Going Under

The reason I hesitate to make friends is that on some levels its unsustainable. Acquaintances are all fine. You meet you talk you part. But when you start sharing your thoughts and feelings and vice versa there is this dependency that gets built. I sort of hate that after a point. I try very hard but I guess by nature I am sort of needy, and need to be needed, rather connectedly.

I love people, I love new people, and it makes me very happy to hang out with them. Even if they are sometimes obnoxious, I collect something to think about whenever I meet someone. Sometimes, actually most times, what comes naturally to me is to invest a lot of time in people I really like. This is a slippery slope though.

I think I get (mildly) psycho about this. Then I feel bad for being psycho like that. I feel super duper angry when they don’t respond in equal measure. Take the simple matter of correspondence. My husband for example will ignore all emails I write to him. It makes me furious because I would never do that to him. One day he told me that he doesn’t reply to my emails because I write too long ones, and he feels obliged to write back an equally long email, and he cannot so he doesn’t.

It sounded like hogwash to me in general, but I took something away about myself from that interaction: That my emails are too long. And something about my place in the world: No one cares for honest outpourings of feelings and thoughts and ideas and goals that are personal to me. This one is a hard pill to swallow, to say the least!

Nowadays I don’t bother to write long emails anymore, unless extenuating circumstances occur. I hate nothing more than writing something like that, putting my feelings and thoughts out there, so speak. I don’t know why I do it. And the addressee, such as my husband, doesn’t even acknowledge it? Oh I even hate talking about this. When I hate something its time to change it. So that’s a new resolution. It doesn’t affect way too many people at any rate but I hope it will make me hate myself less.

This reminds me of that phase of my childhood. I was in college, and it was all such a wonderful and new experience for me. When I returned home, I would tend to talk for two days straight. My sentences all garbled and jumping over one another, such would be my urgency and enthusiasm that it took me years to figure out that my family didn’t really care about this stuff.

When I really needed to talk to someone, because of the confusing business of having fallen in love, of course there was no one.  It felt like everyone disapproved and it was only my young age, and that rosy cloud you ride when you are initially in love that helped me carry on with my life back then. I did what I could and resolved my feelings through some analysis and so on, as best as I could.

Even though I am online a lot, it takes effort to pour my feelings out in black and white. Effort and time. Which are better spent elsewhere. Thankfully I don’t talk on the phone too much so that wastage of time is fairly minimal.  At any rate, it is time I channeled better and stopped wasting time on un-reciprocated thought-sharing exercises. It’s a hard realization because periodically people come into my life and it seems for a bit that I have an ear for my outpourings. And it feels great and I forget my past experiences in this regard for a little while.

But at the end of time it is just a false sense, a big fat lie. The truth is that I am forty (nearly) and its high time I curbed down my enthusiasm for life and the everyday living of it. And definitely high time I shut down the noise and drone of other people that runs in my head and tuned it to different, more peaceful, internal frequencies.

So you’ll find me over there in the corner, doing what I do best, marginally fictionalizing my day-to-day life. Playing to my strengths. One of which is an innate ability of fingers to fly on the key-board. And also, possibly going a little insane as a considerable amount of talking to oneself will likely be involved. If you try me online and don’t find me responsive, its not because I am too busy. Its because I don’t want to deal.

I am no news channel

So do not expect news here. I rarely even read the newspaper or watch the news on TV. There. I said it. I have said it before too, I live in a Kenny Bubble World. I don't even have opinions on most matters any more except about myself. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I took the internalising too far, but then there is no coming back now, does not seem like it. I am too far gone. I did watch some TV yesterday. Idly. Walking away to the kitchen or some place every half hour or so. Tears would well up in my eyes. The heart would go through some sort of wrenching motions. But nothing seemed real, nothing still seems real, and yet I am all shaken up inside.

Anyhow it is today here in Mumbai. The 28th of November 2008. Situation looks bleak and at the same time normal. The city is under siege. But when is it not? Four months of monsoons we expect at least two maybe three days of uncertainty, of beating hearts, of water everywhere, and mobile phone messages to friends You Ok Dude. Yeah I am Home. This Place is OK. Clear. Except that one time three years ago. When my only aim was to drive home and charge up to my year old daughter. I learnt how easy it is to climb twenty-four floors that day (and to drive on even if you are in a zen and the water is up to your windows). I was not even that fit that time. The husband returned a whole entire day later, our hearts thudding, food turning to ash in our mouths. I loved FM radio then because they played my message to him. Who was that that sent a radio message? Surely not this Kenny here today? Then you hear of some religious or regional group or the other breaking chairs or protesting in a mall. You message again. Bomb threats. Yeah I was far Away. There was a freak shooting incident in my neighborhood, which, apparently, houses a shooting range. My heart beat faster whenever I crossed that store in front of which this happened, for a few days. I would move the kid away from the side I imagined the shot came from. No not maternal instinct. I would do it with you as well, am just a nice girl. Deluded and random and unrealistic, but still. That is forgotten now. The trains thing happened. A colleague I met that day gave me information about some young people he knew that lost their lives. I thought about that boy (face unknown) in that mangled bogie and allowed my heart to beat faster for a few days whenever. That is forgotten now. It was my wedding anniversary (or thereabouts), I was desperately messaging and it was not going through. Somehow messages and calls from other people asking me if he was back home, were coming through. I kept a brave face in the absence of any knowledge. He Will be Fine. Has Not Called Yet. Dont Worry. Yes I Will Call Back. The husband finally came back home by 9:30 (I think it was). See, I have even forgotten the details. I was in Boston. I was at work and watched the planes crash into the towers online on some site a friend opened up. That took longer to recover from than this, which happens in my neighborhood every other day. I cried all the way home from the train station in Cambridge that day. I still cannot get myself to drive past the empty place where the twin towers were, where my husband worked for several years, where I have been so many times on the New York trains that I love. That was something of a first for me perhaps. The magnitude of it was greater perhaps. In India we value lives less perhaps. I never heard of Americans evacuating foreigners first or anything, we are stuck in Athithi Devo Bhava perhaps. Its too close to make any kind of sense, it is not possible to view it all with a dispassionate, objective lens perhaps. I am struck dumb. I have no words of solace. I have no remains of positivity to offer to you. I am not even sure things make sense any more.

Last week my friend at my exercise class was talking about life lines. I pointed mine out, it snakes down from my palm and joins a seemingly endless line at my wrist. Yeah well. Perhaps that drivel means something. I am here today.