I have this thing..

I like keeping things that I can’t quite understand.

I once bought an old copy of La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus;
from a flea market in India for 50 Rupees.
It was in French,
a language I am still trying to learn.
The corners of the book were eaten by termites;
some bookworms probably left it for the other ones to enjoy it.

I once got a book of Haikus as a gift from my wife.
She got it from a little bookshop, from somewhere in Québec.
The book has Haikus in Japanese (Translated to French),
and it holds in its pages a hope that someday
I’ll understand all those words without the need of a translator;
I’ll understand all those emotions without the need of a language.

I once got caught in an endless cycle of thoughts.
It felt like a fever dream,
that showed me memories I’d never lived, places I never willed to visit,
people I never dared to meet, destinations I never knew the existence of.
And everything I failed to understand from it,
I kept, in the deepest corners of my mind,
alongside my love for the life I try to live,
for I really like to keep all things
that I can’t quite really understand.

Piano Man

Have you heard this song? “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday..”

I heard this song through some friend. He had a good collection of English songs, and he used to share those songs with me using “Bluetooth” when it was a very new thing. That friend probably would have downloaded the song from some random site that let people download songs. Not many people knew that it was piracy, because that friend probably had to pay to use the Internet on a computer at some cyber cafe. Anyway, this post is not about piracy. It’s specifically about the Piano Man track that I got from that friend.

When I heard the song for the first time, I felt like something was wrong. There’s a line that goes like “He says, ‘Son, can you play me a memory?'” The track that I had went something like “He says, ‘Son, can you, son, can you play me a memory?'” Yes! It had the “Son, can you” part twice in the song. And even though I felt something was wrong the first time I heard it, I didn’t have any other way to confirm if there was something actually wrong with it.

After years, when I listened to the Piano Man on youtube, I found it weird when the “So, can you” played for just once. It’s been years now. I have listened to the real thing for a thousand of times. And even after that my mind still sings that particular part twice.

That’s how conditioning works, right? We grow up learning a lot of things, right and wrong. We relearn. We unlearn too, but not as effectively. The hardwired lessons keep peeping at random times.

The mind just keep saying, “Son, can you, son can you play me a memory?”

Rain.. Rain..

I still love the rain.
There was a time when I hated the monsoon season. Then came a phase in my life when I started loving the monsoon. So much so that when it used to rain on my days off, I used to look out the window for hours. Years passed; I moved to a different country, and for the first time in my life, I saw it snowing. I loved it. It was like rain but slower, and more beautiful. I fell in love with the shape of a snowflake.

Yesterday, I was checking the weather app, and it showed it would rain today. And it did. I was home; I looked out the window; I kept looking at the sky. I loved it so much. My mind just came up with this one sentence, and I said it out loud. “I still love the rain.”

I have no idea why I said so. I haven’t stopped loving the rain since I started loving it. And yet I was surprised that I loved it.

I guess this post is just like a journal entry. That’s all!

(Now, I just can’t stop saying it again and again) I still love the rain. It’s beautiful!