Busy, but alive.

The second day of the new year is one of the most important days of the year, if not the most important. 

Dec 31, we celebrate in revelries and reminisce on our full revolution around the sun. 

Jan 1, we recovery from those revelries. 

Jan 2, well that’s when the work begins, or more accurately the work for the work that will be done in earnest. Plans will be laid out, schedules will be devised, and goals will be written and recorded on the last pages of our newly minted journals so that we can review those goals just as the notebook ends and the new year begins. It should go without saying then that Jan 2 is the day for such reviews.

2020 was a year, a tough one at that, but it was also a year of new frontiers ventured and great possibilities explored. Risks were taken and failures were sought out till termination, and then new risks were taken after that. I saw many great ideas evolve over the course of 12 months, and many great projects rise and fall like a normal distribution peaking in July and dying in November. But I think the best thing I had witnessed all year was a stoutness of mind in my friends and family—a resilience that would define 2020 like no other. Sure, scholars and historians will paint 2020 with one broad stroke as the year of the plague, but it was so much more than that, and I don’t want any of us to dismiss everything that had happened. So much was lost, yes, but so much was achieved as well. There was death, of course, but there was also life. New friendships made, and old friendships reignited, and there was the ever constant reminder that life is just too short, so let’s fill it with the people that make us feel invincible in an otherwise vulnerable time. 

Lastly, there was growth, an exponential surge of it. Many boundaries were breached this year as a result of many hardships, and I can only be thankful that I had the opportunity for those challenges and pressures. For feeling the opposite would only invite gloom and despondency as we enter 2021, and I am so very tired of that kind of cynicism. 

Recalling this time last year, I was so ready for 2020 to be filled with promise and success—I ended up getting so much more than that. And now looking at 2021, I feel more prepared than I’ve ever been before. 

Here’s to Jan 3 and onward.

At the beginning of May this year, there was a windstorm in Toronto.

- - -

We walked together to the parking lot, our cars parked beside each other on the far end of the tarmac. It was finally day’s end but we didn’t want to leave, not yet at least. We were slow and steady, and our words were paced and perpetual, and it was perfect, all of it, save for the dark clouds swirling above us. I had already felt the air growing heavy with the imminence of rain, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to keep talking with you. And you kept talking with me. And the Sky remained silent and patient for the time being, as if it were listening in on our conversation. So we stayed in the lot, standing beside our cars, in the very eye of the storm, talking. Just talking. Your voice kept me tethered to the ground, and like a counterweight added to the scales your words tipped me into a microgravity of imponderable balance. I teetered back and forth, brimming in your every utterance, my body surging with the frisson of your electric elocution. But as you continued to speak, the impending storm brewed and churned overhead, as though it were your spagyric words that had unwittingly summoned the Four Winds to our tiny concrete in the city. Those mighty gales came, the envious Sky sending out its scouts of squalor. The wind swept into us like our jackets were sails, and I felt it pushing me towards you, drawing us together. We were two airships among the clouds, the lines of our anchorage bound together by the desire for discussion. We inched ever closer, mercurial sparks igniting as our skin touched, but such contact buoyed us back into the visceral elements. Your hair was everywhere. I smiled. You chuckled. I sank, my heart pierced by the mirth and sweetness of your laugh, like the iron hulls of my once floating vessel perforated to send me crashing back to earth. “Okay, I’ll let you go now,” you said, smiling with closed lips. You knew precisely when the rains would come, didn’t you? We parted ways and entered our separate cars, my heart drifting in the enraptured current of the Sky. I strapped myself into my seat, a futile attempt at feeling connected to something, anything. That was when the rains came, a torrential downpour as 100km/hr gales bellowed over the city and buffeted my vehicle—the very elements of this world pounding on the roof of my car as if to wake me from an undeserved dream. But even in the face of such ancient forces that have long formed this world, I couldn’t stop thinking about our time in the breath before the tempest. The pocket of time spent with each other, talking. Just talking. Just us two. What a simple moment. But everything exhales, and so too would we dissipate back into the Sky, the wind blowing us far, far apart.

I’m typing and I’m typing, and I’m thinking of words to say, something, anything that would entice you to stay, just to speak with me for a little while longer. But I’m nothing special. Truthfully, I’m a monster. Conjured by a darkness deep inside that you would have to be bonkers to wanna talk to me. For you’re the sun and the moon, the light that everyone is dazzled by. I wish I could deserve the time you had already spent on me, but instead I am pulverized by my own demons. I’m sorry. I’m just so impatient to love you. I’m often scheming in my mind, for reasons undefined, my soul deepens and unwinds, as I search for feelings, saccharine, for meaning, crystalline, but I’m being asinine in hoping that you’d wanna be involved. My reasons aren’t designed such that I could ever be absolved. Because in fact, who could be patient enough to love someone like me back.

(via littletropicalthunder)

do whatever

Written under the influence of love, or rather the illusion of it.

- - -

A great storm brewed inside of me—a stirring turned drizzling turned tempest in the inner casing of my being. I shook and trembled as the rains poured. I was caught out in my tiny, slanted raft, in the middle of nowhere’s ocean. Such drops from lurching waters caused by visceral winds were enough to split a man in half, but not me. I endured the lows, I withstood the long troughs of misery, but only because I remembered the highs, and by God were the highs euphoric.

I closed my eyes and withdrew into the fortress of my mind—a tiny fortress on a tiny raft, how completely maddening. The wretched waters and wicked winds laughed at me, uproariously, but I didn’t care. They could laugh all they want, so long as I retained the memory of you, the beautiful memory of you in my arms. The shape of your body was engraved into my mind. My heart stopped at the very thought. How my hands caressed your skin, and how your breath filled my lungs. How electric all of it was. And then my heart jumped, as if electrocuted, as if defibrillated. I gasped for air, and all of a sudden I was vaulted leagues into the stratosphere. I soared at a thousand kilometres per second, vertigo subsuming me, my body on the verge of disintegrating against the galeforce. But then I slowed, decelerating until the wind was perfectly still around me. That was when I felt it: the weightlessness, the feeling of zero-gravity at the apex of my ascent. I was floating at the top of the world. I remembered how the air tasted. The particles that existed here—in the juncture between Earth and space—filled my lungs as if to empty out all other matter and small precipitates. My chest illuminated, and I felt light and luminescent like it was new and soft and cool. And of course the view was beautiful this high up.  

How I wanted so much to feel the high again, to be together again. How I wanted so much to be embraced by the air and the wind, by the illuminating coolness of you, to be above the clouds, to be caught in the subspace between planetary orbit and galactic elsewhere, to feel the stars cradling me in their grasp while at the same time feel the pull of Earth’s unnerving gravity. How I wanted this so much, even if it meant falling inexorably every time. 

I opened my eyes. Waves knocked me to and fro, my tiny raft perpetually shifting and turning in the floods and monsoons of utter languish. I am buoyed only by the hopeful desire that I might be lifted up once again, that I might see the sunlight pierce through the veil of the storm clouds once more, that I might live in your presence anew, with my arms wrapped around you, and my fingers intertwined with yours, your cooled hands inside the undying warmth of my own. I generate heat like I could live forever, but only with the memory of you, only with the hope that we will see each other again. Till then, let the tempest rage on. Let it rage on.

Here’s a story about my feelings over 2017. Happy belated new year, everyone :)

- - -

The journey had become something that I didn’t expect. Or perhaps it was everything I imagined; I was just not looking properly.

A great and mighty Wall resided on the horizon, but from where I stood it was a thin and blurry line that stretched like a meniscus over the world. It brimmed in a streak of tangerine light just as the sun rose from behind it. I wanted to see the wall up close, to witness it for myself: the grand megalith of stone and metal that only the Masters could’ve built. But more importantly, I wanted to know what was on the other side.

That was why I started. This journey. This long and arduous task of traveling along the riversides and lakefronts, through the valleys and forests, and over the vast steppes of discovery. There were villages every now and then, where I had conversed with the elders about the ever-elusive Masters and their great works of artifact, but for the most part I was alone. The path was a solitary one meant only for the brave of heart, or the desolate of souls.

With every second that passed, I inched ever closer to the Wall. Days grew into weeks and the weeks turned into months until finally a year had passed, and the great and mighty Wall towered over me just as my journey towards it came to an end. 

I gazed upwards, my eyes met with an intense beauty rivalled in measure only by the Wall’s sheer height and size. Intricate lines were immaculately carved into the stone and metal, like a secret language privy only to the Masters. The language extended ever upwards, ascending towards heaven—a labyrinth of code that I couldn’t possibly decipher. The top of the Wall seemed unreachable. How would one even begin to climb this Wall? How long would it take? Surely as much time as it took to reach here, maybe more. I couldn’t help but wonder what was the point of travelling all this way. But this didn’t stop me from thinking about what was on the other side. 

As time drew down in my contemplation, and as the sun had set and midnight arrived, a gate opened at the foot of the Wall. There, a keeper stood guard, cloaked in a runic attire, a dark robe with the same secret lines as inscribed on the Wall.

He asked me, “Have you finished?” 

I replied, quizzically, “Finished what?”

Then the gate closed and I was forced to wait for the next midnight to come. I racked my brains for the answer to the keeper’s question. 24 full hours passed and yet not a single thing came to mind. The gate opened yet again at dusklight. 

“Have you finished?” the keeper asked again.

I chose not to respond. In that moment, I felt the entirety of my past journey weigh over my mind. I went through every day like sentences in a book, skimming quickly and frantically. In the riverbeds where the stones and sands gathered and rolled over in the rushing waters—no. Within the trees of the great forests or the land of the barren steppes—no. Among the stars of the night sky, during cool evenings lying in wake, wondering about the significance of my existence within the vastness of the universe—no. Perhaps it was with the elders whose words clung to me like wrinkles to skin—no. I pored for an answer, anything at all, but there was nothing I could find, no semblance of a proper response to give to the keeper of the gate.

“No,” I said out of absence rather than substance. My eyes searched the ground, peering deeply from rock to dust to molecule, like I had a pair of microscopes for glasses.

“That’s okay,” said the keeper. My eyes zoomed back out and back up. “It is perfectly okay if you haven’t finished yet. The journey only begins now.” The keeper then moved aside, granting me passage through the gate. Whatever it was that I had to finish, I might never know. But the way was open, and I still wondered what was on the other side. Perhaps I would discover the answer beyond the Wall.

I emerged on the other side, the gate closing behind me as I breathed in new air. The sun had begun to rise, and there I was greeted with an infinite landscape, the liminal edge of the horizon unencumbered by a stone and metal wall. That was when I realized: this was the starting point of the Masters, and I was only able to begin once I had let go of the notion that I was any lesser for it.

The limitless horizon spoke in gusts of wind, revealing the secret language. There is no finishing. There is only forging ahead, and I was bestowed with the mantle of forging my own path, one that would one day rival even the greatest of the Masters, if only I remain ablaze on the road before me. From that spot, armed with the realization of the Wall’s true meaning and given the winds of infinity, I took my first step.

chasing 

Ben Mezrich (via quotemadness)

(Source: quotemadness.com, via theliteraryarchitect)

evoketheforms:

Rebecca Lindenberg | Interview in The Believer | March 27 2012 

(via neil-gaiman)