The way you intersect in my life

“… And then I learnt that people come and go, we are planets, we orbit around each other, and that’s okay.”

“… It’s more than honour(ing non attachment). It’s the understanding that we are all humans, we are all on our own journeys. We are all suffering in some form and sometimes we are in certain places that we just don’t have the ability to meet in the middle and hold onto the other person. It was beautiful while it lasted but it needs to end here. We might meet again in a better place, maybe we might not. And that’s completely fine too.”

There was a time when I wanted to write without living. My living, feeling, understanding was done through stories typed away at keyboards ill-fitted to my fingers. Screens more ill suited to my eyes. It was a strange desire of mine, to fit oh so perfectly into the world, only insofar as I could live through writing. I never wanted to go up to someone, strike a conversation, have a poetically discursive exchange with like minded people. Or not like minded people. Any people really. In fact, I expected to whittle away hurtling into a book of my own tinkering. Or art, I wasn’t particularly picky, for a while, till english caught my heart.

And then life caught my heart more. Shackled my soul with glittering chains. So very scintillating that I was enamoured, maybe for the very first time.

That’s besides the point anyways.

It took me time to understand that living was necessary. Vital. It was a prerequisite to writing, reading, breathing. Crucial to comprehending the self and that that is outside the self. You may call it other, the world, god perhaps, not particularly pedantic about it.

I write here. This place stores my art, which is primarily in the form of my thoughts, feelings, writings. (Must admit, I am still horrified at how horrid the literature I produce sounds in my head. It feels and sounds like an absolute atrocity, to me. And yet, I am deeply aware of how it lays on someone else’s skin.)

Sometimes, a lot of the time actually, my writings are intricate intersections of my experience in concurrence with other persons’. Perhaps it is narcissistic of me to think of it like this. Of how one interaction changes me personally, the other person equivalent to a prop. Interchangable, maybe even expendable. But that is the point. They are neither.

They were a planet that came dangerously close to mine. Almost scraped the surface even.

We orbit around each other. Sometimes close, other times further than we thought we would ever be. Maybe even deliberately clashing into each other now and then. Every so often, we leave the planet and continue our journey into a different part of the galaxy. Or maybe we collide and take a little of each other into ourselves. Mutable, but still a part of the other is deeply embedded in our self. For better or for worse.

We orbit around each other, too close, too far. We are just planets orbiting around each other.

It’s poetic, isn’t it? It is indeed, till it hurts and we have to reflect on it.

The orbiting isn’t always as romantic as I make it sound. Sometimes it is horrifyingly destructive. It erodes at the self. One day you are walking your merry path and something collides into you. Words maybe, a book perhaps, a song, or maybe a friend you thought would stick up for you because you did, a doctor, a teacher, maybe even a stranger. Something shakes the tectonic plates of your planet. A part of your soul that you thought you would never question. A principle of yours that is so sturdy is suddenly blasted into instability.

I decided to write about it. All of it. Because why not.

Before that though, I was terrified. You see, I never thought I had to talk about my feelings without filtering it through the gaze of my art, writing. It’s never my voice when it’s my art. It’s never “I”. It was and is still always (to a certain extent) we, they, someone else that is not me in whom I place my argument(s) in.

My art that is informed by my experiences, by the planets that orbit around me, were always shrouded in this elaborate mirage because I was too terrified of living, breathing, feeling. I was too terrified to say “I” because I did not know how to say “I” without calling myself selfish, narcissistic, perhaps even worthless. Vulnerability is not a sign of strength, it is weakness. “I” was vulnerability. “I” was a sign of frailty. I despised being fragile.

It was an amalgamation of things really. Chronic illness, the anger and fear that comes with that. Me screaming into the ether only to receive half baked advice and condescension in return. Learning that this world was built for someone that was… not me. Pain, so much of it. I wrote, terrified, about other people and me. But it wasn’t other people I was writing about. It was me and other people.

The way you intersect in my life is also the way I intersect in your life. Perhaps not the same. Perhaps in a wholly different manner. But we intersect in each other’s lives. You are as much of a story in my life as I am in yours. You cannot hate me for writing how you have changed my life. I cannot hate me for writing how you have changed my soul.