So there’s this person I often keep referring to as the spark behind me finding my writer persona. I call him Mr. Unattainable. He used to be my teenage muse, the love of my life, the one I couldn’t have, the one who was ideal…the first true love. Now, twelve years later, he’s a mere silhouette under whose shadow I took refuge as a child & found my way to one of my core identity markers today…writing. ‘Wacky Figments’ is the product of that futile love, the countless teen tears & that love that I know to be the purest love I’ve ever felt. The innocence & selflessness made it so powerful that I didn’t even need the love of the other to feel whole. I was in it for myself. These days, we mostly chase an idea of love, one of convenience, one that checks our filters & those of our family. I know for a fact that Mr. Unattainable is not my kinda guy, I’d never be attracted to him as an adult, but my fourteen-year-old self could die for him. The problem is, she still lives in me, & she comes to life whenever she hears two songs—the one he was listening to on the first day we met & the one I was listening to (on loop) when he tied the knot earlier this year.
I’m currently aboard a train, a short ride, off to be with my adulthood love…you know, the stable, sensible, sweet & reliable kind. The love that makes you feel seen and sleep like a baby, the love that needs no filters, because you’re truly just one unit. The love that you take home to your parents, the love that finds a way to lift you up when you know there’s nothing or no one that can help you from drowning. But as I sit in this isolated train compartment in an air-conditioned coach on a cold evening & find peace in the slow rhythm of familiar songs, up comes a song the music of which is enough to transport me back in time…to that fateful day when I was destined to chase a shadow that I was never to see in light.
‘Nilanjana’ is an Assamese song sung by Shankuraj Konwar and Kadambari Kashyap and composed by Konwar himself [Listen here]. The song begins:
কল্পনা মোৰ কল্পনাৰ তুমি আকাৰ
আল্পনাতে, আল্পনাত তুমি সাকাৰ
দুৰ্বল ৰাতি মোৰ সাহসী হ'ল
পিয়াসী তৰাৰ স'তে সাৰথী হ'ল আকাশীগংগা
which can be understood as:
You are the shape that my imagination has taken—the embodiment of my thoughts.
Within dreams, you come alive—you take a real, tangible form in my dreamscape.
A night that once felt weak or fearful now turns bold and courageous.
The longing stars in the sky found guidance or companionship in the Milky Way, as if the vastness of the galaxy became their charioteer or guide.
[Interpretation by ChatGPT]
I fell in love with this song on that tragic night when the bitter crush from yore was to enter his new life in another city while I was to watch their photos on social media with my girlfriends. I was sad-drinking; we had starry lights on the ceiling as we lazily lay on the warm floor of our room.
Nilanjana begins with trippy music. I don’t know if it was the lights, the alcohol, the suppressed pain & hopes of my younger self, or this godforsaken song, but that night I listened to this song & related to the voice singing it. The lyrics describe the guy’s lover girl as a weak figment of his imagination that becomes his reality in the most surreal way. I guess it was a combination of everything, but this song takes me back to that very difficult week of my life when I struggled to understand why I felt pain when in reality there was no hope of ever having that person in my life. I mean, I got my closure years before this day. But I think our unhealed wounds come to the surface sooner or later. Suppressed anger & grief often find the ugliest outlets. Mine was in the form of this beautiful song that will now be etched in my heart as the song from his wedding & the very difficult week I spent half PMSing & half feeling pity for my 14-year-old version’s unrequited love.
Now Nilanjana plays again, bringing him back, but not quiet. But this pseudo-dramatic phase of life gave me the gift of words, and that’s the second part of this post. Earlier today, while on one of my many pee-breaks at work (apologies for TMI), I did an ultra-quick recap of my week. It being Friday meant a reflection of life from Monday-Friday would be nice, & I realized how mechanical, frustrating, draining, weakening & miserable this week has been. I have been juggling way too many dramatic things at work & in my head, & this 90-second walk to the washroom brought all this back to my head along with the realization that words are both my friends & foe.
Lately, I’ve realized that just like a coin has two sides, life has its ups and downs, and a day has brightness & darkness, so also there’s a good vs. evil equation attached to other things in life, like our love for something or someone. In this case, my love for words. They say that brevity is the soul of wit or something to that effect. Sadly, I’m neither witty nor brief. I guess it’s because I’m not the latter that I couldn’t be the former, but anyway, you get the idea. I’m someone who types paragraphs when 2-3 words suffice, prefers long, elaborate notes & letters & just anything that requires me to be wordy. Give me a 500-word limit & I’m likely to come back with another 1000. That’s just who I am. This problem of over-explaining & over-sharing has often led me to problems in my personal life. But because I’m a chill girl who doesn’t blame herself for anything & deals with consequences of her shit very maturely, I never learned the lesson these episodes of over-sharing were meant to teach me. I sat on the first bench of this life lesson & managed to miss the whole point (the lack of wit explained!).
Anyway, while this wordiness was hitherto causing minor havoc in my life, it began causing hurricanes of problems in my professional life recently. And there is only one rule in my life: I can do WHATEVER in life, but NOTHING that harms my work life. That has been my motto since the first standard. And the chill girl in me becomes a crazy womaaannn when she messes up the professional bit.
So, because of a couple of messes created at work by my lack of better sense while framing sentences and letters, I attracted unnecessary attention my way. While the issues now stand resolved, the over-critical self is hard to forgive & forget. Ever since these episodes, I feel like I’ve been restricting myself from interacting with people on the professional front, constantly fearing another mess that my words might lead to. They say that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I want my pen to be mighty in my creative posts, never to become a burden in life. Getting a glimpse of the other side of my pen has left me scared & jittery, & I'm still recovering from whatever it is that I had to feel. I don’t exactly remember why I thought this was an important idea to share in this post.
I guess I wanted nostalgia to unfold in more ways than one.
I’ll go back to Nilanjana now. See you later!
