too valuable for how rare it is. 

Hour by hour, day by day. It’s been a few weeks now. It’s part of my existence now. 

There’s a relief within me, in this new routine. There isn’t one anymore. I’m not sitting around, waiting, anymore. I watch the sun set, bearing witness to the cycles of life far greater than me. I felt feelings, the kind that people long for and write poetry and music about. I know nothing is permanent in this life but I was hoping that I’d have a little more time with it before it was gone. I cannot consciously recall how this once felt.

I mean everything I say. It’s dark now and I’m very tired. I would stay up longer to write a little more, but it feels like my eyes are working overtime to fix the way my brain sees things.

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