for today, it's enough

On September 5, the rigmarole of the previous month has led me, in the most distinct way possible, to professional, and even personal plights. I miss being fifteen, and it has been so long since I was fifteen. When my grandma would touch my head intimately, and say I was a handsome young man. I wanted the world in that shape forever. I remember the way of moving that said my head had been touched, ego inflated, and everything I did was so that someone I wanted could touch me later. Yesterday, the decision to take a walk was stronger than the will to rot in my bed. As my strides replicated in an endless cycle, from muddy roads to tarred roads, and then clean walkways, there was a consideration, and a recategorization of all the limerence my little world has permitted as an experience. With no direct attack to how it looked, and what it felt like in that moment, the burden on me was not to dehumanize the people I once considered lovers, but to simplify what looking at them meant to me within the epoch that affections flowed without restraint. The complexity remained, and truly it was hard to place people in buckets that were never defined by anyone else. But it was my definition and for the period of time where this walk led me, it felt enough. To see through a plethora of personas in one recollection felt familiar. I do that during work meetings, but something else that found its way to the fore was that sometimes if people were just beautiful, it felt enough. If they didn't have to struggle to fit, and should their existence be tied to a mission bigger than all that they've ever been, it just looked attractive. My life hasn't been simple, or stable, and perhaps there is a false perception that it was until I turned fifteen, but I don't think so. Strongly because the waters that found their way out of my family didn't exactly give me the room to relate with people without the slightest doubt that they wanted to harm me. One should never teach a child to hate extended family members. It seeps in, and even in the long run, the questions would linger and there would be no one to attend to it. Such was the case in the folder that was titled: There were never simpler times. I deconstructed everything about my affairs eventually into two buckets, the devotional ones, and the ones that consumed me in totality. I sat with it, and placed people in the different places that would further contextualize who they were to me, and what they meant to me in that moment. But it felt unfair. To reduce the burden of choice to two little words that housed so much meaning. Beyond that, it reduced my partners to moments of highs and lows alone, without compensation for the days that were normal. The narcissistic tendencies hit hard again. The non-verbalized behavior that I express that makes it look like everything is about me, and only how it affects me. Solipsism. I bend under the weights of my own selfishness. Still, I kept on. Drawing a narrative from a fictional character, but that's what book lovers do. We live with the assumption that life can be implied through a character shaped by an author's words, that has nothing to do with you. The brakes come, and the words I'm looking for are the ones that define my internal control systems, the ones that align with the internal controls of another person. Not because fights don't exist, but because intertwined thoughts make such things endure. In a sense, it's a matter of acceptance. And I can succumb to it because not everything in the world can be defined, and that feels enough for now. I see that my experiences with an affection for someone that totally engulfed my being are so few. All on one hand. The humbling feeling that brings me to my knees is that they didn't even do anything to warrant that kind of intensity, but there it was. Burning on both cylinders. Yet people still settle for ashes with me, not knowing that infernos once erupted in the name of limerence. To me, the nightmares are when it is obvious that I cannot be that type of person with someone after a couple of hours, days, and maybe weeks of seeing each other. Most times, the attempt to delay as a response to a feeling that's not there yet hasn't proved anything. The bus stops where it stops, miles away from a location where people can scream that they burn for each other. I consider the possibility that I've settled multiple times, and to this betrayal to myself, I stand guilty. It's a shame and an unbearable experience to always be alone because your inner compass is yet to point towards the direction of someone who might fit properly. It's not even that one isn't patient enough, it is that having to go through life with no one to witness you can be quite heavy, and as against previous utterances, I don't blame people who ditch their dream person, and settle due to convenience or availability biases. We can't ignore the weight loneliness brings, and even though sexual autonomy eases the loneliness for a bit, it holds no promise of sustainability or even happiness afterwards. The post coital clarity will leave you wishing the path of being a eunuch might be more honorable than the moans and stimulation. But we are allowed to be who we are, to revel in the gigantic power of free will, and to sing the song of what we can do in bed, but when the dust of everything settles, people like me come back to myself. Almost like what happened minutes earlier was an act of madness, a state of being beside oneself. And when I'm back from that walk, my judgment stretches once again, with an understanding that permits even realities I may not always live with, and an inconclusive explanation of what it means for me. To define what the search should be about, to make an end to a journey that has lasted longer than I thought. To brood on what life offers, be it devotional affection or a love that consumes everything it touches. I know I've been there, in times that felt almost simpler but never were. And today, in the dusk of everything, I leave the door open for what I don't know, and I pray that I feel the same way when the sun rises again tomorrow. For today, my nerdy habits are enough.

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