I cannot wait for this shitty month to be over. You can tell how shitty the month is when you look up your calendar to see how many months to Christmas. Yep, I cannot wait for Christmas, and it’s just April. Sigh!

Let’s be honest this hasn’t been a great year for Agam, Tara and me so far. Born under the same stars (yeah we were born 9 days apart), Agam and my troughs and crests at work come together, of course personally our journeys are anyways intertwined. But these troughs are great because we both need each other equally. To lift us up from the rock bottoms. Of course Tara helps so much. All my twisted perspectives go for a toss the moment I am in her company.

But net net – we are both tired. Our vacation plans are screwed up. We have a new lifestyle to adopt with gluten out of the picture and we haven’t quite celebrated anything since the beginning of this year. It’s sigh after sigh, after sigh!

It really feels like everything around us is gloom and doom. But we continue to smile. To do what we can, and what we must, and keep rolling with the punches. Including all the doctor visits and the nutritionist appointments, the futile visa appointments.

Each time I put my existential questions to test I hope that I won’t have to deal with them again, and they take no time to surface back and haunt me. I feel like at a fundamental level, Agam and I have both failed to answer the larger question of who do we want to become. And until we find that we can never be at peace. Of course the wise will say, solving for that is what life is all about.

We watched the Brene Brown Netflix show last weekend. Although Agam was laughing at it in the beginning, she definitely stirred up something in both of us. (hahhaha .. born under the same stars syndrome)

I am certain this stir will cause some storm, in one of ours lives. I am so exhausted with my journey that I want to tell Agam to just go for it, and I will take a back seat and settle with mediocrity. Sigh! Again!

To kill the sighs I walked to Tara’s school after work today. It was nice to chat with the teachers. Hear about their day. I had nothing to share. I listened. It was so refreshing to see the kids playing and feel the spring breeze over my ears.

Tara and I decided that we want to walk to downtown from there. Of course Agam was certain she won’t walk all the way. But I trusted her. So we began what was the best 30minutes of my month so far.

Tara and I looked at the flowers blooming in people’s gardens. We talked about the trees around my house when I was growing up in Saharanpur. We talked about all the places I have lived, and why. She asked me about the flowers in my house while I was growing up. I told her, we never had a garden. She did not quite understand how that could be the case. And I hope she never has to understand it.

She asked me why I love walking. If it was to see the flowers? I replied yes, and the people and sounds of moving things, amidst the backdrop of nature. She started humming the tune from – “in the jungle the mighty jungle the lion sleeps tonight..” and we both started singing the jingle. With no fear of the environment around us, we joyfully sang and made it to downtown, where a worried Daddy awaited us.

A sushi dinner, a big bottle of cheap Sake, and Tara’s antics – were all that were needed for Agam and me to drop the baggage of our other lives and just enjoy the moment. Icing on the cake, our waiter’s name was Haruki.

I decided to walk back and enjoy the sunset skies. I sometimes feel like a character from a Haruki Murakami novel. Someone who tries so hard to be normal. And yet, for some strange reason, normal is just not what happens to me. Regrets keep haunting me and I keep searching for answers in all the wrong places. The only missing piece is the crazy sardine rains and the unexpected vanishing acts of the people around me. If only that was happening, I’d resign to my fate and curl up inside the pages and wait for my turn to be turned over. I just need that, to be turned over. Because I myself am incapable of turning the page over.

At this point I am certain that the sake has taken over and even though I could make a few thousands from the words that will come out of my mind, I’d rather not, and just return to my mediocrity. Perhaps it’s time to start celebrating that. At least that’s what I heard in my perf this week.