I'm reading Virginia Woolf; feels like I couldn't possibly have read her works at any other time in my life but exactly now. 

A few weeks ago I just felt like therapy wasn't helping us any more, especially not teaching me anything more. Coincidentally, things have been feeling more like our early days and years, not because of therapy but just because. I felt like the need to go to therapy, or that to fix something, was possibly misplaced. Even though it taught us things.

Getting older has been more sobering lately. There have been more than 5 people I've had conversations and connections with worth reminiscing. But yes conversation, the idea of it, the potential it holds, is limiting or is limited. So much more is said by a look, a pivoting of someone's gaze or body toward or away from me, shock and embarrassment, chuckles, and involuntary bodily reactions, ...

There's a conversation without words I have been having with someone for about 6 years now, over rare sightings a year or two apart. What will I say if I could talk? Would anything be valid be true and be sayable? Would trying to put a form to that inexplicable thing kill it in the process? There is a restless anxiety to talk and to communicate, and yet the past has taught me that I have wasted it and that it dies it's death after a futile bout of time.

There were times I wondered why he wasn't insecure of my affections, why never jealous. He said it was because I always told him things. Once he did get angry, frustrated. Makes me smile today when I think of his lack of insecurity regarding me, as he sleeps peacefully while I lie around restless in the middle of the night, reading and writing. We have both been sensible, patient, and loving, even when we couldn't make love, or I couldn't desire him. 

But also sex is more and less than everything people attribute to it.

I haven't had the time to write about many things. about our panic and failed attempt at snorkeling in La Jolla caves in the cold pacific ocean in July. about visiting the US after five years. about mexican food and people, and swimming in cenotes - the cave pools created possibly by the impact of the meteor that erased dinosaurs from earth. about our visit to Ghana (erstwhile Gold Coast) and how the tragic history of slave trade and the opposite of anger that I saw in people's faces there has changed me, made me more humble and compassionate. how we made friends with a local cat in Elmina - the place that reminded us of Goa, both Portuguese colonies around beautiful seas - and how the owner said that locals look at you funny if they see you trying to make pets of animals. how I've started to also recognise the beauty of the glow of darker skin; how I was mistaken yet again for an Ethiopian; how I roamed about alone and random people showed me things; how some flavors in their fermented foods and meat stews were way too strong for me and made me smile while I couldn't continue to eat them. about how I felt my life's journey was taking me to places that felt like pieces of a jigsaw that told the story of America and the world, of the intertwined fates of humans, and how now I want to visit South Carolina to dig into the Gullah food and culture.  

about the apocalyptic levels of air pollution (about a week of 400plus pm2.5 and a couple more weeks forecasted) in Delhi this Oct-Nov where people are walking about without masks making you wonder whether their belief of you believing this to be harmful and hiding from it behind your masks and air purifiers is in fact your fragility and your woke-ness. about transitioning to flowy skirts as I grow older. about a slow acceptance of having aged, while airport officials in Accra still marvelled at my age (and also told me that Indian brides are in demand there because they pay good bride price; technically African ideas of bride price imply the groom's family paying the bride's, quite the opposite of dowry in India).