Time Machine

I built a time machine. And let me tell you – not an easy task! The dials go wonky, the hands refuse to sync with moon’s gravity and the batteries run out before you can even think 2050!

This was supposed to be a multi-directional machine. Forward and back. Left and right (Not including up and down as I don’t want to wake the Gods and the Devils). You fancy seeing your great-grandfather build the cabin by the lake or your future great-grandchildren pull it down to pieces? Hop on! Want to visit a parallel dimension to see how that meal would have tasted with an extra pinch of nutmeg or how that astronomy course might have changed your life? Got you covered!

To test it out, I had to choose the perfect moment to visit. I was seriously tempted to take a sneak peak into the future to see how the gamble D and I took with our lives would turn out. Or take a spin into the past when times were simple and safe. Or perhaps take a glimpse of an alternate reality where we stayed put in India.

That is pretty much when the time-machine ended up in the junkyard.

I now know I would have seen a future full of anxiety and second-guessing and frustration! Not to mention Canadian winters!! That itself would have been enough to firmly tie myself to the good ol’ climate of Pune. But would those stolen moments of the future done justice to the depth of my journey getting here? I am guessing no. My present tells me more about my future than the actual future; without my present, I have no future.

There is no moment I would rather be in than my present, exactly the way it is – crudely packaged with mistakes and lessons and bursts of brilliance. 

My curiosity refuses to go back to sleep though. It keeps wanting to know! I am smart enough to not try to interpret the predictions of Nostradamus but neither am I so sophisticated that I won’t do those cheesy prediction tests on the internet 😀 Hey! If I am destined to be a travel guide in Prague then there is always hope right??

I feel like I am forever trying to strike a deal with time – Don’t tell me the answers, but give me the four options! Or a teaser pack if you will. A movie trailer of my life with cool background music doesn’t sound so bad!

I play with online prediction tests while I resist the call to salvage the time-machine.

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What would you do?

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Helping Hand

Image: Prateek Gupta

Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up. – Thomas Wayne (Batman Begins)

Just to be safe, let’s practice yelling as loudly as possible for a rope-ladder.

I love rising out of ashes stories. That journey of climbing out of the pit, brushing down the muck and moving on with life’s lemons? Oh yes.. count me in as I add some tequila into the mix. Funnily enough, I commit the heinous crime of overlooking the lifelines and cooling stations in my own story, not that there were any significant ashes.

Like a bitter pill, I spit out my pride and zip up my mouth. A stubborn misconception plagues me that requesting help makes you weak! It keeps me from taking the first step and admit that maybe, I cannot do this alone. Obviously, it comes with a cost of bewildered family and friends that justifiably feel hurt. Even if they cannot give a hand they can always lend an ear, right?

I am also a hypocrite as when someone else does the exact same thing – I am sense & sensibility personified. Turn the tables and there will be a me-shaped hole in the door… Classy, I know!

I am serving a life sentence for this. At least the prison isn’t empty – in fact, it is probably a fire hazard at this point. 

I took my sweet time getting used to counting on someone. Getting married helped. Funny how long it took me to realize that asking for help is the first step in becoming a bigger person. Funny how late I realized the amazing liberty of pestering someone and they will unconditionally be there to carry you through. Did you know they even get you ice-cream? If you did, why didn’t any one tell me sooner? I was missing out.

Oh to have the compassion of the helper and the strength of the … helpee? I am struggling with the maths here. 

Check out Erika’s infinitely brilliant take on this

Restful (or Less?)

24 hours in a day – How royally do I waste it?

Sometimes, I manage to draw some semblance of good out of my day. I ate healthy, I had a stimulating conversation, I delivered a good piece of work, I worked out, I wrote something, I ran errands, I cooked a great lunch. Whatever. Something to make me feel good that I didn’t let the day go waste.

Nothing to write home about.

Many nights, even though the sleep comes easy, I find myself wondering what on earth did I accomplish in the 16 waking hours of my life that day beyond browsing Etsy and Buzzfeed! (No offence to either). What’s the word I yearn to use?

Constructive. Or Productive.

Funnily (or not), I hesitate to use those words out loud. Story time: I was 15 and on a school trip – an overnight to a village in Rajasthan. We were sitting at this spot all afternoon. Gossiping and playing cards. I became restless with the inactivity when there was a world to explore outside the guesthouse (or so I imagined). I just voiced out this one line in frustration, “Let’s just go and do something constructive, guys”. I never heard the end of whatever came through the laughter. The boring studious girl had spoken the boring studious lines as usual. Even my close friends couldn’t help a chuckle.

Till date, I am surprised by how easily that mildly mortifying feeling comes back to gnaw at me.

The point of my rambling is that I always get restless if I have not done SOMETHING! I can’t just let things go. Even on a holiday, I cannot relax and keep feeling wasteful. I wonder about the dozen things I could have done differently, to show something for my time and leave behind a piece of worthiness. To whom, is a very good question!

I don’t know. I don’t have any answers. Just a long list of could haves, should haves and would haves.

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Put me out of my misery, will you?

Precipice

The wounds sneak up slowly.

The blade and the belt catch you unaware,

On the precipice of the cliff

And the free fall into the churning tides.

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You don’t recognize the relief you seek.

Is it from the intense sting of your welts?

Or from the powerful current you can never take on?

Or from the pointed rocks that tempt you to end it all….

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Thaw

It is slow. It is painful. It is unavoidable. It is welcome.

I am bending to the will of the increasing warmth of the sun. The clouds have broken through in a glorious display of song and dance, the memories of the frost all but forgotten. It feels like waking up from a long, tormented sleep where even nightmares would have been welcome instead of the blank lifeless vacuum that held no concept of meaning.

The blood is running through my fingers again as I furiously set the pen to paper. Doodles make way to letters and then somehow, magically, unfathomably, the letters are turning to words. I am afraid to stop writing lest the sunshine gets lost and I get frozen – suspended back into the land of the long winter.

Oh! I have missed being here. I have missed giving reign to my thoughts. I have missed the joy of not knowing which words my fingers might bleed. I have missed being envious of the brilliance of fellow bloggers and writers. I have missed being inspired.

It has been a long journey to open my blog again. For months I was contemplating, but I couldn’t turn it into a task. This place was always about choice, about joy and about freedom. I was loathe to make it into something akin to duty. My mind was numb. It was all about laundry lists and action items in the long journey of settling down which somehow never seemed to happen. It has been almost a year since I moved to Toronto and yet, my mind took its sweet time into making the city its own.

I don’t know when this city became home but I will tell you when I realized it – last Sunday. D and I took our first long vacation since moving here and got back on Sunday. That is when I equated the end of the vacation with coming back home. My condo and my city was what I wrapped around myself with a sense of comfort and security. This in turn, encouraged me to welcome myself back into my second home – this place 🙂

Let the good times begin! Happy Summer everyone 🙂 How have you been?