Occurs spontaneously
you won’t know it
feel it coming
it’s silent
(I promise!)
it’ll come
all at once
so don’t worry
it’s sudden
(it’s painless!)
it’s painless
it’s painless
that is
it’s quite painless
it’s painless
that is
quite painless
quite painless
until it comes on.
and the pills
make you sick
keep you awake
and awake you wonder
why?
Because imagine
Imagine a world in which that was enough
Because I had enough
Elsewhere
And if that were enough
I wouldn’t need any more.
But there are as many worlds as mirrors.
Imagine a world —
a different glimmer of the disco-ball
a flicker of glass away from here, a crack
a hair’s breadth.
A moment.
Imagine a world —
Imagine a —
Lost.
The moment, lost.
Lost with its beauty, latent, potent, gone.
Laden, then lost
at sea.
As ships upon the sea.
As many words as ships upon the sea.
Sailor, spy.
A sailor’s spyglass at sea.
I used to sing around the schoolyard, tunes from Fred Astaire movies.
Isn’t it a lovely day to be caught in the rain?
I’m stepping out, with mah honey; can’t be bad to feel so good.
Shall we dance? Or keep on moping? Shall we dance, and walk on air? Shall we give in to despair? Or shall we dance with never a care?
It was strange; before then I had never sung out loud, where anyone could hear me. I could sing with the choir, I could sing alone, but never to be heard. So frightened of the sound, my throat would catch up.
At some point later, I stopped singing again. I wonder now if I was happiest then than I have ever been. Why else could I sing?
Some time in 2011-12
(He was young and kind, and a little puzzled.)
You don’t look like the kind of person who usually sees me for social anxiety… if you don’t mind me saying so.
I wondered what a person with social anxiety was supposed to look like. An image rose up: a chubby boy, pale, pimpled, the archetypal damp hands.
Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.
I had been afraid — some element of superstition had mingled with the dread that unaccountably, always, clung to my chest. The great barrel of metal, furnished in grey plastic, shaking and rattling with the vibrations of the air pressed against it, had seemed flimsy. Its breaking-up slowly, piece by quiet piece, under the force of its unnatural journey alone, had not seemed far-fetched. The creations of humanity inviolate — I could not believe in that myth in this lonely expanse of dark empty sky. We might slip away — the great violence of our breaking muffled and rendered silent by the cloud. Though as a child the noise and energy of a plane’s take-off had worried me, never had I felt so deeply disquieted by flight — a distress without urgency or focus, a heightening of my new natural state.
Magical: Day One 