Counselling session 3: I feel inadequate and insufficient

Another session of counselling today- and at a right time I guess. I feel strong and brave, but I still need help. I mean free counselling? Yes, please! (Does capitalizing even on things like counselling, make me too much of a baniya?) I guess we are on a pretty comfortable level on, so I can talk without many inhibitions. I mean, I was lying on the couch, so that’s pretty cool. He thinks I am at ‘high-risk for self-harm’ because I bought a pack of Marlboro lights and carry them everywhere. I can apparently call self-injury helpline 0808 800 8088. Developed countries, *sigh*. I haven’t smoked and neither do I intend to. I will not betray my own body- but then again I still carry it around everywhere. At least I don’t have depression though, so that is good. Anyway. So he asked me to list my fears and insecurities in order. I did, and then he asked me to write one line on the entire page. I did this for 5 pages- my hand kind of hurts. Things like “I am a nice person and I deserve to be happy”, “My world is still intact” “I can be happy with or without *him*”, “I want him to be happy with or without me” and then “*He* does not love me back anymore” It felt good though, it makes me confront the things I have sort of tried running away from. And then you talk, really, about anything and everything- I was talking about how I am kind of worried if this will affect my exams. But I always cope don’t I? I like that he isn’t there to give me any advice. Why is that even a surprise? I did psychotherapy, I should know. I think he’s from the Cognitive School of thought. Damn! Now I know which psychotherapy he is using. Anyway, so, I feel okay, I forgot to eat today (again?!) so I will go get pizza from Chester’s . They claim it’s “Great-tasting pizza” but it really is just inexpensive average-tasting pizza. Sophia’s coming tomorrow, so my loneliness-spree ends. I need to learn to be comfortable alone though. I thought I was- but then damn this Rahul thing happened and look where I am. How do you just be detached anyway though- these are people you gave a chunk of yourself to. How can I be adequate and self-sufficient. Fuck this, closed economies have never worked well anyway.

Okay. Too much pain.

Sometimes the pangs of pain are too much. My bodily system is still in the shock mode. My adrenaline system can’t quite get its flight or fight response on point. I wake up crying, and I sleep crying. I wake up thinking of it, and I sleep thinking of it. The only moments of respite are when I have just woken up and I have no idea where I am, who I am or what’s just happened to me. The pangs come out of nowhere, I was in the kitchen and I suddenly started crying so hard and I was gasping for air. I tell myself afterwards that no more. I couldn’t possibly cry more- my eyes burn if I cry. But then again, how can you deal with love, if you are afraid to feel? I am embracing this- it’s just a feeling like love, anger, sadness and hate. To love completely, is to feel completely vulnerable and I think, it was yesterday that I truly understood what it meant to love someone so much.

The tragedy of economics

I don’t know when I stopped being his most important person. Just because I was never jealous or insecure about him talking to other women as much as he liked- I trusted him so much (lesson noted). He never stopped being my most important person, out of all the people I have ever met. When we weren’t talking for hours or days, I thought it made us stronger because that meant that we were not dependent on each other. Of course, the assumption that I was still, and would be, as important to him, as he was to me- did not hold true. That’s the unsurprising tragedy of this future economist- unrealistic assumptions.

Dated : 30-03-2015 You are in every line I have ever read

I bought a packet of cigarettes today. I do not smoke. The funny thing is that the packet read “Smoking is addictive, do not start”. It’s as if they knew it. I cannot be doing this to myself. I owe to my body. I cannot abuse my own body for him. I do not want to. I miss him too much. I was crying on the train. I put my head down at times and just cry for a while. I am crying right now. I used to tell people relationships aren’t worth it till I got into one. I love him so much, too much. We were going to have a house together with white curtains and a big library in it. We were going to have a pet dog, a gaming room and a low height bed. We were going to cook for each other depending on who got home first. We were going to occasionally pick up each other from work. We were going to be in the same city, same house, same room. Wishful thinking. Thinking out loud. I don’t like these green line under my words, they annoy me. Everything I did annoyed him. He told me that if I didn’t come back home in June when he was home, we wouldn’t last. I would be giving up work and internship to be home- he would be giving up lectures. I guess we were becoming two different people. But I miss him. We used to walk on the sideway together after school. We used to spend our days just casually lying on the cold grass near the lake with warm sunshine and cool breeze on our faces. He used to look at me for a long while each time before he kissed me, too afraid to cross a line.  He used to say I love you, Deepanshi mid-way through it and I used to laugh because my name never sounded special until he sighed it inside my mouth.

Okay, here’s a thought

There’s no such thing as good writing or bad writing, good music or bad music, good poetry or bad poetry, good art or bad art. There’s only writing, music, poetry and art that make you feel something and those that don’t. The ones that have the power to bring back a tsunami of memories, evoke a laugh or a gush of tears when you’re lying on the floor all night or just make you fall back against the wall of your bedroom and gape at nothingness for a minute or two out of a life that’s too busy for your own good, and the ones that don’t. No one judges feelings as a good smile or a bad smile, a good sadness or a bad sadness, a good anger or a bad anger; because a smile is a smile and a frown is a frown- period. It does not have to be ‘good enough’ for anyone but you. Tell them that you will not let them get an elitist pleasure out of an indirect judgment of your feelings. If they’re pure, make you feel human and are your break into an alternative world, nobody has the right to judge these feelings or the source of them.

दिल की जो बातें हैं

जो प्रीत की रीत को ना समझे वो प्रेम निभाना क्या जाने,

जिस दिल ने चोट ना खाई हो वो नीर बहाना क्या जाने।

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रात जितनी भी संगीन, होगी सुबह उतनी ही रंगीन होगी

गम न कर जो है बादल घनेरा, किसके रोके रुका है सवेरा?

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हर एक रंज में राहत है आदमी के लिए,

पयाम-ए-मौत भी मुज्दा है ज़िन्दगी के लिए।

From The Concise Kamasutra: (Unknown)

One of my favorites.

1.

Under the warm coverlet my woman sleeps on;
I am drenched in the intractable scent of her hair.
The notion has often crossed my mind:
I should crumple it up like a handkerchief
that I could press to my face from time to time.

Meanwhile wakeful hands peel the skin off the night;
I drink from her tongue in the dark.
Our breath tips the room over to one side;
the tight hardwood floor groans
under the slew of discarded clothes.

We shut the whole untidy threadbare world out–
dogs, telephones, even the small indifferent rain.

2.

As you untie your long flowing hair in bed,
it spreads over slowly and colours the sheets,
leaving behind a pool of black
caught in the red glare of the lamplight.
You turn towards me, disturbing the pool:
hands and tongues lose no time in spinning their moist web
and we fall into their delicate net.

Day breaks: the window empties its pail
of light over us, waking us up.
It is our sweat now that colours the sheets;
it is the clean scent of your hair in the morning
that keeps me awake, and I am unable to rise.

Long-distance with family

You may feel like a very strong person, soaking in life- not being homesick because the feeling of missing family has not hit you yet even once. But you don’t miss home when you’re surrounded with noise and work. It hits you hard and all at once when you least expect it to-like in a supermarket when you’re buying groceries and you turn to ask mom if flour even has an expiry date and you realise she isn’t there and it is THEN that it is hard to stop your eyes from welling up. But even when you manage to pull yourself together in front of a 100 strangers, it is when you’re walking home alone with those two grocery bags of 5 kg each in your hands, that you miss the comfort you enjoyed in the strong arms of your dad. And after a long hard day of work and cold weather and rain, when you get back to your small morbid room, it is then that you realise how much you need the pointless chattering of your sister to make you feel warm and alive. I miss home, I do; not continually but in pangs of extreme, unmanageable pain.

Festering Faith

The girl waddles clumsily in her bright red frock
Intent on staying ahead of her ageing mother
Who tries her best to race her down the sidewalk.

Her matching dupatta is draped dutifully ‘round her face
And she tucks it in carefully before outrunning her sister in a race
Hands on her knees, she gasps for the fresh morning air
And laughs as she looks behind, tucking back her hair

Ahead of all now, she runs to the garden
And picks the first rose for ‘her’ Janardhana
Her eyes scrutinize the roses and she plucks another
Only the most fragrant one for her favourite, Damodara

The travellers she left behind finally catch up
And she restlessly looks for the freshest roses in the shrubs
“Mahadeva…Mangalmurti and Maheshwari
Two more for Maatangi and Mahabali”

Putting the prudently chosen wealth in her dupatta
She now walks to the temple with a hop and smile
“Faith is the reason for all the good and jubile.”

~                                                                                    

Her faith has thwarted as years had to depart
Yet the garden has remained the same
Only the roses have been torn apart.

The memories of a distant time have been callously replaced
Some she’s taken care to forget, others time has erased.
Skies have grown darker and the people beneath, estranged
Her thoughts revolve on a different axis; she has changed.

The roses have been substituted with the notes of ten
Adulation has been replaced with much derision
Maybe rationality has taken over her emotionality
Mayhap she is just a victim of time and sensibility.

She knows not what is more despicable-
The deeds of religious men
Or the way they preach morality after acts unforgivable
Claiming their superiority and blaming others’ mediocrity
Are these the men of that supreme authority?

When you’ve lost your substance and sacrificed your soul
How can you live or love when you’re an entity no more?

Her stupor breaks; a beggar calls her in voice so coarse,
“No, not the prasad give me money or bear Shiva’s curse.”

Taking the prudently earned wealth out of her purse
She now walks from temple with a complacent smile
“Faith is the reason for all the sinful and vile.”

Elusive

Two greedy souls

Earth and the sky

Reachable. Unreachable.

Reflected in ripples

Cast in the firmament

Bound to each other, with chains.

Bound in chains, to each other.

Merged. Submerged.

Brim their aching hearts

Only with fleeting, teasing silhouettes.