I've been feeling sad and empty. Except when the family drama around us makes me feel annoyed, frustrated, or simply irks me to listen to all that self pity. And I've sensed someone to be very lonely amidst all that. And pitied him for it, but also for seeking my company, while feeling both uncomfortable and vindicated by it.

But more than anything, I haven't seen him in more than four months. In this overlapping of our lives where I caught up only after some fifty odd years of his. And it feels like this will be thrown away. Feels like sacrilege. With her too. 

What is the point then? 

What, remind me, was my mattering project?

Last month in Spain I felt alive again. But also felt old this time, because the last time I was in Europe was four years ago! That was when I first noticed my cellulite. Now, many things are changing in my body, and possibly in my mind. My wrists feel like they can't grab suitcases as easily as they used to; I often spend nights waiting to feel sleepy; my almost-constant weighing scale reading is becoming history; I get injured very easily now. 

But it also feels like it's been a long and fruitful summer. 

And yet I'm left with this sinking realization that each of us is wasting this magnificent life on trifles. 

We all, each one of us, always want to be exonerated. I didn't do the wrong, the other person did. What I did was justified. What I said was just the facts. The other person's words, where did that come from, what was that??

Are we all just fucked then?! Never getting each other, always hurting each other, always dropping off to sleep convinced in our fictions, sewing up the ends in our stories about ourselves, each time our disguise is blown off.

This is why with him it feels the way it does. He apologises for hurting me and I do the same, before it's been said in words that that hurt. He hears what I cannot say, and I've known. And we devise wordless ways to see each other and to communicate.

That day he kept searching my face, fearing an accusal, and his ready defense shut me up further. I realised it was bad timing and that no words would come out of me anymore. And I shook my lowered head, and then a half unexpected half to defuse the moment chuckle escaped me. And he relaxed after that. 

Later, annoyed at the world, I let some unguarded annoyance at him out as well. As if he were my age, as if I'd known him forever. He apologised for having assumed something that wasn't. 

He saw more of me in those unplanned moments than I could have ever shown him. 

And then days later when he smiled at me as I entered, catching my eye as I looked up half scared to enter, I broke into a wide smile and soundless laughter, at myself and at him, at us and all that we had said and not been able to say. And we stood there like teenagers, smiling into our eyes, saying It's nice to see you. 

And then I went and spoiled it all...

All over again. Because I saw her watching me, and her son said she had been unwell after I noticed her sore throat. And my heart went out to her.

I hurt my sister today. Because I thought she was hurting our father with her words. And because I thought it was agreed between us that she did that sometimes and I thought it might help to point out when. But apparently she does not agree. And so she lashed back at me. And I'm left wondering what's left if in our closet relationships we are so callous and misunderstood. 

I must be getting schizophrenic if all that happened in my head.

But also how does someone get to know anyone at all if they "don't remember anything"??

Yesterday I saw an airplane in the air but it wasn't moving. And for a brief moment my car and I were right beneath it and I thought it would fall on me.

An older friend of many years told me that my piece on biking reminded him of some white man's book about walking the city. He couldn't remember the name of the author or the book. And then misremembered it as Khushwant Singh's beautifully illustrated (with watercolors by Suddhasattwa Basu) book on the seasons in this city. I went looking for it and bought 4 books, testifying something about this city that I have felt since childhood, years before I ever got to live here.

Turned out Sam Miller's was the book he was trying to recall. And Sam Miller took me to Thom Dunn's poems... apparently Dunn's early poems became known for his 'unembarrassed portrayal' of the interpersonal conflict of human romantic attraction. I am moved by this review, this rare acknowledgement of the war between people when they start to want the other but are unwilling to admit it, denying the power the other has, wanting to challenge and tease it, wanting to hurt the other in vehement refusal of the vulnerability to being hurt oneself. Till they start themselves to ache when the other hurts, and the line vanishes between hurting as a verb and hurting as an emotion... 

I seem to have lived this journey with two people in this life so far. 

I believe both of them were part of the pull that I felt for this city; both belonged to this place and were here in the years when it started to tug at me especially strongly. The first I met almost immediately after starting to study here, and he introduced me, virtually, to the work of the second and to his existence. I met the latter 12 years after that and am still, for the last 8 years or so, negotiating that interpersonal conflict with him.