I am turning 26 soon.
This is what I was up to in my 25th year:
Rediscovering the thrill of everyone in the room knowing my name
Collecting scraps for a time capsule (this blog)
Wrestling with the concept of creation, mourning the sentence I lost this afternoon, then another came in its memory: “once it is gone, it is gone. Something better often returns”
Alchemizing my flaws into gifts as often as I can
Letting my body sense what works, what does not (emotionally too)
Gaining a ton of weight from months of eating a lot of sweet and salty and crispy and fried and cold and rich and decadent. I regret it now but it was such a gift to the self. What fun is withering yourself dry?
I’m a hat person now
And just like that, you grow up.
There is something to coming back from all the places one has been to and working on a piece.
The feeling of having something that is invented out of thin air (by me!) and creating a sanctuary I can be suspended in for the time that I am interacting with it. Because that is what it feels like - a communication with things that are bigger than me, and a conversation that is happening through me. Yet, the gift is that I get a front row seat to see how magic happens. Watching words wriggle and scrawl and falter only to arrive and finally be captured feels like sorcery.
I am turning 26 and feel younger than ever. I feel now like who I should have been when I was 18 or 19 and just discovering my identity and “brand”, if only I had not been absorbed in self doubts and study pressures and this crush and that one. This is me, out in the world for the first time, just me, clean, empty handed, open to crashing parties and trying substances but guarding my heart all around that party and drug and person.
Mess with me and I will do something worse than destroying you, I will walk away.
There is something also to be said about all the life progress made, but I feel a divide between the me that writes and the me that lives. It is almost as if being an Indian, working class female woman who did a business degree and works in sales does not feature into the words of the me that is new, young, open, guarded, writing this.
But it is not true.
It all arrives from the very air I breathe in this clever unwelcoming city and the sweet place I get myself paychecks from. It arrives from the stones that I step on everyday to walk to this grocery store and that one, finding patterns and chocolates and selling where it all has not been before. It exists in the bright superdry backpack I can now afford, and the purple california cap, and the grey sweater and orange velvet dress and a french press and personal library and pink aesthetic keyboard I always get compliments on.
That is turning 26 too.
I have been trying to find traces of who I used to be, and often I have been thinking of old friends, lost ones, who once wrote me birthday letters, introduced me to new alcohols and drew cherry blossoms with sketch pens on sticky notes to put on my productivity bulletin board. I have been yearning to return to some people because they are the only ones who remember me as I once was. They can bring me home.
At any rate, the real ones, the ones who never crossed boundaries or broke my spirit, they are still here and don’t have much to say about how it all was (except “you used to be really angry and we were scared to say anything to you” thanks mom) and so it is all fuzzy, always has been, and I now have spotify again, new music, old music (embers by tiny habits, everybody talks by neon trees, dear reader by taylor swift, hot sugar by glass animals, take your time by sam hunt, sadda haq from rockstar, ladki badi anjani hai from kuch kuch hota hai)
Sometimes in my life, many times, there is an instinct at the back of my mind that keeps nagging: something needs to change, anything. Ever since I have graduated, I have hugged change like a old wiser sister: I move often, I try new hobbies, learn ways to save and invest, take frequent trips, have plans to travel the world, and it all boils down to listening to that muscle in me that is good at sensing when I need a 1 degree shift, a tilt on the axis of my life. Some of it is just my emotional chemistry but being good with a certain level of flexibility and variety really widens the scope of what you may discover about the world and yourself. I think welcoming change is the best thing I have done for myself in my early 20s.
I sometimes muse about the whys that have no real answer but always manage to make me feel like a nonentity- why I always liked reading so much, why do words get me this way, why upheave your entire life for an idea, why did that not work out, why this did. I try to console myself by giving my sensitivity meaning, by formulating a worldview that justifies my aches with the potential of what they will become one day.
Most days though, I know.
I know I am turning 26, just like millions of others. I know I am turning 26 on 1st March, just like thousands of others.
I am fortunate and clean and can live a life where I keep doing things that connect me to others.
I can enjoy life as much as I choose to, make mistakes, correct them, and grow older still.
I can go on rollercoasters, read thick novels, book a one way train ticket to Sri Lanka, write more around here, flirt more with that boy who likes me, use up all the aloe vera lotion, cook paneer, get stronger, build courage, get happier.
I am not a medium anymore. This paragraph, these words, my life and writing are melded together, it is all simple, it is all real. I am turning 26 and that is really nice.
Turning 26
I am not prepared for tomorrow.
I am still preparing for today, even as it goes on.
Life, like a frolicking puppy, has playfully placed me amongst men I do not know in an evening eager to stay and simmer into a warm summer night. A more philosophical soul than mine would say no one really knows even themselves. But philosophy is not the point among men who pride themselves on practicality, on real things, on lack of emotional outlets, on the capacity to ingest sweet alcoholic poison and exhale suppressed thoughts in smoky silences.
They have a lot to talk about, men. They have a way of talking about a lot without having much to say. A casual shrug dismisses wives and homely duties. It is not everywhere they show softness. Wives have waited, they will wait a little more, it does not matter. Half their lives they have spent waiting, the other half in looking back on the times they waited far too long. If there is an exam tomorrow, if tomorrow ever comes, a hundred such tomorrows will keep coming till one day you realise your child isn't in school anymore. Reality is something you suffer from. You let it infect you, hoping you'll get immune to it. Men sit around smoke and dark vague fluids with smoke and dark vague fluidity in their thoughts.
Today your boss said something to you that you did not like. They were mere words. They are always mere words. A slap would have hurt less. You, a man, let that out into this evening. You know the other men beside you do that too. You know we are all defeated. You can discuss targets, that colleague who left and did something and ended up making a whole lot of money, the current market, the current anything, the past, the future, the whole lot of topics you always keep on the tip of your tongue to avoid having to explain yourself but never fall short of words. You will need words and drinks to fill the silences, silences bring clarity, you can deal with anything but clarity right now as you let the comfort of the haze take over you.
Life sits beside me silently in this lazy, hazy evening. Stars are starting to reveal themselves like secrets we know but refuse to face. She asks me if I am alright. Unknown men and unsaid things lurk in the haze, but she looks at me and says, ah, you're growing old, you're reading too much into things. I am frightened of being old, of turning 27, of things lurking around corners, of the different ways we poison ourselves.
Men talk, men listen. I too, try. I am never going to be prepared for tomorrow all my life. I will remorselessly be pushed ahead, and someday life will sit with me again in a vague evening full of unknowns, and we will talk like friends.
Wow ✨