My 'M' size life

Do you know what the most committed thing in your life is? It's not your parents, friends, or lovers. It will always be your belly fat. The center of your mass, the middle section of your body, and the putative locus of your subconscious. Why am I subconsciously always aware of its mass, and why does it matter so much that most of my neural energy is spent on concealing its existence? My belly fat grew up with me. When I was small, it was small. Now that I am big, it's big too. It's big enough to hold my beer of thoughts about my middle-of-somewhere existence. My window always shows me life in real-time. It is the beginning of spring here, and every morning when I wake up and look outside, I see the branches more peachy in color with flowers I knew I had seen earlier but forgot. I forgot when they vanished. I only noticed when the roads were colored again with them. These flowers remind me of my forgotten dreams. Dreams that have come back to me, slowly, again. The idea of writing this blog came from the changing room of a mall I visited. I noticed that I have always chosen 'M' as my size. All my life till date, it has been M, and on that day, M did not fit me. I lived an M-size life, and now the M-size does not fit me. These times, you realize that it's not just about your body; it's about the M-size thoughts you held onto for so long. One of the perks of being raised in the middle class is you learn to value "things," be it anything from a fully worn-out piece of cloth to a friend who reminds you of the good parts of your childhood. We don't hear that song for the song; we hear it for 'that middle' part that stirs our sedimented soul. The middle then takes up the whole of your heart. Subconsciously I always knew that I had limited my potential more than anyone else ever did. Previously it was my own unawareness about what I really wanted in life, and now it's the unawareness about what life wants from me for real. I don't feel like an M anymore; it is slowly dawning on me that I am made for something big, something that only I have known underneath all the unknowns.

                                               The slow arrival of long-planted dreams has made life a little sweeter, just like the subtle sweetness of waking up from an evening nap, unable to recognize the confusion between dusk and dawn. I assign my present life as that sweet confusion between whether to brush up my skills for the day or to light up candles for the midnights to speak. The middle-class debate of whether to feel things deeply, let dreams breathe, or just behave is getting stronger. It's getting difficult to imagine an unartistic life, a life where the wind reach out to me through the language of leaves, where my feet gets healed from the cracks it never thought could be filled; where my nostrils pick up memories from the scent of everyday encounters; where I write something so unheard of that when you read it, you feel heard!...At the back of your mind resides a universe, one where you live a secret dating life. From the beginning, the girl that resides in that universe has been perfect. I like writing, while she is a bestselling author, I like singing, she is an adele of that universe. I enjoy raw dancing, that girl is on fire when she rocks her body. I give pep talks to myself when I am nervous, while she is a fluent TedX speaker. I can barely think of getting married while she is walking the aisle in a beautiful satin dress at a sunkissed beach. She has gorgeous skin, she has style, she eats healthy, she worksout, she is perfect. She is all in the mind, she is the roadblock of all my potentials. I am dating this perfect girl in my mind for so long, that I could never think beyond her. I could never think that the concept of perfection exists at the heart of ego . Perfection never lets you explore yourself, it always makes you adore something outside of you. Somone's eyelashes, someone's hair, someone's skin, someone's style, someone's something or the other that you have not felt only saw. The conditioning of not adoring the same things about yourself or not adoring yourself in general is how perfection has raised us.

                                                           The idea of being desirable to the family, to work, to friends, to the society, to the world dries our dreams. My vulnerabilities has slowly sewed my dreams, dreams that are beyond money and status, dreams that the perfect girl I am dating has lived since forever. The art of being vulnerable is usually maligned as a defect. Being vulnerable is different from being in tears. I always thought that I am my most vulnerable when I am hurt by a close one. I have had many such encounters with that kind of vulnerablity. But just like my size, my definition of being in painful softness has become bigger too. Today I am most vulnerable when I see  lotus flowers in a mini pond blooming in a shade of color only god knows. I see them and I want to become them. At that moment, I don't want a degree or a house or human beings, I only want to drink that color and become that. I feel similar when I touch grass or watch little birds drink from the dew drops; I feel so fulfilled that the world has discovered so many kinds of bread! You really need to know how mother nature works to know how to make soul satisfying breads. I mean what more does this world need after the bread. At the foundation of our work and dreams and the so called strive for being 'desirable' lies our imprinted hunger to eat all kinds of bread, meet people around the world and still bewilderly create a place to come back and lie down. I don't know what settling down in life really feels like but I live in a hostel and this space and this exact point of time feels like fulfillment. My hostel is the medium size fitted life between my family and future. It's a place that doesn't have my mom's kitchen and my dad's stories from work but it has me, the new strand of the semi-conservative existence. I don't get to share my bed, food, clothes, opinions with my sister anymore but somehow all my decisions have her in them, her looking upto me in them. I use to laugh a lot at home because of a monkey we raised but as it turns out I had to become my own brother to keep me happily going. My hostel is not where I work either. Most days it lives alone and only sees me in the night. The walls have my writings, the bowls have food cooked by me, there are unread books all over. There are piles of clothes on the sole chair I own, there are packets of ordered food, my freefalling hair dancing in circles, my unkept bed, coffee dried mugs, half drank bottle of water, bucket of unwashed clothes, an autopilot collection of zepto bags, my favorite shinchan poster and absolutely no one to point any of these things out. I like it when my room is clean just as much as when its a mess. I just feel relaxed coming back to it after a long day and become it. The reason this point of time feels enough is the fact that I somehow realize that I would never find something as personal as this room again. It's the space between my future and my roots, it's the medium size I know I will grow out of but for today and for tomorrow it is the basement of my dream of the bread. It has seen what my family hasn't seen, it has been what sometimes my friends haven't been, it reminds me that no matter how my day has gone, I would always sleep tight. Like a father it reminds me that I have to work to be strong and like a mother it feeds me with good health. This is the only place where my physical body as a women lives freely. I am neither bound by the pressure of my bra straps nor do I care if I am growing a moustache. It is the only place I get real freedom from the 'desirable body and mind'. It does not feel like home because I often miss home and crave seeing my family. It is not home for the daughters that are born but it's a home for the women they want to become. My hostel is the only place that's going to take me to places. So in the meanwhile it lets me see the entire city, the green mountains, the colourful skies, the satin clade moon and everything that life is made of. I know it protects me when I sleep just like it protects me from giving up on this women I am becoming. What is this middle part called? One where you are with yourself with few drops of time in your hand thinking why this feels enough. There is a journey lying ahead awaiting my baby steps towards it and there is a journey I have lived already and in the middle of this tussle lies my days in this hostel, days which feel enough, nights which feel well slept and people who make me laugh just like my brother. 

                                                Having bigger dreams comes with a regular encounter with your ruthless reality. We are never short of options and that's our tragedy but there are certain hints from the universe that have somehow not stopped whispering. Just like lovers, our dreams also demand us to fight with the world for them, to protect them and nurture them. Become so hopelessly romantic about your own existence that everything that you do becomes a creation. The perfect girl will always run for perfection while this girl in the hostel is running for her evolution that began from unhooking all her bras of the 'M' size life that she is growing out of. 

                                                          You never see the colors of all the flowers that bees lands on but you can taste them in a honey drop. You don't have to know what flowers will get you the honey just don't stop reaching out for them. Don't stop yourself from the joy of smelling them while you work on the nectar. My current flower is my hostel and it feels very settling when I come back to it. It is the small world of four walls where I fit perfectly. I hope you fit perfectly in yours too because if you do then I think you are settled in life!!!...