When you have been used to working full time almost a decade, ending up suddenly with a lot of unstructured time is exhilarating as well as agonizing. Lack of routine seems almost criminal or sinful. With all your friends insanely busy at the high end career driven jobs, you begin feeling like a sloth, a tramp, a burden on the society. You perk up one moment; you despair the next. Not having to put up with a nasty email or working late hours on deadlines, is a relief, why am I not able to shake off that experience, I don’t know! Maybe I was lucky enough not to come across such behavior. I don’t know! Lying on your pajamas all day long is a relief. Putting up with random ambush of weird relatives or domestic problems isn’t. I lie down one moment and then that weird panic, emptiness hits me, makes my heart sink in the middle of waking up in my sleep, after waking up, falling to sleep, talking to my folks. And then I dash off…I dash off to kitchen, to try my hand on some recipe I saw in a blog. It excels sometimes; it flops at others. My mother doesn’t understand what makes me keep on trying as many as three dishes during the course of one day. It’s not the love of food, my under weight structure tells all. It’s just the need to keep my fingers busy so the mind not go in knots, anything to keep my 6 senses engaged all at once, to ride from one moment to another, so the emptiness wouldn’t suddenly catch and choke me, the sadness that I carry like a halo doesn’t drown me. In moments like these you are grateful for the tv, as it absolves you beyond the need of thinking, talking, interacting, responding; all the things you are precisely warned against. But I have always found TV series therapeutic. So I might have woken up late to what Sax and the City was all about, but now I am hooked. It makes sense to me – the need for intimacy and connection deep down – whether with our flings or friends, perpetually in the journey to find the significant others, filling our lives mean while with gadgets, clothes, shopping, coffee, booze, yadda yaada.
Coming back to friends – they understand that despite calling the valentines day a capitalist driven, pagan ritual, you do like to be thought off and remembered, just as a friend, even if you have been unlucky in love (many times). So they send you flowers through courier or a girl friend drops in with a choco cake. Or those who call whenever they sense that you are down. Or the random stray cat that befriends you and come by many times a day to have its belly rubbed. It’s these friends I am grateful for. It’s these intense cycles that help me reborn like a phoenix.
