sidewalk scribbling

It felt really good to step outside and not freeze. And it was even more liberating to be able to take off my coat and sit under the open sky – I realized I hadn’t been able to do that in around five months.  I turned my face up towards the sun and felt a strange, almost foreign sensation … warmth, almost heat, really, almost enough to want to turn my face away but I didn’t because it had been SO LONG since I felt that! It was truly a beautiful day – a whopping 16 °C.  Pretty much the same temperature I would whine about in September when we initially arrived in England.  How we adapt and forget and then remember again… the mystery of the human brain. Memory can be quite erratic, faulty, like a sieve really, things slipping through and disappearing.  Images stick much better than sensations like pain.  That’s why women have more than one baby – (I read that or saw that somewhere – can’t remember exactly … see what I did there?), because they forg...

First, it is just the thought, a fledging plan scribbled inside a notebook or a pastel image that reflects on the back of your eyelids when you close your eyes – toes digging into soft, warm sand … a deep breath in to inhale the fragrance of cold mountain air tinged with the scent of tea leaves … the tinkle of ice in a glass of pink lemonade as you sit on patchy grass watching the sun set behind a lake … Then it’s actually living out your plans, stepping into museums you’ve read reviews about or getting lost on your way somewhere and stumbling into something new … And finally, it’s the memories that make you smile on a gloomy Monday or while you stare out through the dusty blinds on your window, making you forget your itchy throat and your runny nose, dimming the fluey-head ache and making you think how fortunate you are to take time out for travel. Travelling is definitely one of the best ways to spend your money –experiences are worth more and they last longer than mate...

From where I’m standing Right now, It’s not really clear; I see some clouds And a grey fog Perhaps I can lean over And draw Some silver linings Around The dark A box of crayons Always by your side Reds and blues and greens And the brightest yellow And while it may be Too easy To let the box drop And drown In the gray It might be better To lean over And draw silver Around The dark. Hello, new year, another year. I think at some point I stopped owning the years – you know, how when we were younger and in school, we’d start off the new year by always writing down last year in the blue and red margins of our notebooks – but then eventually, we’d grow used to the actual date and our margins would stop being all smudgy.  For some reason, now when another year steamrolls into me, there are two thoughts that come one after the other (like a race between two close runners, with one leading and then the other overtaking and you don’t know wh...

September 28 Tara sat in the armchair by her bedroom window, unable to fall asleep.  The evening had slipped into night, exchanging her lavender gown for a black velvet cloak, switching on tiny lamps in the sky because she is afraid of the dark, nudging the moon with her toe, slowly rolling it to the top, from where it shone whitely onto Tara’s window, where she sat with her insomnia in her lap. The silence stands just behind her, softly breathing melancholy thoughts into her ears, like a selfish lover whose love has atrophied into jealousy and insanity, no longer warm and comforting, instead distant, foreign, painful because of the memory of their closeness that now taunts. It is when her house falls quiet and the neighborhood too crawls into bed, when the eagles are swaying in their sleep on tall coconut trees, when the crickets have exhausted all conversation, it is in the blaring quiet of the deep night that Tara’s insomnia sidles out from under her bed and comes ...