I Am A Home

I am a home. One that you decorate carefully and with love. I am a home that you spend years to fill the walls with pictures of the places you've gone and the people you love.

I am a home where you lay down your finest foreign rugs on my hardwood floors so that the ground doesn't make your toes prickle when you take off your shoes, or come downstairs for your morning coffee.

I am not a summer rental, one where you go when the weather is warm and the breeze is cool and you feel like the best version of yourself. You cannot leave me all year to gather dust and to let the ants and mice crawl across my floors looking for the scraps and crumbs you carelessly left. You cannot throw your extra things here and leave them only to come get them when it is convenient for you. I am not extra storage, I am not where you hide your secrets and the things you wish you had not done or said. I am not where you get extra drunk off warm beer and high off of the salt in the air or the rain on the porch. I am not the stories you tell about the weekends you spent with me, how they made you feel like you were not a part of the world for a while, and that coming back to "real life" always felt nice in the end.

I am not your cabin in the woods. I am not sitting around with no one for company hoping that one day you may pull up a dirt path and see me again. I will not wait to hear you hoot and holler about how long it has been, for you to run your fingers across me and to say, "You feel just the same as the last time I was here." I am not your retreat from how hectic life may get. I am not your dead zone so that calls may not go in or out and you can pretend that no one else exists but you and me and the quietness of the night. I am not here so that you can listen to birds chirp in the morning and feel the warmth of the sun on the floors when you've slept in a little too long.

I am a home. I am always here for you after a long day and you are here for me when the winds are howling outside and the thunder is crashing and there is nowhere else you can imagine being but here with me. I am a home where the roof leaks and you get up on your ladder that is stashed somewhere where cobwebs are aplenty and you find the holes and you patch them.

I am a home that does not asked to be taken care of but expects to be taken care of because my well being is yours. I am a home.

I am not a hotel room that creates the vague notion of home but never feels like home.

I am a home that waits for you to come back each day. You know my inner workings, where there are cracks in the wall and nicks on the floor, where the floorboards creak, and which light switches appear to have no purpose. You know that when it is cold out that I creak and groan and that in the summer the door is harder to close because I demand the breeze and the sunlight. I am where you wake up each day and when you are gone, I am where you long to be. I am not an escape from your life. I am everything you've built, the reason you've come this far, and the will to go on.

No One Likes a Girl In Love

You see the thing about being in love is, no one likes a girl in love.

She is soft and sappy and coos and sighs when there seems to be no reason to.

She will be sitting on the train and you're minding your business sitting next to her when you hear a big inhale and long, breathy sigh with her fist propping her head up with her elbow on her knee and you don't know what she's looking at.

No one likes a girl in love.

She doesn't walk through the streets, she dances. She one, two steps as you tango back and forth trying to pass her and you just want her out of your way but she can't see you. She was just shy of walking straight into you before the clouds in her eyes fell to the wayside long enough to realize that other people exist around her.

No one likes a girl in love because during class she tap tap taps her feet to a song that no one else can hear. She perks for a moment like a dog hearing footsteps outside the front door and looks at you with burning curiosity in her eyes and you roll yours because you won't give her the answer to the question she just missed because she was too busy daydreaming. But instead she says, "Do you know the name of that song? The one that goes..." and she la la la's until she giggles and waves her hand, batting away the notes in the air and the question itself. She says, "Never mind, I heard it in a bar when..." and she laughs again and says "Never mind."

No one likes a girl in love.

As she's waltzing through life she seems to look too long at the faces around her telling herself, "I swear they're all familiar." And it's because you have his eyes, or she walks with a slight bend in her back the way he does, and that person laughs as low as he does and she finds him everywhere and swears the only reason other people exist is to remind her of him.

No one likes a girl in love, except the girl in love because she puts on a dress that makes her feel as weightless as she does when she's with him. And she bats her eyelashes in the mirror because he said that he loves her big brown eyes. She temporarily lets go of the present to live in a memory she keeps in her pocket for rainy days. She thinks about all of the things about herself that some people find hard to deal with, but someone loves anyway and it makes it easier for her to love them too.

No likes a girl in love except the girl in love and the person she has the pleasure of being in love with.

Stand Clear

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

How do people navigate through these ratholes? Why is everyone staring at me?

I want to look up but if I do I may catch the eyes of someone. Would that be too aggressive? Do people make eye contact here?

Should I stand? I should stand. Were these tracks laid on gravel? I'm going to fall. I am going to fall on this woman in scrubs next to me and she looks like she just ended a 10 hour shift. Or is about to start one. Either way. Don't fall on her.

*Errrrrkkkk* Is it safe to be moving this fast?

Sorry, excuse me, I didn't mean to-- haha... I'm just getting used to---sorry.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

I'm going to sit. It's bold. But I am going to sit. There are two seats right there.

It is fine.

Should I leave a space between me and this person?

Yeah, I should. I should respect their space.

Ok, or you could take that seat, I didn't just elbow through four people to get it. It's fine. You didn't see me. It's fine.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

I'm tired. Everything is exhausting. Looking at you people is exhausting.

Why are you looking at me? Why did you smile at me?

Now I don't know if I should smile back. I'll smile back. It's fine.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

Don't look at me.

I don't know who gave you permission to stand this close to me, but I revoke that approval. Take two steps back.

Why is your arm over my head to hold the bar? There is space for you to put your arm down next to mine. I am not that short. You are not that tall.

Get your armpit off my damn head.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

A seat! A seat!

Is that old woman going for it? Do I care?

I do care...

No. No I don't care. If I can beat her to it, it's mine.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

I just won't make eye contact. If I don't see her, she doesn't see me.

Old lady in front of me? What? Giant octopus? What?

Seamless ad. So funny, hahaha, yes Seamless, dying and moving to Westchester and owning a Volvo are equivalents!

What old lady?

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

She got off one stop later, anyway, she didn't even need the seat.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

Why do so many people live in this city? It should just be me here.

Me and like 500 other people maximum, and that's it. And those people would just be here so I can live normally and without too much hassle.

An MTA guy, a grocery person, a bodega guy, a taxi guy, a bartender, and me.

This is not the beginning of a joke. Sorry, that was misleading.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

Almost home.
Almost home.
Almost home.

Aaaand did you just sneeze on me?

Almosthomealmosthomealmosthomealmosthomealmosthomealmosthomealmosthome.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing doors please.

Home.

I just have to turn the keys and walk five feet and--

is my roommate trying to talk to me right now? No. Sorry.

*Ding* Stand clear of the closing door please.

Breaking & Reshaping the Power of Language

A lot of people, friends both past and present, people I have not seen or spoken to in years, people who have moved miles away, have thanked me for sharing my thoughts. That in and of itself has been amazing to me. They have thanked me for writing and for being "eloquent" and speaking and writing with dignity. And for that I thank them.

People have reached out to tell me that they appreciate that I can express myself (usually) without getting emotional, for making clear sense, and for opening their eyes.

It is of course nice to know that I have made slight if even somewhat negligible changes in the way people view certain things.

But to my friends who compliment my language and say that they themselves cannot express their thoughts in "the way I can", I say do it anyway.

Because the fact of the matter is that I speak in fragments, I have comma splices all over the place, I misuse words, I stutter, my voice cracks, and utterly I am human. But the very cool thing about language, especially a language like English which constantly borrows from other languages and evolves pretty much daily if not more frequently, is that it is not the execution but the content that matters.

I would hate for anyone to think that I am an exemplary writer or speaker. Because the fact of the matter is that I can talk like this. Or I can talk like this:

Language changes. Language doesnt matter; grammar doesnt matter; ur words matter; wht u r trying to say matters. My accent dsnt take away from wht i am sayin. If u can back up wht u r sayin with facts w/ heart w. passion w. knowledge it dznt matter how u type or how u speak

speak in run on sents, let ppl know where u come from with ur language. that is ok. dont let ppl tell u tht u r "uneducated" bc "You cannot convey your thoughts with eloquence and proper diction as a learned man would."

F U C K that!

I LOVE language! I love English. I love the language my parents speak, Konkoni, I love the broken English my parents sometimes use because they were born and raised in another country!! And guess what?! If you are a first generation child and you learned English from your parents or from your aunts and uncles or other people who were foreign born who try to grasp the complex intricacies of English and sometimes you conjugate a verb wrong, DON'T be defeated by it!

And if someone says that they cannot understand you. Speak slower. Ask them what they do not understand. That is okay! Sometimes I speak to third or fourth-generation Americans who think their language is so advanced but guess what? Their language is so exclusive, so erudite, that most people don't know what the heck they are trying to say!

That is NOT the point of language. Plain and simple the point of language is to communicate. If you cannot communicate with me because you are using archaic words to sound fancy and educated, you are really doing the opposite! I am not impressed by your extensive vocabulary unless you can explain what the word means to me if I ask. And a lot of people can't! Do you see what I did before? I used the word "erudite." Outside the context of some news articles and books and I suppose "intellectuals" (aka people who have the privilege to access higher education) who really uses the word erudite?

Remember those "stupid" English homework assignments you used to get that made you write your vocabulary words in "context sentences"? They are actually not so stupid. When you use certain words, it is important to use them in context because language is not about you or your ego or you showing off your amazing linguistic abilities. It is about your audience. Language is always about your audience. People need to understand what the heck you are trying to say!

And most importantly, if some ignoramus tells you that "This is America! Learn the language properly." I want you to viciously cackle in their face for at least 30 seconds. Then I want you to google "official language of the U.S." or show them this:

And yes! I did cite wikipedia! If you have issues with it, then you can look at the hundreds of thousands of other websites that say the exact same thing in a more superfluous manner. Wikipedia is concise, ok? I like that.

If those people, however, once again maintain their hard-headedness, then I want you to tell them this:

"English is the language of England. Why should I maintain a language that oppressed not only the people of this country hundreds of years ago, but many other countries including countries in Asia, Africa, & South America (i.e. pretty much every conceivable place they could get their grubby, imperialist, racist hands on)? Why should I carry on the tradition of maintaining their language when the whole point of them implementing it was to make the country they were occupying more like them?" Tell them that you are not in the business of carrying on imperialist tradition and if they are, they need to stop celebrating the 4th of July and if they so wish they can identify as a supporter of the continuation of imperialism and oppression.**

Look, I'll say it again. I love language. I know this post will aggravate many a language enthusiast. They will say "We need to preserve English as it is because it is an art form! There are rules to language and you can only break those rules when you know what they are and the proper way to break them otherwise you defeat the point of many writing techniques." And to them I say, "Ok.......But art changes. And the way I speak and write is art. And to say that my misuse of certain words or use of slang is to say that when Shakespeare invented the word 'bedroom' he was really defecating on language."

So, I guess what I am trying to say is that if you want to write, write! If people insult you for the way that you speak, then there are only a few reasons for it and in summation it is probably one or more of these:

1. I don't understand the way you speak, and am too afraid to ask you to clarify because I don't want to look dated
2. I only speak in airy, contentless words that make me sound smart, but in reality I am almost never saying anything of value
3. I am insecure that language will continue to evolve in forms that I cannot learn from college/mainstream books & I'm too arrogant to talk to people from different socio-economic statuses, learn about the sources of the way you speak, and therefore can only understand people who are as arrogant as me
4. GADLHDF A U HAVE A N ACCENT???¿¿ I HAVE NVR LEFT MI HOMETOWN OR INTERACTED WITH PPL LIKE U BEFORE I AM SCARED FOREIGNER PLS LEARN THE LANGUAGE!!!¡¡¡¡¡

So speak and write on my friends! If you know what you are talking about and you have a point then you should have no real trouble communicating that message.

**Disclaimer: If you say that to someone "important" like your boss or on an interview at a job, I cannot guarantee that it will go well, but I will totally give you a high five, tell you that you're awesome at least 12 times a year, and will take you out for lunch.

Hundreds of Worlds

I don't know how you can leave me like this. I don't know how you can pretend that this is all normal, like time apart is immaterial.

Everyday that I wake up I wish I could fall back asleep and live in another world for a while. One where I am so strong, like you expect me to be. One where I am invincible, nothing can hurt me. Where the demons can get so close, stare at me with glaring eyes, bear their teeth at me, but I laugh in their faces because they cannot touch me.

It's so much easier to live in a world like that. The one that you live in. Where 90 days is as long as 90 seconds and the giant cerulean monster that constantly threatens to swallow you is nothing but your queer pet, tamed by your mere command.

I want to live in the world you live in. I want to feel nothing. I want to live in a world without "goodbye"s or "I miss you"s. One where they are only spoken when your body can find the energy to provoke your vocal chords to find the power to vibrate.

I want to live in the world where I understand you. One where you do not let me cry in bed one day and forbid it the next. One where you do not recoil from my touch, take my hand in yours for a few moments only to drop it like a child that has lost interest in walking her dog. Find me the world you live in, where your ship turns skywards and the sheer force of your will and apathy sends you through the layers of the atmosphere. I want to go with you. Let me join you while you cruise through the unpaved antigravity roads. I want to look down on the rest of the world and laugh too.

Let's find a barren planet and promise everyone that we will return one day. Let's promise lands so fertile that there is no need to replant what we take. Let's promise time that stands still like we've discovered the Fountain of Youth. Let's call our space ship The Ponce de Leon. Let's crash it.

Allow me to hurt you and I promise I won't. Grant me permission to feel something and feel it with me. We don't have to feel it for long. Let's get caught in the doldrums of life and know that we can create our own winds if we need to. Let's leave. Let's fly, walk, cruise to lands and pretend we are conquerors. Let our flags be the footprints we leave in the soil. Let our treasures be the leaves we find in our hair after rolling around in the earth. Let's stay. Don't move. Let's be present. Let's stand at attention. Let's stand at disregard.

Let words be words. Let them be nothing more. Let's not speak. Let's create a language of our own where we trace lines across the landscapes of our bodies. Let words be what our lips do. Let love be what our lips do. Let's pretend. Let's never leave the pretending. Let's kill our obligations with the sword of adolescence. Let's walk from east to west. Let us be underdressed and overtired. Let's never eat anything but a few bites of Italian food in an ambience that does not match our aesthetic.

Let's cry. Let's never cry again. Let's cry some more. Let weakness be our strength. Let us be human. Let's not deny. Let's not pretend. Let's never pretend again. Let's be who we are. Let me know who you are. Let me love you for it. Let it be more than words we speak before we shed our layers. Let it be real. Let me wait for you. Let me feel. Let it be real.

Priya

What Yoga Has Taught Me

I've been practicing yoga for almost a year now and it is the one physical activity I've ever participated in that I've actually enjoyed. Ever since kindergarten physical fitness tests when we had to do the bar hang/pull ups, I pretty much resented any and all sports because I fell from the bar the second they took the chair out from under me.

The rules to soccer, football, and lacrosse either confused or completely disinterested me. But I think this is because I was never able to mentally take anything away from these things (even though so many other people can!). Then a year ago, I decided to sign up for a yoga class, after never even being able to touch my toes. That was my main goal: to touch my toes. So here I am a year later, a toe-touching yogi who has found something in her practice far beyond balance postures and savasanas.

1. If you can breathe through it, it will not defeat you.
   
   It seems like simple enough advice, but it's become so important to me in every aspect of life. Sometimes there are these big daunting things that we have to do, whether it be a chair pose, running for miles, or going through a major life change. In practice, during the more difficult postures, the teacher will sometimes chime in and ask, "Are any of you breathing?" and you exhale and realize that you don't know how long you'd been holding your breath. I think sometimes when we get caught up in the whirlwind of life, or a difficult posture, you become so focused on beating it, that it starts to defeat you. It has taken over your thoughts and you forget to do something as simple as breathe.
   
   
2. If you lose your breath, stop.
   
   I've noticed a commonality among people my age and that is, we do not stop. We are so afraid of looking weak that we forget that weakness is human. In yoga, the moment you start panting, you are expected to stop. You are not meant to lose your breath in that way. You should push yourself to your limits, you should try to push past your limits, but you should not kill yourself to do these things.
   
   At the gym the other day, I was running on the treadmill next to this girl who had been running before I got there. After a while of running, I noticed that she was starting to slip and could not keep up with her pace. I saw she was looking at the speed and incline on my machine and she began grasping for the treadmill handles to pull herself to the front to keep going. It looked like her face was going to implode. Life is not meant to be like this. We are not in competition with one another. You should not battle your body. When your breath and your body says stop, it is only because it knows best, not because it is challenging you.
   
   
3. Know the difference between mind and body.
   
   There's a huge difference between being in a tough posture or position and thinking to yourself, "I can't do this" and feeling your legs start to give out. It seems like a simple distinction, but it really is not. You can beat your mind and your thoughts. You should not try to beat your body. It is good to see what you can and cannot do and to challenge yourself because sometimes the biggest thing defeating our efforts is our mind. When we do balance postures in yoga, you often find out that it is not your legs or arms giving out on you but your thoughts distracting your body from the task at hand. Which leads us to...
   
   
4. You are a mountain and your thoughts are clouds.
   
   Mountains do not stop being mountains when a cloud passes by it. We cannot be affected by our thoughts all the time. Sometimes we have to acknowledge the thought for the moment, and let it pass as it is meant to. When we hang on to the things we think about too much, you begin to lose yourself and become wrapped up in something that in all actuality is not important.
   
   
5. Before you move an inch, make sure you are solid in your foundation.
   
   When entering into poses that require standing on one leg or one hand or what have you, we are taught that we must feel the strength in the foundation before we move. Before we even pick up one leg, we shift all the weight into the other and begin slowly moving inch by inch. I think this is so important. How often do we commit to doing something or try to do something only to realize later that we were just not ready for it yet? If you are not ready for something, it is in your best interest to either take it slowly or simply accept that you aren't ready for it. This is not a loss. This is not a weakness. This is a major triumph, a strength in knowing who you are and what you are capable of in this present moment.
   
   
6. You are not the you from yesterday or what you will be tomorrow, you are who you are now.
   
   When we do something today, we should not hold ourselves to the expectations of our yesterdays. What happened to us yesterday, what we were able or not able to do yesterday does not define us today, and does not define us at this present moment. Just in the way that we have our off days mentally, our body has its off days as well. Some things feel sticky or tight that felt loose and strong yesterday or vice versa. Our body changes everyday and it is our responsibility to respect those changes and to not get angry or frustrated when sometimes those changes delay our progression. You'll find much more peace and ability when you work with your body instead of against it.
   
   
7. When you are ready to do it, commit fully to being vulnerable.
   
   Take things slowly when you have to, but there must come a point when you are ready and when this time comes, you have to let go of the fear. There are so many challenging postures in yoga that include being susceptible to falling. It's scary, we want to protect ourselves always. But without releasing and without becoming susceptible to failure, we cannot know what we are capable of succeeding in.
   
   
8. It's called a "practice" for a reason.
   
   There are things in life you are not meant to ever master. There are things that you can get really, really, really good at, but that does not make you a master. If it is something that you are passionate about, you should always work under the assumption that you are still a beginner with so much to learn and with so much room to progress. With this mindset, we can let go of arrogance that may come in the way of getting even better.
   
   
9. Smile!
   
   When you are in discomfort, it should not show through on your face because that is an indication that your thoughts are adversely affecting you or that you are simply hurting yourself. But if it's the former, smack a smile on your face. It's kind of strange how much better that can make the situation. Whenever we're doing deep lunges or holding planks for a long time, our teacher will sometimes ask, "Are you making a face that would scare a small child right now?" because carrying the tension in your face does not make your burden any lighter. Inhale, exhale, lighten your load if you need to, but do not grimace. You are meant to enjoy your practice, your life.

Good vibes as always,

Priya

To Carter

I can't stop writing about you. You're quickly filling the pages of my journal. I take it on the train with me hoping that the sound of steel grinding against itself will be loud enough to drown you out of my thoughts for a second, but ironically you quiet that noise. And when it's quiet, you're all I hear.

Some nights, just before I'm falling asleep, I'll roll over to my left and expect to see you taking up half of my bed and taking up way more than half of my sheets. And when you're not there, I imagine you are. Your cloudy gray eyes starting to be veiled by heavy eyelids threatening to shut out the rest of the world, myself included, until they part again the next morning. But just before that happens, you put your arm around me and you say "C'mere" because you just know. You always know somehow, exactly what I'm thinking and what I need at that moment. You make me laugh, you give me space when I need it, you challenge me, you hold my hand, you torture me endlessly, you finish my sentences and sometimes even speak my thoughts just as I'm thinking them.

That scares me a lot, Carter. I wrote an entire post on how I don't believe in soul mates, about how even though you're everything and more to me, I still couldn't fathom the idea of there being only one person for each human being in this world. I wrote about how I won't succumb to the idea of "destiny" and I think you'd agree with me on that. But I had to delete it because everyday you make me question if maybe it's not that I don't believe in soul mates, but that I've just been defining the concept wrong. 

Do you remember, when we had been only dating for maybe 2-2 and a half months tops, and I mentioned I was going to Starbucks, never once mentioning what I was getting, but you just knew? And I asked how you knew and you said, "Oh well, I just know you that well." And maybe it's an insignificant thing in the grand scheme of things, my Starbucks drink order. Or maybe the detail in itself is insignificant, but the fact that you knew, or at the very least took the time to pay attention, is significant.

I'm not a believer in destiny or fate. I don't think we happened because of some cosmic quest that we are both embarking on that led us here. But there are a lot of times when I have to reflect on the grand design of our journey. Something like the butterfly effect, but closer to the watchmaker. Have you heard about that? It's about how if you were to find a watch, just somewhere in nature, you would have to assume that someone made it, because everything works so intricately and all the pieces are so deliberate, that it couldn't have just come into being.

It feels like that with us. I ask myself if all of life feels that way, if everything feels like the steps I took to get there were deliberate like the tiny cogs in a watch. But they don't. They don't feel as significant as Us. When I think about how I could've been in Connecticut right now, or California, or that you could be in Florida, or North Carolina, or anywhere in the world, but we're not... When I think about how you could've been just like the rest and moved on to some other girl. When I think about us all the way back in October, sitting in a bar watching Ax Cop, and laughing about God knows what. Do you even remember what we were talking about, cause I sure don't. When I think about the moment just before we first kissed and how I remember that more clearly than almost anything else we did that night because I swear that moment lasted for a century... When I leaned forward to rest against the bar and you followed me there and I just had to look at you, at those stormy gray eyes and I leaned in and you met me halfway, that was it, Carter. That moment, especially in hindsight, makes me think there's a watchmaker. That all these little things that could have happened, that would've left us as two separate entities, as we were before October 11, they're infinite. And the things that led us to each other are so specific, almost unlikely... Anything could have happened. You could have been anyone. But you're not, not to me at least.

I never thought I'd meet someone who would want to watch the cooking channel with me. Or someone who would walk 20 blocks in the rain with me. Or someone who would answer all my drunk calls. Or someone who could watch me fall apart for almost no reason at all, and would not only want to put me back together, but knew just how. Or someone who I could pee and barf in front of who would still call me beautiful just the same. Or God, just the way you look at me, someone who would look at me like the way you look at me. I thought I'd be lucky to find one or two of those things in someone. But you're all of that. And more, I could go on forever, really. All those tiny little cogs turning inside of you, making you Carter, my Carter, I can't believe it's a coincidence.

There's no way.

I don't know about soul mates. I don't know if I ever will believe in soul mates. The world is too big. Do you think about that? Maybe when you're out at sea and you can't see anything past the horizon but blue. But what I don't know is even more vast than the sea, so I'll get to what I do know. I do know you're my best friend. I know that I toe the very fine line between falling more in love with you everyday and not knowing how there's any more room in my tiny-fist sized heart. I know that whenever I'm with you it feels kind of familiar, like maybe I dreamed that this happened before, or that it happened in a past life and we're meeting again in this life. I know that I don't know what I'm trying to say. I know that doesn't matter because I could ramble forever, never having a point and you'd probably still get what I'm saying. And I know I love you. That's all I know, Carter. I'm okay not knowing the rest, as long as I get to figure some of the rest of it out with you.