On Lost luggage & Missed connections

Hey, it’s been a while since I last wrote to you. I know we dont really talk anymore but I wanted to write to you and so I’ve decided, I will.

As I lay in my tent half-propped against my backpack with no network, with no light, and with no sleep for miles. and nothing but thoughts to keep me company. thoughts about how things have a way of getting tied up, each knot in the fabric of time. a reminder of memories that accumulate within, weighing you, not necessarily down.

I wanted to write to you about today. Enough of today has been spent in a manner best left for somebody who has access to better hiking shoes. I looked around today as I walked and walked, and thought about the life I have created... it is in a shape that somebody long gone would have understood. But I’m getting the order wrong, somebody was long gone before my life took this shape. Today. I end up back where I was. The wound stares back.

I wanted to write to you about the first day I was back in the city and I was walking on those roads where we used to go for walks and it felt like... yk how it is to go with a friend to a railway station? then to watch the train take them away? and as you’re walking back into the city, the friend who has just gone feels often more there.... more totally there than when you embraced them that last time before they climbed into the train. there but not there anymore.

I wanted to write to you about loosing one of my close friends from my childhood. Ik I hadn’t really been in touch but we had known each other for... and she knew everything about me. I think there are few closer bonds than that of best friends bc they are some of the only ppl in your life that you’ve chosen to share your life with for whatever brief period of time the logistics of life allow you to. you both are not bounded by blood nor by any obligation nor by the pain of romantic love. in true friendship you are bound together by voluntary admiration and loyalty despite each others imperfections or maybe bc of each others imperfections.

I wanted to write about how it felt to live on w/out her, how it felt to go on, move on recreating my life w/out her presence, to realise that I now miss her more than I actually remember her... it’s a strange feeling, looking at your life and realizing someone who was once the most important person in your orbit no longer knows anything about your world. You know?

I wanted to write... well write here bc of the logistics of life again (or maybe I just use that as an excuse). I wanted to write about this bc i feel it’s a rare experience... one I have only felt with three people in my life. i sometimes worry that i will never meet another person with whom i feel this close. i sometimes relish in the same idea.

I wanted to write and tell you about her, and that time, and how it felt to feel her slip away. to let her slip away. the way she took a part of me with her, a version of myself that I will never be again. our unique identity is only in relation to people after all. we are different people with different people. now lost in a crowd.

I wanted to write about the pit in my stomach when I realised I had to stop calling or texting, and then the eventual settling when i accepted she had moved on.

i wear my heart on under my sleeve. and the times i have let it lead me through this life... my capacity for love was often a gift but I’ve realised it also traps me, dragging me down dangerous paths to people i cannot “fix” but cannot stop loving either. sometimes i think i have no control over myself. sometimes i relish in the idea that i have no control over myself.

I wanted to write to you about the novels I’ve been reading. I kinda used to read for nothing but the joy of it earlier, but now I've found myself dissecting them in my mind sometimes and it takes me out of the experience. maybe that’s what im doing rn, dissecting. I’ve become more self-conscious, but I care less. I still do read. Constantly. Not to look for answers in these books anymore like I used to, but for something more subtle lately, company idk or maybe relief. It’s had to live in illusions and delusions once you really understand something.

I wanted to write to you about my ruminations on my trek. ruminations over the past that has evaporated during the span of time btw that present and this current one. that & this. You used to say that I ruminate about the past too much. it is mildly fun okay!?

The people from my that present... they feel like they are on a different planet all together - one whose atmosphere does not favour me. We are forever going to be a part of this same solar system, but there’s things and there’s factors and there’s conditions that have made us ever so slighlty changed as time wraps around us.

ah well, communication & conflict resolutions had never been my forte. As you clearly know by now ig. I will cause a conflict, and I am resolute in my ways. Had a phone call with her (ik you would have sad “gandu chutiya hai kya”... but then well you know me) that call could have gone in any other way and would have been better than what spurted out in that moment out of our collective stupidity. stupid. The aftermath of it is still ringing in my years. The end was faltering, sputtering, like an old bike trying too hard, too late.

Yk this whole concept of “make amends with the past” is so utterly stupid. Like bitch do not try to make amends when it will hurt the present. You do not mess with this timeline that wraps around by trying to pull out the past from an exit wound. Let’s be honest, the pull out game hasn’t been that strong has it now?

I need to learn to live with my reality that some things will continue on as preserved in their damagedness. even if the damage waas caused by me. I need to make peace with this reality that everything is capable of breaking, even I. and I cannot just put my hand through an exit wound if I want to keep my fingers for future guitar lessons next summer. snap. the sooner the better. an open wound that is tampered with constanty leaves room for newer hurt to grow. infections to grow. you gotta cut it off.

“I think I’m in love with her,” I remember saying to you— it feels like six years ago last week.

I wanted to write to you about chess. I don’t play chess, I don’t like it, it is too quiet, too slow, too... honest. And I don’t think it is love if it feel like a overthinking game of chess. I think sometimes we don’t even wanna win, we just want proof that we were worth playing. So no I don’t think she misses me, she just misses having someone to loose to.

well let’s be honest here. am I over all my ex’s? yes. can I feel anything anymore. no. I went on all those dates and I felt nothing. like this extremely cute funny charming person. a healthy person! and I feel nothin? and this well “not feeling anything” ngl is scaring me.

ig experiencing emotional pain is a lot like burning your fingertips. the nerve endings on your hands lessen as you burn them again and again, and eventually you don’t feel much of anything anymore.

“abe itna despo mat act kar” as you had advised. It is hard to escape from my own desperation so instead i hold myself on a tight leash. if I love you and I fail you you will leave and so i won’t love you so i can’t fail you so you’ll never leave me. i’ll never even be present enough to be left in the first place. no I don’t have abandonment issues bitch.

There are three best friends that i hold close to my heart and a wonderful family and a dog. these are the only people i have ever allowed myself to truly love. there are days when the pain of even this love has not escaped me. and so when I fall in love for the first time i will not say a word. if i love you you can leave me. if i love you, you can leave me. if i love you. you can. leave me...

I wanted to write about how it was watching you fall in love. You used to think of love as a “reward”, like you worked hard, you stayed kind, you dreamed big and somewhere along the way someone decent found you. Someone who clapped for your ambition, who held the door open while you ran thru it... someone who didn’t need shrinking or softening or silence.

I wanted to write about how it was watching you fall in love and realising its not always like that. Sometimes love will walk in wearing charm and will hand you a leash disquised as “comfort” and you? you take it. no, not bc you’re weak but I think bc you were tired. tired of doing everything alone. tired of always being the strong one, the {REDACTED}. so when someone finally says stay, you considered it, and started rearranging things.

you didn’t notice it at first, just little things... less time on your hobbies, on the societies you were once really into, less time with friends. less time dreaming. more time waiting, answering, shrinking, apologizing. I saw you told yourself it’s balance. you told yourself she’s worth the sacrifice but you didn’t realize you had stopped choosing yourself. Idk if I am stepping any toes here, I probably am, but then I probably wouldn’t be a good friend if I hadn’t said it.

I just wanted to write to you about how it’s never to selfish to choose yourself cause maybe one hot afternoon during that era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with {REDACTED}, you will be driving back home and stuck in traffic thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl knocks on your window holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.

I wanted to write to you about so many things but ah well there is more walking to be done tomorrow. This fatigue from lugging 13kg backpack is hitting me a little bit. But I will walk, I will walk places, I will enter the belley of the beast, and I will do what I want, I will say what I want, and I will put out the things that I want. i want not a lot but thats not an excuse that needs to be made to compensate for having desires. i want so I will.

so I will,
kay.