Hello, Goodbye

I haven't slept in over 300 years now so I have decided that I have a right to ramble on my own blog. So now that I turned 29 and I'm looking at the big year very squarely in the face, I have realised I've learnt a lot. So like all the insufferable bores in this world, I too have decided to share it with you, dear reader . 

It has been a strange month - full of goodbyes and hellos. I feel like I'm stuck with a cross of The Doors and The Beatles banging away in my head - 'Hello, I love you want you tell me your name. You say goodbye and I say hello...' stuff like that - very psychedelic even without the insomnia. 

Add insomnia and copious amounts of wine and pain-killers it's an achievement that I am standing or sitting. And that on two separate occasions I single-handedly brought down Bangalore International Airport. 

The first time with my loud sobbing that my little Light said he could "hear it in the loo, womans. Puh! He'll come back, da. Stop crying." And I could not at all. I almost stopped a passer-by who lit a cigarette to borrow one but stopped just in time. 

And there is lesson number one:

Just because you are grief-stricken you cannot terrorize people into relinquishing things that belong to them. 

The second instance was when I garlanded at the airport, the man who first claimed me as his wife in a welcome full of excited shrieks and crazy, mad laughter and really loud bridal make-up and clothes. "Everyone's looking, darling." "So when has that been an issue?" 

Lesson two was about how when you love someone, nothing ever really replaces them. And also that in two years...

In two years, it is possible to change - become less noisy, understand more without speaking much; have more people to love, less bitterness to share. In two years, it is possible to grow together living apart. In two years, accents can change but the essence of the language stays the same.

Tup di dup ti do.

I can drink like a fish and remain absolutely coherent - but God, when I am absolutely hammered, I simply cannot walk in a straight line. (And I didn't even need a Facebook quiz to realise this! How cool is that!)

I can talk myself out of pretty nearly anything - though I still can't swim. And it doesn't help that every time I put my head under water my mind starts chanting Eliot's Death by Water. Not pleasant, at all, darlings.

Marriage in India (perhaps everywhere; but I don't know about that) is a fucking joke. I get interests and requests from ball-less creatures who hide behind their mother or sister or father who tell them how to talk; how to dress; how to, may be, make sweet luvvu on the nuptial night. "Not there, kano, this side." Ergo - No, thank you to marriage. 

A line like "Please get in touch with me only if you can read, write, and speak good English" is incomprehensible to more than half the universe. The response typically is "Myself good boy with kind narture wanting butiful girl from desent family to spend the life with." But at least Good Boy is still talking about himself on his own and not letting mommee do the talking. 

A girl can be in love with more than three men at the same time and love them all equally and well. And have very satisfying relationships with each. Draupadi was so on to a good thing, it's not funny. Even if it was Kunti's idea. Lucky Draupadi!  

The only family that actually gives a fuck is the family you make through happy memories, shared laughter, nasty fights, bitter recriminations, and a lot of forgiving and coming together in tough times. The others are just fillers waiting to utter a sentence that typically begins with - How can you do that? and ends with pissing off hypocritical moral high-handedness. 

I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch thanks to Husband G and can say that the best lesson I learnt in all these years is that you only need one person to complete you and make you come alive and let you stay in love (because really being in love is just the bestest feeling ever). And that person is - You. Yourself. You. 

Sorry to go all Hallmark and Archies' cards on you so suddenly and without warning. But it's true. It says so on Hedwig's and Husband G's tattoo. 

So really at the end of a fairly traumatic month replete with heart pain and good health; debilitating sorrow and wild joy in equal measures, I've realised now that I am 29, I officially don't give a fuck. And so good-bye to those sweet ladies (and other such types) who are shocked and scandalized by my itsy-bitsy purple frocks and cleavage-revealing tops! Good-bye also to the notion of marriage and 'You are a girl, ma, you HAVE to adjust!' 

And hello there to living and life. And completing one self. And may be, just may be making a baby sometime in the future through unconventional but absolutely feel-right and feel-good methods with a really special man! 

So there.