It's been a year of injuries, pain, also heartache, but mostly physical pain, and not knowing whether to give it rest or exercise. Just when in my early forties I felt like I finally understood my skin and my body, it's begun to change so unexpectedly and rapidly that it feels like it no longer speaks the language it taught me. And because of these injuries I have been unable to keep to a regular exercise regimen. As a result my weight has been growing, and its not new muscle mass for sure. 

Last October to this April, my right wrist first got incrementally weaker as I kept going on an unnamed ligament injury, and then took months of near disability and laser and ultrasonic therapy and small magical resistance exercises to heal. Then this July, suddenly finding myself on viciously biting red ants and their tiny blisters like hills and burrowings, I sprained possibly another ligament on the outer edge of my littlest toe on the left foot. I've been unable to run and swim, although as usual I kept doing those till I realised (doc said not to run or walk much; he wasnt a swimmer so misadvised that) they were preventing it from healing. And now waiting for it to heal, one good day I thought I could swim, and cos I was being easier on my feet I got the bright idea to push my arm pull in breaststroke. Now I'm nursing a swimmer's shoulder that again was ignored and has gotten worse. 

When I was younger, limb injuries healed within days. Or had a soreness that felt deliciously painful and slowly opened out to flexing them with the same exercises that had sored them out in the first place.

And then I took a painkiller pill, and it melted and evaporated the pain as if it never existed. Makes me feel like I cheated my memory of it, or like I'm cheating the living of this life.

something broke this last Sunday. maybe broke is the wrong word for it, because it felt like an unraveling, a dawning, that lasted more than the Sunday itself. in fact, it was on Monday that I fully realized it, and when I did it just was there, fully formed, waiting for me to see it. 

it was that I couldn't give her anything, that I had nothing she knew she wanted. that it had all been a mirage to me. and maybe she doesn't know what she wants, or maybe she does, but that that isn't mine and it never was. that eight years ago, when she had been curious about me, and I had shrugged it off, had been quite alright. and that it took me eight years to realize that my younger self had known better, in her bones. 

but Sunday was also strange, in that while my body was absorbing this epiphany, and while I was still unaware of it, those few hours with them felt very nice. very comfortable, old, and lived in. except when she was hurt by him pointing out her clumsy accident, and how I in reaction to that, served her, while displaying how easily I could be clumsy too right then, not looking at him almost as if punishing him for hurting her. and maybe also except when we just entered, and her face displayed the strain and awkwardness of my inviting ourselves over to their place (in a way).

I came away knowing more surely that he and I have known each other in other lives. but also that its okay that that is irrelevant in many ways. that it is enough that he knows and I know, even if every moment one or the other of us fears the other choosing to leave. choosing to leave, given the futility, given the heartache, given the possibility of hurting others. and the other moment one considers that oneself. 

on Sunday apparently no one said this aloud, but I heard it. someone saying to me that not every thought needs to be said aloud. but I sometimes wish we rather did, more often than not at least. 

when we were leaving, I went to my tote and gathered what was remaining from what I had got for them, and looked back at them. his eyes were on me, and I gestured to ask him what I should do with what was in my hand. I don't know if he said it aloud or I just read his lips, and I nodded mouthing okay. 

but then yesterday, I woke up in the middle of the night and it suddenly occurred to me that I might have left him feeling sad for me, for some of the things she said. even though I hadn't been sad, not for myself anyway. 

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.