The Unsent Letters

 

2 January 2025

Writing in a journal often means that you are offering yourself, baring yourself  without any kind of censure. In some of the diary writing years, I have thought of publishing mine but it never happened that way because I was too busy with many things and my journal writing endeavours mostly fizzled out before the end of January. This year I want to write a journal that is worth publishing and want to create positive changes in all spheres of life

I like beginning my New Year with a little bit of introspection. Here, I am sitting with my pen and diary while the rest of the family is sleeping. For me, writing is a way of life and I love confiding in my diary almost every day unless overwhelmed with a busy work life. This year, like almost all the years that I have gone by I want to begin with a holistic goal setting of improving every part of my life including the emotional, spiritual, physical and financial spheres of life.

1 January 2025

The New Year began quietly at 0001 while I was busy writing in my journal. This has been my habit for the last many years when I have found happiness in journaling about the passing year and the coming one. Unlike childhood, when the New Year began with prayers in the church with the Midnight Mass, the years since my marriage in 2008 have been blessed with midnight musings and nothing else. I have jumped like the proverbial monkey from faith to spirituality to religion to nonbelieving all the time and its hardly news that I don't go to church any longer though I am spiritual and read religious books of all kinds. There are sounds of firecrackers coming from the neighbourhood and every year, it has been a special New Year with the people singing Te Deum at the midnight mass. 

Icarus and the Sun

The Unsent Letters

kindness

An evening

In the midst of this summer tedium,we meet again,
In the same old park where we used to sit around, 
Reading books and chatting for hours altogether, 
While the ancient tabeubia trees bore us witness. 

Once again, the carpet of pink blossoms is made, 
For you and me to sit and doodle with lifelessons-
The serious thoughts about the angst of this life , 
The trivial thoughts about the colours in the world. 

You are a strong shoulder that I had let go earlier, 
Your few words fill me with so much of happiness, 
I am the mighty wordsmith in whom you believe, 
The one who can conjure up new worlds in verse.

You and I talk of the serious and trivial meet again, 
In our old hang-out under the same ancient trees.

Spring

positive thought

When you wake up in the morning, you can think of the ways in which you can be creative with the day. Most of the time, people are worried about the past or the future and they are not fully open to the present.

Today is a new day and then only then you will be able to understand the meaning of the word present, which also means a gift. That means to be fully open to the world of possibilities and like the poet says to wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. 

A lament about lost love: K R Meera's novella Meera Sadhu

Love is like milk, with the passage of time,it sours, splits and becomes poison.

The novel portrays the tragic life of Tulsi torn between duty and love and she chooses to run away with Madhavan instead of marrying her classmate Vinayan. She finds that though she loves Vinayan, she gets carried off her feet by the kind of love that Madhavan gives her.

She runs away with Madhavan on the eve of her wedding though she knows from his own mouth that she is his 27th girlfriend. Soon, she recognises that she does not have a role in his life and the story is a lament about lost love.

Through lyrical passages that describe the desire that Madhavan arouses in Tulsi, the author captures the beauty of love buy equally descriptive are her details about his treachery in love, the countless women that he has relations with. This wounds her and she grieves how she sacrificed her career and her life for the sake of the man she chose to be with in life.

The novel details the transformation of Tulsi from a loving wife to Meera Sadhu grieving her life and serving others in the ghats of Varanasi. The frequent shifts in time cleverly portray her memories about her marital life including the good times and the bad times.

Making memories

I want to spend some time with you and I want to know everything about you. I want to spend all the best days across various seasons with you, wandering this world and learning more of you, what you are like and your likes and dislikes, creating some really good moments together. Someday, I want to look back and think that we were creating memories together.

I want to know close, read each and every look, every smile, learn your language and also what you say without using words. I want to see and remember how your eyes light up in a smile and how my world lights up with your smile and how this world lights up making it a better place to live.

Your fingers touch me and I forget myself and the worries of this world. Your lips kiss mine teaching me the art of love every single day.

It is with this pleasant feeling of being loved that I want to go to sleep at night and it is with the certainty of your arms around me that I want to wake up in the morning. 

Learning Curve

You read and study about the world and the things that you have an interest in. You never cease in your pursuit of knowledge and you do not rest for even a minute.

Whatever task you lay your hands on, you want to learn it and do it in a better manner and that is an your understanding of learning and becoming an expert in your daily tasks or bettering your work or learning how to cook your meals or learning how to read faster.

Sometimes, you might learn a subject just out of pure interest without having any particular aim in learning it except for the pure fun of understanding what it is about.

People might ask you: What is the use of learning this now? Will this serve any practical purpose? But you tell that learning your area of interest is necessary for the purpose of developing your understanding of it and whatever you need to know, you need to know it urgent.

You have your idiosyncrasies and your quaint tastes in reading but you for sure that your knowledge will come of use someday sometime may be in another world that might be made complete by your deep understanding.

Your life gets meaningful by the very task of simplifying all tedious work through an overall understanding of how to make it simpler, better and easier.

Summer Love

You are my favourite song that I sing day and night till I get tired of singing. You are my summer love of youth that come to me in snatches of songs and as pleasant memories though our love never got a happy ending like others did theirs. With you, it was always the silence that reigned as if we came from some primeval ocean full of ancient longings. You were the sun, the moon, the land, the ocean and all that this heart wanted to see around it.

It was as if we did not need words to speak of the magic that was between us, it was as if we have always known each other minutely and the much-needed words failed to come out though I tried hard when you were around with you. I wanted you to stay around with me always and it is your companionship that I craved throughout all the years.

What I remember is your mellow voice that spoke enthusiastically and warmly of things that moved you and the beautiful way words sounded when you spoke to me. Not that others do not speak enthusiastically or warmly or sweetly but this heart remembers you with fondness and exaggerates how you were, how you spoke and how you behaved. Now, eons later you have become a beautiful song that I know by heart and that might be sung a lifetime. 

enough

X'mas Tree

One last time before taking the Christmas tree down!

My roots strangely

Sometimes, you learn how to feel this sense of belonging to an unreal world and I belong only to you, my love. 

I have never felt this sense of belonging to this place that I left as a child where my brother and I stood in the cemetery every year praying for his dead soul. 

I do not belong to my father's family since its all dead and gone, with a few bones scattered in a churchyard long and far away though you get occasional visits, calls and messages from people who look just like you. 

I  do not belong to the place where I grew up in my mother's native place beside the River Green, where it was always fun to be playing in water yet there were rightful inheritors who belonged just because they grew up there. Then there were homecoming that were full of affection from your grandparents or their visits to our city that were memorable. 

Now, I belong by marriage to a family which calls me my own though the blood that runs through my veins is hardly theirs and sometimes I get the feeling that I am home, finally free from this sense of not belonging. 

Do I belong to my co-workers who call me my formal name and I am a familiar stranger who does not have many stories to tell but nods and smiles and passes them by. Yet, there are times when you connect with someone and you feel that you have always belonged there and you sense this bond that goes beyond words. 

Then, in an imaginary realm, my love, you are the one who star in my all my dreams, the one whose thoughts occupy this arid life and I long for your presence just like one longs for rain in summer. 

You know me inside out like the palm of your hand or like the page of a well-thumbed book and what makes me a woman when I am with you. You know my

feminine spirit and tenderness and not my occasional clownishness in trying to belong to some name, some family, some tribe, where I do not belong.

It is to you that I belong, your complement that fulfills and completes you,  in the melting down of the barriers between you and me, and the all engulfing tenderness that follows our lovemaking. 

That is the space where I see myself as feeling belonged and as having a pet name that you call me always. 

Purple Riot

The purple riot began

And took root slowly.

Who would've thought
Who would've known

In the rear view mirror
It looks like spring again

It's snowing every morn
And melting by evening.

The beauty that returned
The songs that don't cease

One day sitting nearby
Feeling the full purple riot

The deep desire in your eyes
That sang to me whole night

The hand that almost reached
The purple riot in your heart.

self love

Journal: Serious and Trivial

The pages of my journal await to record a few thoughts. These could serious, trivial or even a mixture of both just like life. All these rambling thoughts were gathered from the same quixotic heart that has loved to dream, to fly, to win and to endure.

The serious thoughts were all about love and the longing to be with the one you love and the need to make him your heart's anchorage and sacred space, how from a chance acquaintance he grew into my world and how this love is celebrated in an alternate universe of togetherness.

The trivial thoughts were scribbled on early mornings as a bundle of words in the dream journal as a celebration of the pure delight of being alive, when a burst of fresh air, a bit of bright blue sky or a belief in the goodness of life were more than enough to keep this heart on cloud nine.

But the best ones are the mixed ones, a little serious and a little trivial about things that celebrate the joy of life that finds room in today's dream journal. 

Rebus Writing

 I really miss the days when people texted more than Yes, No, ok, and what? and abbreviations and short forms than send meaningful long sentences, properly capitalised, spelt and spaced meaningfully. May be you might think that I am a purist but this craving exists to get a well written letter or a handwritten page.

I remember there were friends who could match wit with wit, anger with anger and repartee with repartee, all in matter of seconds and you could roll in laughter at the words they said. You look with nostalgia at the SMSes that could make  your day.

I really miss those texts in words, invites, reminders, emails and missing you messages not the rebus that you read these days. I think want2cu2moro is good enough but I think might like a longer text that goes: I missed you a lot today, my dear and want to see you tomorrow. Please stand near the tabeubia tree where we usually meet.