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This morning, I was fairly lethargic. I had woken up at 2:30 am for some reason, dead convinced that I was late for school. The monster had done the leg-arm-entwine-choke-amma move. Gak. Ack. Save me. Managed to go back to sleep for a few more hours before the alarm went off... Anyhow today is a day off from school so it was okay. I chilled a bit. Thought about this and that. Toyed with the idea of loudly waking everyone up and dragging them swimming. Gave up on that. Chanced upon what seemed like a good plan, if one considered that the quads were a bit tight.

Going back a bit in time, around this time 11 years ago, I was writing my thesis. My legs stretched out and the Toshiba Satellite (which weighed about the same as my seven year old does), perched on my legs. It was pretty exciting. I watched some TV, got some dinner, and tried to make a phone call to my parents, phone lines were down, returned home (somewhere in Northern Karnataka, where my parents-in-law were living at that time), and went to sleep. I was super high. It was just after my Edinburgh trip. I won an award there, I recall. Rocked my brown skirt suit at the banquet dinner. Ran in Edinburgh. Lovely place, that. Must go back s'time. Rolling mountains of green.

Sometimes I am almost afraid to be very happy. In the karmic cycle of the cosmos it seems that I come crashing down the next minute. Of course, this was an extreme example of it. The year? 2000. Dad. Not that he was not suffering for a while. Not that he was not miserable. I was 26 years old, what did I want? That he live for ever? That I be able to ring every time I had something cool happen, science-wise, to tell him about? That I show off my geek child? Her vocabulary & her smile he would have been completely fida over. Surely.

It took me some time to make sense of it all. To come to the conclusion that, his life, and his death, were nothing to do with me. And to understand that those 26 years I had with him? It was not up to him to make the most of them, it was up to ME. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. It doesn't matter. I still talk with him. He is younger and stronger and super duper awesome as ever in my head. I talk about me. And him. We think together. We smile. He was 64 years old, that song...

As I was watching grandma in her hospital bed, too short, that month was too short... I couldn't help wonder. So many years of memories in our head. At 37, when I sit down my brain buzzes with all these scenes and impressions and voices and memories. I work hard on trying to hold on to the good ones, of people I love with all my heart, I know those moments are not going to come back, I don't want to lose them. How must it have been for her? 82 years of memories. A veritable crowd in there...

At least with dad, he would tell you. Its like he had his warnings, he was not afraid. He would tell us. He always told us. I completely know what I meant to him. Some of my dreaminess, I get from him. My nose and jaw, totally from him. My ability to live in a world of memories and stories and fictionalised versions of real life, oh yeah... In a parallel life, we are sitting down, him and I, me, I have lost my shyness, I have found my words, we are talking, and being silent as well. And between us is the perfect arrangement for the situation. Guinness. With a four-leaf clover I have drawn for happy memories, 'cause nothing else really matters... or lasts...

(& In this life, I took a long luxurious bike ride to the beach, ran there, alone in a crowd, lost in myself)