turquoiseandfairydust

[turquoiseandfairydust]

Sorrow and Bliss - Meg Mason

(Spoilers)

I read a book about a woman who has an undiagnosed mental illness, undiagnosed to her for most of her adult life, and then there, suddenly, clear as day. “Of course you have ___”. It manifests as subsuming darkness and sharp corners and witty observations. Some days she is throwing things at the people who love her most, others she is seeing the light that enters through the broken glass, yet others she is standing on ledges willing herself off - to lessen the burden on the world, to undo somehow the rot she brings each relationship in her life to.

Our protagonist lives in spirals upon jagged spirals, fuelled by pills and ever increasing self-doubt. She wears out grooves in relationships, frays faith in herself. She lets the darkness consume her and convince her as would a suspicious ally that she could never bring a life into this world without cursing it. She believes the lies she is told about her worth in the world as someone living with mental illness. She masks it too, so that her behaviour is never quite seen as a product of the illness but as a mark of her character, a smudge if it were. A blight.

I feel this ‘work of fiction’, so deeply. I wonder too how much of it could possibly be fiction if the author inhabits its skin so well. I worry for her. I worry for myself. My baseline, the beat I return to all the time, is underlying sadness, loneliness, a sort of sense of something broken inside me. I see sharpness everywhere. The foggy mist of darkness in everyday interactions. I struggle to work. I eat to cope. I behave like a scared little child in my relationships with the only people in the world who have to unconditionally love me. Am I also ___?

It would be nice to have a diagnosis. It would be nice to have a pill to take away some of the intensity of those feelings. Would it make my world blurrier? Perhaps. Would it make me feel normal? Again, a big perhaps. What does normal even feel like? Where would I be without the kaleidoscope? Sorrow and bliss, sorrow and bliss. A rubber band, a yo-yo, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

In my everyday life, I have built a sanctuary where I don’t have to swing between extremes as much anymore. Surely with time I could find a way to walk out of it entirely somehow? Unsupported by guardrails, untethered by ropes of my own making, just walk out, then fly, free bird in bright sky.

I am not a protagonist in a fictional story. Not that one anyway.

#journal #book review #mental health

[turquoiseandfairydust]

another

"We are going to have another baby", my colleague tells me, breaking in the tradition of strictly work-centred one-on-ones to impart the good news. "Maybe you weren't told at the meeting on Monday."

"Wow, congratulations!" I respond, pleased for him and after only having worked with my team on screens, eternally grateful for a glimpse into people's lives outside the workplace. This explains the near-buoyancy with which he has delivered trainings all week, the underlying relaxed joy with which he has responded to email queries from participants.

All this while, I thought it was because he really enjoyed teaching. Now I realise it's been because there have been understirrings of big news in the background.

He is smiling. My colleague, the actuary with the dry humour, is smiling.  

But I have one more question, something that's been niggling at me since his one-person announcement.

"That's great news. I'm so happy for you both. But...another baby?", I ask. "You already have one?" I didn't know.

"Another baby" he continues with no preamble or pause, "because we lost one."

And then the pain is there all at once, come to terms with over time but its weight still taking up the room. As it ought.

It starts to click. This is the month he was barely at work last year. This is that time he suddenly disappeared and when he returned, catatonic. This is the millisecond of hesitation that comes up whenever the coming of babies is congratulated in big meetings. His not wanting to return to the office for this period. This is all part of that, anyway.

"We were in the hospital for a week last year." he explains "And then we lost it." My eyes want to well up with this news, but it would not be professional. It's what I had suspected but never wanted to ask. (How do you ask such a thing of someone you have never met in the flesh anyway?) "So to say we are having a baby with no mention of the first would be dishonouring it."

My colleague the actuary. The awkward dad-joke maker. The strictly-business-no-personal-stuff colleague. In these two minutes he has ventured something so personal with so much tenderness. I am, as usual, at a loss for the right words in this language that is still not my own.

Talk turns to my move to the city in which the rest of my team is, and the actuarial tools we are working on. A day's work all this then.

As the call ends, my husband stands at the door to say goodbye before he leaves for a bike ride, and I blow him a kiss as we mouth each other "I love you". I like my lines separate between work and life, but after this conversation, I think it's not too bad to let them blur for once.

"I hope it goes really well for you, the move and everything" my colleague says.

"Thanks, A. I hope the same for you too."

#worklife #blurredlines

[turquoiseandfairydust]

get risky

Watching the sun burn up the clouds and planes on its way in,

I sit across you on a couch asking questions. Inebriated on a different kind of drug,

enough to forget myself and all that I love. Just ravishing in you teaching me touch.

The vestiges of that night still with me now: your lips in my diamond, your scent rising like hot heat from everything I own and my skin, the dizzy primal fear of perfuming my whole life with it.

Everything comes full oval. Maybe the game is in finding new corners in the same places and in throwing out the rules I made for someone else for myself along the way.

#nightturnstoday #typetriggerprompts #poetry #more

[turquoiseandfairydust]

get some fresh air

Double windows close inwards the wrong way. We are awake in swiftly stale air rooms apart as always, blurring out feelings with media made by others, hooking expectations on to castles built in space.

Tonight you have sought yourself no rest. Between kissing her and tears that came from me for something else entirely, you are stuck in your own generosity:

love.

Say what you will, the three of us will always know what a fling is and who you could not marry at the end of the night.

The feelings are mine, yours, those of young lovers everywhere seeking honest answers they don’t want to hear.

The fault rests with no one.

#missedposts #typetrigger prompts poetry insomnia

[turquoiseandfairydust]

time is running out

Missed posts

a kiss easily found in the spaces.  your hand easily found in the dark. my mind easily lost in the could-bes

your thoughts, a captivating place to park.

#innocent #attraction

[turquoiseandfairydust]

On Sleep

Today I am  missing waking up in your arms late morning to darkened blinds zippy puppy no alarm.

Work life  (what is balance?) buys my soul for a monkey’s groundnut, rings me up after dark, and driptubes bot-nya sugarcaffeine to keep engines running where they’re temporarily parked.

Bright windows, roosters’ crows, schoolgirls’ chirping early morning in rows, early sun,  late night alternate colour world fun, and much else to do that never gets done. Distractions, libations,  they tidy up the sum.

In five and a half weeks, I will be yours unwrapped and hopefully not disheveled returned to the land of long drives  and perfect sunsets eternal holiday somewhere between your scapulae.

#holiday #longing #arms

[turquoiseandfairydust]

Stories from Last Week

Today, one of my best friends got married. "I'm not stepping onto the podium without the two of you", she had said to me and our third partner in crime a year ago. "Book your tickets!"

Well, she had to step on that podium without one of us in the audience. It breaks my heart to say it and my mind is swimming in maybes. Maybe I didn't book my tickets in advance enough. Maybe I shouldn't have booked them in the embers of a fight with a boy. (The boy was, incidentally, terrified of the family attention that would surround him if he went with me to a wedding, so he is no longer around.) Maybe fates intervened.

Whatever the reason, flights got cancelled, and badly, and alternatives were not on the table. So I've spent two of the last four days in a haze - first trying my hardest to get there, and then finally resigned to the fact that I will miss one of the most important celebrations in her life. C'est la vie, mais c'est malheureux, non?

My heart's been in my throat for the past four days, but what can you do? Somewhere in the heart of bustling India, she is already Mrs Mannadiar.

#nonadventures #missedplanes #tumblings

[turquoiseandfairydust]

Early twenties

Missed posts

At the party, you skulk in the limelight. Yours is a voice that wants to be listened to. You hold it well.

'You're...28?', someone asks. The beginnings of a blush. 'I'm, umm, 24. I just turned 24', you later acquiesce. In this industry, youth is weakness. You have to hold yourself older to be heard. And today, you are meshing social with official. Everyone knows someone who knows someone else. But you are careful. I would even say you're debonair.

Everyone at this party comes from the same small circle of developing country elites, their statuses bestowed from their degrees rather than from their pedigrees. I suppose that's fair. Like you, they have gathered in a cosy home to celebrate the festival of lights, the coming of winter, the absence of family.

To celebrate.

The rain started just as you make your way over from across town, whipping swift, plump droplets on you as you cross the road hurriedly, arms waving above your head, trying not to get run down by negligent drivers in big cars. The city you have just moved to is quiet except for these occasional torrents, and you understand the need for the festivity and chatter, for the warmth in repetitive introductions. At least everyone is nice.

“You’re 24? My God you’re young” , your thoughts swim back to this rooftop revel. Raised pitches make their way into raised volumes, and you find yourself shushing your interviewers, who are currently feeling old, and eyeing you like they would an ice cream shake on a diet plan. Until now, your age has been a source of pride, but here, where you don’t know anyone, and don’t care to know anyone, you don’t know why you continue to be honest about things close to your heart. Too much time spent indoors, maybe, in front of screens and not with real people. Too much being direct about what’s on your mind. Too much distance from the dewy morning soil, the foreign tongues and inexpensive local delights in the lands you have just traversed.

You have been dragged through so many dinner parties in your homes across the globe that you could just let yourself ease into autopilot. It is easier to chat to people when you are analysing their animi from behind the veil of a wine glass. It is easier to file them neatly into the heuristics of your travels, tick off their personality traits against the checklists in your head - the slightly confused accented TCK, the grown up child, the soon-to-be soccer mom, the leery drunk - and accept that you probably never see 99.3% of the people you have met again.

But you are, even at just 24, too old to play first daughter again, to make judgements, or to lose your thoughts in a glass or five of something. So you excuse yourself, just moments before the rest of the drinking and dancing and gambling and dillydallying begins. Honesty will just have to do tonight.

#judgement #identity #restlessness

[turquoiseandfairydust]

Dizzy with the deepness of time

Caught between moments we left in the past and teenage self-consciousness that has softened as it climbs up behind me these days. An old friend with a backpack on a motorbike. We are not as young as we once were.

You want me more than I want you, you say. Maybe. These days, everything is not about that one thing for me. With you around, everything else becomes difficult. You become my one driving purpose, and I become yours.

But there are things I need to do still, while I am green and you are blue from the feelings you are holding within you

and just like that, I am rung (though not sharply) with the fear that I cannot participate in this electronic paper plane exchange the way I would like to. The way that we used to. Your pants in a heap on the floor. My bra wrinkled up underneath the pillow. Our hearts wrapped in each others’ circles and stars.

I reach out for the fragments as I sit up, head still spinning from four layers of thoughts. “Can we do this again? Can we start over?”, I hear my brain matter secrete doubts. Something is not whole inside me; and you tell me the smise haven’t come easy to you since we last blinked goodbye. But two broken people can’t fix each other; sex is not glue.

But it gets pretty close.

#rekindlings

[turquoiseandfairydust]

The Art of Letting Go

I can’t decide whether I’m just good at it or too good.

[turquoiseandfairydust]

Promise

I remember what you told me on that night beneath the softly falling snow in the light of a lamppost.

And what I said back in my head as I walked up the hill heading home alone.

My hands were so cold and yours so warm. And like me, the snow melted when it touched your tongue.

#love #poetry #writing prompt #nostalgia #snow

[turquoiseandfairydust]

For all the time wasted, and all the time lost

It comes to this you me stacks and rows and shelves and woes. A dozen loose files threatening to fall their jagged edges portending an army of paper cuts.

We are so close it hurts. We’ve been so far it burns and back. The space between us a pressurised release of the hot heat of wanting each other all this while.

You have not asked me here and you are searching for something when I burst in fuming. It is only Tuesday but you have been flung far away by the world already twice today.

And when I explode little gnomes of raw madness you look at me pleading, “Not today”. But I go on.

And then you tell me something true but not tender. You should have set things straight long ago.

And my palm finds itself meeting your cheek rather like a piece of meat hits the countertop while being tenderised. Repeatedly and not gently.

You grip my wrist and I push you but you pull me back with more force of feeling than I knew you had for me. You’ve filled me with doubt about your feelings so far.

“Everyone has been taken away from me. I don’t want you to be the last.” you say.

And then your hand is around my waist and I know. All this baiting and doubting and waiting. All that comes before it, all the untruths are white. Your face is flush and your lips are mine

hungrily for all the time  wasted and all the time lost.

#poetry #love #Suits #office romance #time #truth #kiss

[turquoiseandfairydust]

It's Candyland in Your Mind

A tall man once said to the room around me, “We write what we know”. At the time, he was talking of his own book, which was about the death of his roommate and various other events that helped him come into his own as an adult. And I frowned to myself thought, ‘Hey, that’s not right. The process of writing is different for everyone. What about people like Garcia Marquez and Zadie Smith, who spin entirely fantastic worlds with their words? Authors whose writing is at once fresh and completely out of the realm of what we might imagineably “know”. How could they have possibly known so intimately the magic they wrote about?’

But the more I thought about it, the more his sentence stayed in my head. Though there is a special brand of wizardry in the writings of both of the authors I had imediately thought of, as it came to be I found out that their writing was inspired by events that were entirely non-fictional. Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which is a circularly-chronological novel about the murder of a man, and which had been the first novel that had entered my thoughts, turned out to be based entirely on a police report he had read about a street murder. Marquez’s imagination was so sharp and the story he spun around it was so thorough that in his blow-by-blow account of the crime in the 12 chapters of the book, he not only captured all that the police already knew, but also completed the details not listed in the autopsy, much to the chagrin of the police. And while the event mentioned was not in the least fictional, Marquez’s ground-breaking and much-revered style of writing elevated it to an almost magical realism, where all that was missing was a flying pig who had been a banished ex-lover.

As for Zadie Smith? Her novel, White Teeth, is a three-generational account of the lives of two immigrants and their families in the London suburbs. This sounds simple -- and frankly boring -- but her intensely-detailed, hyperrealistic writing makes it a book you find yourself willing to endlessly sprout pages at the end. But Zadie Smith is young and entirely, unblemishedly English in her upbringing, and I couldn’t for the life of me imagine her immersed in the identity crises that plague people from other worlds living on a fence of their own cultures. So how does a white Londoner know enough to write so well about the millions of daily battles fought by immigrants in a world she isn’t even remotely a part of? By having grown up around them. By observing. By knowing them more intimately than they know themselves, yet from the outside, where she can find the space to nurture, develop and fall in love with her characters and their flaws, perhaps more than they love themselves.

And then you think of all the writers and painters and sculptors and other kinds of creators whose works are inspired by something. Whatever the eventual outcome of their work, even if it is vastly different from the original thought in their head, and even if it is inspired by their own work at some point in the past, all of us are in some way creating something from what we already know. Ideas don’t just come out of nowhere, arguments aren’t just formed from thin air. All the thoughts we have are based on a succession of things that have come before them, and all the words we use are based on where we’ve seen them used in the past somewhere. And in that regard, ideas seem finite, and the world seems incredibly limited in its scope.

But while it is important to acknowledge the influence of what you know in your work, it shouldn’t depress you to think that your ideas are not your own, or worse, that they aren’t new or interesting. In the process of stringing together the things we know, we create entirely new combinations. It’s the same beautiful process of permutation that chemically combines packets of genetic information to form a unique, individual you. Imagine Willy Wonka’s factory in your mind, making three fifty kinds of thought-candy in a minute. And it’s all from what you know. That’s something worth taking home, anyway.

#write what you know #art #artists #creative process #willy wonka #zadie smith #marquez #writing #DNA #ideas