if you've seen people mourning over a break up you will probably understand this. often the predominant emotion is that of rejection, sometimes it is that of having failed especially when they had known for a while that something was wrong and they were giving it their best, trying to fix it but couldn't. anger yes of course, but usually lower down, beneath disappointment, rejection, failure, a sense of loss, of not knowing how to start to live afresh; unless it was a case of unfaithfulness and abrupt breaking up. what i have been surprised with is how many people just broken up are afraid and insecure, their predominant worry being left alone, single, for the rest of their lives. in fact, once a friend of mine who was then married also voiced these concerns wondering aloud about other people who broke up but talking about how she was so scared of being left alone. the older the person concerned, somehow the sadder and scarier this sense of abandonment.

i've been getting that lately about my professional self. its three years now I have been without a job. and this birthday i noticed a lot many white hairs down the sides of my head, those that get exposed when i tie my hair up. ive crossed that age when i saw my parents start to get wide around their waists, my aunts start to color their hair. and i am starting to get the feeling that a professional marriage (aka tenure) might not be possible for me in this life. in fact, that's not even the scariest bit. i'm starting to feel complacent in this city, in this situation, with the people of my own country all around me, with family members close and far flung peppered through the geographical space (even though i still avoid many of them). i am beginning to feel that i'm getting too old to start afresh, again and again. i look around this flat, the kitchen with its windows lacking curtain rods on which we have pasted craft squares of various colors to block out the sun (we do this every year for some months), our yellow sofa that has collected a myriad of shapes of grey spots on its body in our years here, even our kitchen dish rack neatly placed on our green absorbent mat collecting our washed stuff: two plates (carefully picked by me from fabindia someday after i had broken another plate at home), spoons hanging upside down from a lil spoon stand that had come free with the dish rack, a bowl or two, a small glass he likes to drink in that remains the only one left from a pack of six we began with (5 others shattered by us, one by one), the hand vacuum sitting quietly in one corner of the living room waiting to be used to suck up miniscule glass pieces or the dust of drilling after a handyman finished his job and left the place in a mess. our plants, or rather my plants that remind of our first year here when i'd keep going to the nursery getting lil pots of flowers, i got some bigger ones for his office too, they died one by one. how many times can i pick myself up again and start afresh, throwing away the familiar crockery and buying new ones, looking at an empty place and imagining it as home. this has in fact been the longest he and i have lived together at a stretch. but this marriage needs two others - a professional marriage for each one of us to a place that is both encouraging and supportive of the work that each of us thinks we want to do. i'm getting too old and the longer i stay unaffiliated the bigger a problem it might be for me to find a match.