Have you seen the simpleton around?

The only way we understand people is by focusing on the few attributes of theirs which jut out alarmingly and tying them together. Simply put, we understand humans by stereotyping them. A person is often easy to understand because they fit a certain mould like clay does; in every single part of the crevice, completely, as a whole. When they don’t fit, words are ascribed to them: “complicated”, “unpredictable”…. the likes.

My favourite incomprehensible type is whom I call the simpleton. The modern day simpleton isn’t stupid or boorish in conceivable ways. She’s likable because of how easily she likes everyone. It’s easy to please the simpleton for she asks very little of a select few and jumps with glee when that is granted.

Have you met the dignified, intelligent stereotype? She finds the simpleton’s exuberance embarrassing and hopes that her palpable enthusiasm would fizz out. “Everyone around her has smirked at least twice. How long can she speak about a TV show? Does she not realize she just met this person a minute ago?” says the dignified, intelligent stereotype. Something about the simpleton’s enthusiasm irritates her. She’s unsure what it is, though and pegs it to the simpleton’s lack of self control. What the simpleton calls genuine, she finds undignified.  “If only she could be a little more normal than she is like the rest of us?”

The simpleton on her end is fully aware and in the moment brushes aside everyone’s smirks and a few hours later spends the entire night toying with shame. The simpleton is so because she doesn’t know how else to be.

The elder male figure in her life reminds her to “calm down” and not waltz about like her amusement matters more than others perception of her. She responds by saying that it’s who she is and she doesn’t know how else to be. Her joy isn’t to amuse herself. Her joy is true.

The former however doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s a laughing stock but smiles at her sadly knowing well that “people like her” are prone to get bullied. He hopes she can tide through life unaware of the sniggers. But he assumes wrongly. The simpleton for all her idiocy knows that she’s laughed at. She understands people, listens to them too. People love talking to the simpleton before they go off and laugh about that one thing she did over dinner. She’s kind and hugs people when they feel like the world is working against them and promises them they will be okay.

“People are supremely good, aren’t they?” she mouths to her friend who agrees in a moment of heightened joy knowing very well that tomorrow, she wouldn’t feel as optimistically about people the way simpleton will.

The confident, optimistic guy finds the simpleton “frankly idiotic” and “a tad fake”. He thinks that this disarmingly upbeat demeanor is a facade and the simpleton is not to be trusted. He slyly tosses out a joke and hopes the simpleton fails to get it. Someone that blissfully upbeat is probably daft, he thinks.

But she gets it and rudely mumbles in response, in the moment ashamed of who she is. The simpleton is rude and blunt but understands what it is to treat someone unfairly, what it means to make someone uncomfortable. But she hasn’t been taught to fend for herself. She isn’t the fittest and invariably doesn’t survive. Thank god for the simpleton, we aren’t living as hunter gatherers.

The question then is what makes the simpleton so? The answer is difficult.

While she may cling on to certain threads of goodness, the truth is that the simpleton cannot clearly define herself. This inability of hers pushes her to be even more chatty. “ To her credit, she puts a great front.” The elder male figure remarks.

The simpleton scribbles in a notepad demanding to kill every instinct of hers when she is around people so that she doesn’t feel ashamed. A big part of the simpleton which not many people get to see is how often she feels ashamed of herself. How easy it is to feel disgusted by who she is and often for no fault of her own.

At the end of the day, none of the stereotypes told the simpleton that its okay to be that way. Not for lack of affection, but because being a simpleton isn’t very acceptable. Even if they did tell her, she wouldn’t believe them.

She tried a bunch of times to morph into another stereotype. The way she saw it, the other stereotypes were well respected, successful people who got love. The attempt to morph however didn’t work. She was unable do it. The mask felt heavy and hurt her. And so she finally told herself that one fine day, she wouldn’t go around getting misunderstood anymore. Until then, she lived the same way amidst the other stereotypes.

Pickled Words

someone stole all my words!

I had hid them in ammama’s porcelain jar.

the big white one, with the pretty blue rim?

They were supposed to marinate, my words.

I wanted amma to weep after eating them

akka to grimace when the juice hit her tongue.

I wanted a reaction, a worthwhile one.

I couldn’t ask appa. he never liked pickles.

he liked rasam and khzootu, mildly seasoned.

but someone stole my words, and left me not a syllable.

I set appa’s plate on the table now, mournfully.

and let water wash over ammama’s jar.

in the sink outside the kitchen door.

appa said the house reeked because of it.

The Miss-Fit

in movies, she’s tattoo-eyed, baggy clothed.

a book hangs on her chest, one wrist perennially shut.

squeezed tight. like the noose around a deliberate neck.

she likes doodling. solitude in any form is preferred.

over time, the corner of her kohl clumped eyes

watched her own stereotype collapse like

a druggie, addicted to pins and needles.

in reality, the world has its own misfits;

all of  junta strewn about like sand on wet rocks.

the chatty tea-drinker we love screams in his sleep.

academia drove that tall pen-pusher insane.

“ah snowflakes”, smirk generation X. all so smug,

as if cynicism never hit them like married men do.

all said: surverys taken, literature exhausted—the question

seemed sickeningly obvious: an age old query

isn’t, wasn’t everyone, everywhere

a damned, deflowered basket-case?

On Tradition

I read Forster’s A Passage to India in the last semester of my Masters program. Like most books, this one would need re reading because I didn’t soak it in as well as I should have. But every time I look at the tattered copy (a family inheritance) on my cluttered desk, I remember that what Forster impressed on me in the first few chapters of the book was how community spirit mattered. The more I think about it, the more I realize that this sense of community which Foster beautified has sheltered people from modern alienation.

For my mother and her sister and their cousins: tradition, religion, God seemed to do the sheltering. The stringing together of jasmine flowers, the dusting of the same Krishna idol which has existed in the family since Patti’s childhood, decorating the oonjal for Krishnashtami were more than just acts of tradition. It was done to foster a sense of community spirit and bring the family together. In one sense, faith was just a flimsy excuse. No one liked flirting with loneliness.

Tradition for me, however was burdensome. I often hoped that my menstrual cycle would commence so that I didn’t have to partake in floral arrangements. I liked the exclusivity of menstruation.  I however, didn’t mind sitting on the sidelines to observe happiness engulfing the older generation like Tsunami engulfed parts of Tamil Nadu in 2004. But I never got engulfed. I was like a member of the Jarava Tribe. I escape to the mountains whenever Tsunami hit my family members come festival season.

My disdain for God and tradition didn’t come from a place of snobbery. I wasn’t embarrassed by sarees with a zari border because it was too flashy or annoyed because I’d rather listen to Avril Lavigne instead. I also didn’t look at it as ignorant or foolish and hence wasn’t embarrassed by the older women at home. They however made me feel uneasy and as a child and much later as a teenager.

I couldn’t pin point where this discomfort stemmed from. All I knew was that if I paraded around in a half-saree and helped serve bakshanam and went through the ordeal of being asked to sing, I could run away to my room and play the two songs I knew on the piano.

I however, joined my own communities with people vastly different from one another. We weren’t similar; We didn’t always share the same taste in music or food. But everyone accepted everyone else with ease. We flirted with, wept with and insulted each other in the same breath because our sense of community lacked decorum. Crudeness was intimate and we all came from very un-intimate households. We grew up outside our families and possibly in spite of them.

But these communities too, withered away and I felt like the sugary residue at the bottom of an empty tea cup. I wasn’t stirred in with the rest of them. Everybody was plagued with the desire to move to new places and gawk at new worlds, study and work and form new communities. And they did precisely that. I didn’t. Matter of fact, I couldn’t. I stayed where I was. And nowadays, I find myself observing my own life choices and the world around me with an obsessive, unblinking eye.

A few days ago, as I walked back home after sufficient sauntering, I heard Banayenge mandir hum emanate from the speaker near a Ganesh Pandal. As I walked towards the pandal, I found a group of men, no older than me dancing without abandon. I think I realized then where my disdain for religion, tradition and everything else stemmed from. When I was younger, it irked me that my relatives, were expecting me to be somebody I wasn’t. If they had accepted the loud mouthed, opinionated klutz, I would have joined them. Instead, they wanted someone vastly different. A good girl, they called it and I knew they didn’t mean a woman in possession of goodness. I was careful however and I promised myself not to grow up to be a ‘good girl’.

Today however, I noticed with fear, that tradition demands more than just the need to challenge the root of an individual’s personhood. It wasn’t conformity alone that tradition demanded. Tradition demanded discrimination. These customs were never innocuous but in my time today, I noticed people shedding the veil of innocence they had earlier used.

The sense of community people derived from tradition was fostered not by bringing people together but by keeping certain people out. “We are more of a community than you are.” The men at the pandal seemed to yell to some imaginary muslims who weren’t there. Tradition was operational not to escape from loneliness but to instill in someone else the sense of isolation.

On reaching home, I told Amma the pandal story. “Tradition used to be a good thing” she remarked softly. Festivals at home were a lot more tame then they used to be. There was lesser food prepared, we didn’t splurge on new clothes and a few flowers sufficed. I suspect that at fifty seven years of age, Amma felt ashamed of festivity and tradition and that deepened her sadness.

Unsure of what to do, I sat down next to her as she strung together jasmine flowers for Ganesh Chaturthi and toyed with the twine. We sat in silence for what seemed like a very long time and in that silence, I found myself hoping for her sake and mine: that tradition changed for the better.

 

There wouldn’t be any residue at the end of the cup, then.

When you grow up……

I told Sam amidst cigarette puffs that I want to see the world so that I can update my instagram. I was joking, obviously. But Sam as always rolled his eyes and smiled at me like I was a newly discovered litter of puppies. He told me about the places he had seen and told me how it was strange to be trapped between our world and the other world. I, with exuberant idiocy informed that he could belong to both worlds because it’s always, always easy to find good people, no matter where you are. The puppy litter smile returned and I wondered why the statements I uttered sounded like a scrawny child’s. I knew my thoughts and I knew them to be earnest. Somehow, the more I grew, the more people I rubbed elbows with, the more I realized that earnestness often got mistaken for naivety. At this point, Sam developed an expression akin to woe and informed me about the existence of his badness. He told me he felt hollow and that all meaning seemed to be lost. I, on my end told him that he was inherently good and he exists because goodness in him exists. Sam hugged me tightly like it was the last time and we smoked the last cigarette left in the box.

Sadly enough, it turned out to be the last time. Sam and I don’t talk anymore partly because my earnestness was so close to stupidity. So now, I find myself practicing earnestness all by myself in my bedroom wondering if I am more idiotic than I was a few days ago.

One summer day, I stepped out of my bedroom and watched Amma working diligently on a jasmine garland and found myself getting increasingly irritable. For as long as memory serves, Amma has stressed on being good and kind and how nothing else mattered. “It wouldn’t have hurt her to tutor me on Ambition and Drive.” I often thought as a teenager. These are things you learn at home no? Your values, your priorities?

“How can someone at twenty five be so fucking naïve!?” I asked Amma that same day. We were talking about somebody we knew. She told me that innocence was rare in today’s world and finding innocence repulsive would mean siding with every single evil in the world today.

“Saha, being weak isn’t bad.” Amma said.

I found it difficult to argue with that notion then. I still do. It was a very, “Remember, it is a sin to kill a mockingbird” idea. A part of me wanted to say that with her worldview, we would encourage more and more vulnerable fools who’d get hurt first and lament later and end up doing little else. They could have very easily avoided hurt if they trusted less, maneuvered more, maneuvered more cautiously.

Amma however, wouldn’t have understood this. She found me to lack sensitivity on some days and I wanted to tell her all those tales about people I knew. I would start with Eliza from 11^th grade, Kathy from College and then end the list with people whom I called friends until six months ago.

“See?!” I would say. “I am not half bad.

I haven’t had these conversations with Amma for a while now. She is not around. And as for my view on weakness, it went through a phase of ups and downs. My opinion on weakness changed quicker than Trump’s views (on everything) did before the Presidential Election. I didn’t disagree with Sally when she said she hated people who were mentally a mess. I also wept when Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club told me that “when we grow old, our heart dies.”

Today I thought back to what Sam had said about being trapped between ‘our world and the other world’. He said he felt like he didn’t belong in either the East or the West. If I could I would tell Sam that I finally got it. I always understood his fears but now I realized that mine weren’t very different either. I was stuck between not wanting my heart to die and wanting to grow up into someone worthwhile. I figure that some people like Amma, never really sort out that mess and even at the ripe old age of fifty, don’t let their heart die. For these people, ambition seems petulant.

I told myself eventually that it was okay to be weak, that it was okay to not harp on ambition and it was perfectly alright to not completely grow up and to remain earnestly naive. If people like Amma lived this way, it could hardly be a bad thing. It however did mean that you watch as people in your life slowly leave because they chose to grow up and they don’t have time for naivety.

With the discovery of my first grey hair I notice that I am occupying my mother’s world and also slowly becoming it. But this observation isn’t essentially joyous. Sam had said it was a tussle between “our world and the other world”. At twenty four I now see that Sam and I don’t share any world. We inhabit different worlds now and it seems unlikely that we’d merge.

 

And Today Went

August 1^st,2019.

10 AM

I realized today that mornings are good for mulldozing. Mulldozing is the process of alternating between staring at that one blank spot on the wall of my choice and taking short naps invariably interrupted by people, going about their business. I mull first and then doze. Sometimes, I doze first and then mull because it is refreshing to mix things up. Mulldozing. I wish I could obliterate these two specific activities because my sane thoughts chide their very existence.  But here I am, staring at my terrible penmanship in my journal as the cup of tea on the side table starts to lose its heat, bit by bit.

The mulling I do takes up so much space that very little else gets achieved. Sometimes I stare like an idiot at my to-do list as my thoughts viscerally trace every single phase of my past except the here and now. My thoughts dip into specifics and dissect moments from my past like ninth graders dissect tapeworms for their Biology class. The thoughts then connect dots which would put conspiracy theorists to shame and branch out into vague notions of morality and finally, force me to decide what kind of person I want to be. It may start with wondering why Peter Keating from Fountainhead is disgraceful but these thoughts always, always end with me wondering about my own existence. Who am I? A professor of mine once informed me that this question is the basis for any philosophical enquiry. I informed him that this question is sometimes annoying and Kant always is.

1:00 PM

As I reheat my tea from three hours ago, I think back to Pew. Pew once told me that people invariably decide what kind of person they want to be by the time they are twenty three years of age. When we heard this, Sarah and I laughed it off as some ‘silly older male babble’. But everytime my thoughts wander to Pew, I resent him for this statement. My tryst with twenty three is about to end in a month and even today, I still find myself unsure. I spend at least an hour every single day wondering who I am and who I want to be. Every character in fiction seems aspiration-al. Some days, I seek power and some days I have a healthy appreciation for a quiet life and some days I mope about wondering how dreary it all seems. This might seem like a conflict everyone faces and it is. But I am not privy to very many people who spend hours and hours attempting to arrive at certainty. Not just about the life they want to lead but also about the person they are. Other people just do things no? I realize that I am growing up rather slowly and scribble ‘trappings of an adult-teen’ in my journal.

Below that, I wrote the word KIND and gave each alphabet a tail and bemused eyes. I’ve always liked this word. Sarah had told me once that teaching inspired her to be a kinder person and I found myself smiling at her like a looney tune character. The only thing I am certain about is kindness. On days when I think I have enough of it, I live like a Jane Austen character. On days when I think I don’t have enough of it, I embody a Dickensian world.

The mulling can go on and on and the only way to break away from it is to nap. Off late, I nap for a while post which I eat a meager lunch at around 4 PM. Then after some more considerable dilly dallying, Sarah arrives at 5:15. She wonders how my morning went and I tell her that it wasn’t dull at all because my brain kept busy. She nods, notes my guilt lingering at the corner of my sheepish face and then speaks about her morning. Her mother had said something funny today and she had purchased new woolen wear which she said was “Not bad”. I liked talking to Sarah. On some days, she seemed to be the only live access I had to reality. I wasn’t always sitting around mulldozing but on the days that I had, Sarah sorted it out just by being her sane, glorious self.

We sipped tea and smoked as we discussed everything. On frivolous days, we loved talking about people we knew and how silly they were. On days when we circumstances didn’t allow for frivolity, we spoke about goodness and honesty and kindness. But we always, always circled back to chats about love. Maybe I had heard a Joni Mitchell song earlier in the day, or maybe she had read some titillating poetry, or maybe we were rereading letters we wrote to people a year ago but we always worked love into our conversations. I guess we figured that even if we missed out on love in our lives, we kept it alive by talking about it.

“I am sick of modern love.” she informed me, rather irritably. I nodded and acknowledged her irritation. Sarah was fed on a diet of movies and books which vouched for unblemished love and every time a new troublesome thread popped up in romantic relationships (hers or someone else’s) it irked her. To further the conversation, I asked more questions.

“Was forgiving easy? Is it difficult to let go? Why couldn’t person X pursue joy? Would we die alone? Did our parents ever feel love?”

I invariably failed to understand love having had less of it, but the good thing was that I understood Sarah and she understood me. When silence crept into today’s conversation we spoke about Orwell and realized that “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

 

12:30:  Sarah left at 8 PM. I spent a few hours working on my research project. Working was probably the most satisfying part of today. Accomplishments always are. At around 11:30, I went back to mulldozing without guilt and decided to give dinner a miss. If someone were to ask me what kind of person I was today, I could very easily tell them that I was content. I had my thoughts, my work and a friend. Today, the desire for power seems disgusting and I admonish it and for today I chose normalcy. And as I watched today go by at midnight, I realized that a new person would greet me in the bathroom mirror tomorrow.

*inspired by The unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath

* to D.D — Aren’t you flattered? Be.

One childish love

It was simply pure

My love for you

Like paper boats which

Kids place in puddles

On fresh rainy days.

I was drawn in, deeply

By the kindness I saw

and gentle tender moments in

Wee hours of tingly nights.

I jumped with sweet glee

Leapt for eager hugs and

Stealthy kisses in dusty bushes

Way back in the day.

Maybe the shows of affection,

The hefty gestures

Lay obscene, vulgar.

But they’ve now fizzed out

And love to this last date remains

A fucking meaningless

Four lettered word.

I wish I grew up quicker

Punched time in its face

To pursue mature, stable love.

But time laughed mercilessly

As I watched dumbfounded

Again like a child, a weepy one.

All said and done and dusted

The question remains: was it love

Or just a poor, stupid imitation?

 

On love

for ten whole years, I’ve fussed and fumed

from fourteen to now edging twenty four.

annoyed I was initially, at my new found idiocy

unable to grapple with what love was, how it worked.

shakespeare told me “it’s an ever fixed mark”

“must be true” fifteen year old me, agreed.

the bard died when I first saw love fade

like the last lamp on a fumy diwali street.

i then spent time listening to songs full of mush

starring lip-glossed girls and shy looking boys,

the gentle riff of a guitar on moon kissed nights.

“pretty love no?” i remember chuckling to myself.

and then, i took the quest even more seriously

when adulthood dawned one september,

and i stopped loving my own person.

I watched keenly the cynicism of love

which plath and sexton fed me at age 18.

the next few years i gave to myself a

feeble diet of cheeky, plastic movies

which made love out to be an achievement.

a ‘serendipity’, ‘begin again’,  a ‘post.script’

on long, nostalgic, brilliant love letters.

I stopped. I gave up, said it was ‘about time’

and belligerently shunned my research.

over the last couple of years however, this love

arrived at my doorstep and asked of me,

to pen down my witticisms on love.

because to love—it seems—meant

to pen down your heart and watch

even more keenly as it crumbled

and rebuilt itself, all over again.

ON NOT WRITING WHAT I KNOW

One of the cardinal rules of writing is “To write what you know”. I dislike this rule because it looks at writing as a discipline and not as that activity which has kept me going through all my bumps and bangs. I wouldn’t romanticize writing by saying that it is a “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions”. It requires discipline, rigour and hours and hours of grunting, sipping tea, thinking about thinking about writing and cursing at the laptop screen for no fault of its own.

I think it boils down to one question. Whom am I writing for? On all days, I write for myself. I do sometimes wish every single person I knew read the words I penned down and smiled as they finished reading the last sentence. But sometimes, in a twisted manner which I know is peculiar to me, I write for any one person (a friend, a foe, a family member) in particular hoping they’d read what I write and understand that it’s easier to let my emotions build up paragraph after paragraph on a blog post than express them to face to face over some lousy beverage or the other.

So “write what you know” makes sense if you are attempting to present your version of truth to a whole lot of people. It makes sense when you are writing for others. However, I don’t spend ludicrous amounts of time staring at an empty Word document to write for others. I do this for myself. And while on most days, the attempt is to make sense of everything that happens to me and because of me, on some days the attempt is to think about things that could happen to me.

Auden’s unknown citizen worked to remind us that we are cogs in the wheel. We don’t know if the unknown citizen was free or if she was happy. We just know that she remains as a mere statistic. I am a product and a victim of modernity just like every single person out there is. I long to be a part of a community yet cannot push myself to leave my room. I desire companionship and yet love eludes me. I want friendships to sustain and yet find myself separated from comrades, time and again. Modernity has inspired too much mobility and the intimacy we share with another unknown citizen is often fallacious. The modern citizen longs to belong to a space that isn’t replete with dissatisfaction and mistrust.

Virginia Woolf notes in her novel, “Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”. Social gatherings are planned and born out of each individual’s deep seated desire to stifle their own dissatisfaction brewing beneath the surface. The whole notion of “self love” in the form of scented candles, wines and whatnot which industries use to mint money also is born out of the realization that modernity has messed us up, has broken our backs and left us sullen and sad.

At times like these, I find refugee in the words which I know I control. I know that these “words, words, words” cannot hurt me one bit and if anything, halts modernity for a while. Unlike Mrs. Dalloway, my silence is first addressed and then vanquished. And sometimes, my silence wonders about the “what ifs” and the “maybe some days” and these musings are not held captive by modernity.

They are about worlds which remain untouched by modernity and people who jeer at mistrust as much as I want to. So, I don’t wish to “write what I know”. What I know is disgustingly morose. What I don’t know seems a whole lot more worth pursuing….even if it never manifests into the real, MODERN, world.

FEVERED SINISTER READING

Some days, poets and their otherwise beautiful ideas don’t fit into any corner of my life. Not even that teeny tiny space between the chest-of-drawers and the phone shelf in my bed room where locks of my hair float about gaily. A certain poet’s notions enter my life, make a case for their existence as vehemently as contestants on Shark Tank do, and then leave the minute I roll my eyes and mouth an unsavory expression.  And so I told myself, that I needed to take a hiatus from reading poems.

On this particular fever-kissed day however, as I shuttled between long naps and all the romantic comedies Netflix recommended, I decided to take a break from my hiatus and consume some much needed poetry. I hoped that I would be moved to bits, smile to myself and decide to change my life overnight like everyone in Dead Poets Society wishes to do.

What I hadn’t realized up until I started reading was that fever celebrated that sinister side of my brain which I worked on squishing periodically. Poetry—especially hopeful poetry– at this current juncture was a bad idea. But it was too late to stop now.

I first pursued Elizabeth Bishop and her ‘One Art’. My American Lit professor had impressed on my fellow classmates and myself, the niceties of her words. Bishop asked me (the sneezy reader) to “lose something everyday” because “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”. I thought back to all the Tupperware bottles, the many rubber bands and one of many-a-pair of earrings I lost and didn’t see how this advice worked. Bishop believed that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” and “none of these (loses) will bring disaster”. The woman clearly has never spent more than five minutes with my prudent South Indian mother who spelt disaster in every language she knew whenever I lost something or the other.

The point Bishop tries to make towards the end of the poem is that with every loss, there is a bigger, more wholesome gain and so it is okay to lose everything—from keys to the people you love—because you gain something else in return. Honestly, Bishop’s ideas scare me. She asks of mere mortals like myself who hold on to their slam-books and childhood toys, to just let go easily because “who knows what else you might gain if you just let go?”

Bishop’s joie-de-vivre while compelling doesn’t bode well for me. In one of our late night tete-a-tetes my best friend and I agreed that our past makes us who we are and while we try to un-do it sometimes, we simply cannot let go of it with Bishop’s nonchalance. Letting go of my past in toto, is letting go of everything I am today. And that aside, losing “door keys”, means sitting in a dingy café for four hours until my brother returns home and chews my head off. So, no thank you.

I paused, gulped down a Paracetemol and decided to switch to Derek Walcott. I chose to read ‘Love after Love’. He starts by discussing how with elation “you will greet yourself arriving at your own door” (That is of course if you haven’t lost the keys!) and how eventually “you will love again the stranger who was yourself”. Walcott pushes for the notion of self-love and how we must make it a point to come back to ourselves after we get our hearts broken, before we do anything else. At the cost of sending my Romantics Prof in a tizzy, I cannot help but draw a parallel between a Nobel Laureate like Walcott and Julia Roberts in ‘Eat Pray Love’. Walcott says that we must “Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself…” and Roberts does exactly that as she polishes off bowls of pasta in Italy right before she falls head over heels in love with Javier Bardem’s character in Bali. She eventually does “Feast on life”……and  on Bardem.

I finally decided to pursue Dickinson because there was something about that locked up woman in a nun’s habit I always found charming. I read “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” and couldn’t help but agree with everything she said. Dickinson reminded me that all pain subsides and we are left wondering if the pain was ever real. And it is always the same as Dickinson puts it: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

Today especially, Dickinson’s ideas fit perfectly. Not just as a reminder to all the real, tangible pain I’ve dealt with over the last few months but also to the woe that is reading poetry. As I sit here, fever infested writing about Bishop and Walcott, I wonder why I subjected myself to good poetry on this dreary day and ruined it for myself. Because after all that sinister thinking I indulged in, ‘a formal feeling’ has come. And now when I think of Elizabeth and Derek and Emily, I nod and smile and sheepishly go back to watching another Netflix recommendation starring Isla Fisher.

*poems mentioned: One Art- Elizabeth Bishop, Love after Love- Derek Walcott, After great pain, a formal feeling comes- Emily Dickinson