Prose before hos

My heart feels full. Maybe it's the cucumber sandwich I had for dinner. Maybe it's the day I had. Maybe I felt fucking free after a long fucking time. Or maybe it was the new A24 romance. Did you know A24 does romance? I had no idea. I mean, I did, I'd seen the trailer and ignored it. Like everything else, along with everything and everyone else. What a whirlwind of a year. I ignored it all and I'm facing it all. It's nice to do it, to see things and face things and to hold the life you were given. My mom did not struggle to survive with difficult in-laws for me to throw it all away for someone who thinks they know life better than me. 

Ali Sethi makes my heart full. All Ali Sethi videos have the same effect on me as pets have on babies. It calms me down and makes my heart feel full. It makes me smile, even if I've been stuck in a jam for over 2 hours at 11:30 am on the highway, while being accosted by a man I'd hooked up with hundred years ago, on account of how I discussed him and another man I went out with earlier this year (I hadn't). I don't know what is it about me that men think I discuss them with other men. I don't remember their presence. I write enough in my journal and live through every feeling to not think about them in their afterglow. When it's over, it's over. It's the nicest thing about me, I don't wake up the dead. If you're gone, be gone. For good. 

My therapist and I had a few breakthroughs today. She said she's seen a shift in me since the last few sessions and I agree, so have I. It's like finding a new ray of hope, a string of light, and a sizzle of glitter in my eyes. Therapeutic work is done outside of therapy, the actual session is a catalyst with your atomic bomb consultant, who helps you unpack your ideas and knots in the hope that you'll make flowers out of those bombs. Some days they really smell good. Some days those flowers make your heart feel full. 

Astrology has this thing about patterns and numbers. If you see things in repetition it is often believed that spirits are trying to send you messages. If that's the case then I don't know if the spirits are sending me flowers to help me realise it's time to wake up and smell the leaves; you can eat, shoot, and leave, you know. Ali Sethi is also a flower, a whole blooming individual who makes my heart feel whole. 

I've been eating out and not working out. I've been a bad girl. I've been reckless and shopping. I'm jumping through music and artists on the highway. I'm typing every wild thought and spending time on the drawing board. I feel wild, I feel free and most importantly, I feel full. The last time I felt this way, I had learnt that my office plays Fleetwood Mac in the ladies washroom and god that felt like a good enough reason to take a dump there. Feeling full can make you shit your heart out. It's what they say, if you haven't shat where you've eaten, you've not lived your life. 

I've spent countless hours in that room between fete, practice, sessions on how to cope with periods, dance parties etc. Unlike most parts of my school, I never particularly liked or disliked it. The man, our dance teacher, made a lot of girls feel like they are his children; and later during #MeToo, the allegations against him came as no surprise to me (or the group of people I follow on socials) that he was apparently a creep to many young girls. Doesn't shock me one bit. 

In the past month, I cut my hair short. Like really, really short. Like, I had them when I was 6-7. I remember going to Chandigarh at that age with the same hair and I found myself repeating that at 31, with the same hair. Both those episodes are incidental, and in no way planned. Yet, to a larger idea, it seems like it was always going to happen that way. 

When I found a few pictures with my short hair and had a chance to reflect, it seemed like a grown-up decision. That I had lived with my long hair all my life and I knew it was time to move out of the comfort of knowing how my hair feel against my skin when I wash them or how long do they really seem when I'm in bed alone. I was ready to embark on the journey, even though I felt my whole life upending moments after taking the plunge. It helped that people encouraged me and even the fiercest critic of that decision (my mum) came around and said I've never looked better. 

In the last few weeks, I've had to discuss some tough life decisions. I found myself offering things to a man I never wanted nor thought I was capable of and yet in that moment I felt so sure and strongly positive about those things I wouldn't change a thing even today. While those offerings are still up in the air given the status between us is unclear, I feel so strangely motivated and grown up about parenting, motherhood, marriage, and even partnership that I have started absorbing those motifs into my life without explaining or answering myself to anyone. I previously held extremely strong beliefs that I found eroded in no time as I mouthed the words, "I'll do it because you are at the center of it". 

At some level, the hurt flows because, like I said, it wasn't enough or good to get a total outcome but I know I have done my best and given whatever I could have. I do not know where life will take us and I am a sucker for definite things. Maybe one day I'll look up and realise uncertainty is just as beautiful as changing your mind and living life knowing results don't matter and that it's fine to live with short hair, regardless of how your self-hood is tied with long, straight and beautiful hair. It's okay, it'll be okay, it'll pass. It'll settle. I'll be okay.