Perhaps it is the lack of fellow insomniacs who crack terrible puns at 3 in the morning or the constant honking of horns in the evening while going back home, but I seem to be coming apart. So do forgive the rants that will follow. It is a season of wrongs. It is all wrong. The wrong cities and the wrong time and the wrong thoughts. The weather is wrong. It is supposed to be unpredictably hot and then comfortingly mild within seconds and it just won't happen. I'm sitting on the wrong chair and on the wrong side of the laptop screen and this whole room feels wrong. The books are kept in the wrong order because why, just why should they be in height-wise order anyway? Who says it is wrong to stack them in the order of which they were loved? The light is wrong, it no longer falls gracefully and has to be forced in through a tubelight that has something wrong with it and so won't start until I clamber up a chair and twist it forcefully which is again, a terrible way to start
I never did imagine one could read the way I do now. I picked up Love In The Time of Cholera for the 3rd time last month, in an attempt to finally read it. I've been rummaging through it for years now, making futile efforts to move beyond three or four pages. The fact is, at the time, I would have start building the streets that Dr. Urbino, Florentino and Fermina walked on all over again each time I started after keeping it down for a day. It becomes exhausting, imagining the crowded streets, nauseating odours and myriad of emotions throughout. This time around, all of it changed. I knew the city already. I could see it forming in my mind as I opened the pages to where I had last stopped. Somehow, I could fathom every cobbled path in the city as surely as the characters tread upon them. Florentino Ariza's love letters seem written by a hand no more experienced than mine. All it takes is one whiff of the air and every floating aroma, odour and smell from the harbour comes ru
Circa 2007, watching Breakfast at Tiffany's. Hoping, wishing, praying and demanding that one stranger who walks into your life and turns everything around. Fast forward, January 2011. For the first time in many years, something that another person has said rendered me speechless. In a way that makes my heart skip a beat every now and then. In a way that has me almost crying for sheer joy one moment and smiling softly to myself the next. And like all the good things in life, it doesn't make any sense to me. How does someone go from an acquaintance to friend to filling up the whole of my message inbox in one week? How did I go from being socially awkward to telling somebody everything there is to know about me? How can he possibly know the words I want to hear and be the person I want to spend time with? How in the name of God does he get me singing with him in the middle of the night, especially that one song that speaks to me? Knowing him is reassuring, like a promise of so
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