My epiphanies are sprinkled and they remain few and far between. Mainly because when I have an epiphany, the one that should follow about recording them never seems to make it's way through. Rest assured, I'm plagued with guilt about not having written. Plagued. No, I'm going to rephrase that. I have written. I just haven't blogged. I love how that word is a verb now. I love how my mind sidetracks and derails and refuses to come back home to me. I love streams of consciousness. Only when they're not coming from Virginia Woolf. I love that I can still write. Speaking of streams of consciousness, here's a word from a person sitting in my head. She's been there for a while. I hope whoever stumbles across this piece finds something worth their while for reading.

Red Brick Walls

I think I dropped something a while ago. I don’t know how it could have fallen out of my hands – I’d held on to it so tightly. I don’t understand. I think I had taken my hand out of my pocket to touch the wall. I just love red bricks, don’t you? I just love red bricks. I just love the way the grain crumbles on to my fingers and how I can walk away with a little bit of the wall with me when I leave. I like to leave walls a little less than the way I had found them. See, I never know when a wall is a shelter or a barrier. I never really know. I don’t like walls very much. They stand between people, don’t they? Don’t they? Don’t they put distances between people seem much wider than they really are? I think they make people rude, the way they stand next to the walls, hugging them with their ears glued on to them, listening in on moments in every one else’s lives. How hard would it be to knock on a door? To press your face against a window? You know, just for fun? Just to make someone laugh? Just to make someone laugh. I like laughing. Laughing is fun. It’s joyous. It implies carelessness, to some extent anyway. You know how you can bubble over with joy when you’re walking barefoot in the sand? You know, with a glass of wine in one hand, and your fingers intertwined with the other.

I don’t like walls much. They separate hands that should touch. But I like to take walls with me. They’re good against the wind, you know? Especially the cold wind that leaves you feeling so numb that you forget you’re actually hurting. So I just close my eyes against the cold wind. And then everything disappears. You know, when I close my eyes, I feel needles pressing against my skin, but that’s not all they do. The needles go through my skin, I think. They pierce me and then dangle off the other side to keep reminding me how much they should hurt me at every moment that I feel them. Wait, don’t drop my hands just yet. They feel so empty since I lost what I was holding. I can’t see them anymore. Of course I can’t. My eyes are closed. But I have to close my eyes, you know. Just to shield them against the bright light that comes streaming through this window right here.

It’s very strange that such a small window with so many bars can let so much light in. But I suppose it’s so bright because these walls are so white. There’s nothing on my walls here. When I was at home, I would have a painting hanging off every wall so they could never look just the same to me. Walls can have lives too, you know. They come to life when they have colors splattered on them. That’s why I don’t like these walls here. They’re too white, if you know what I mean. Too virginal. Too tall. They’re just….oh, I don’t know….here. They’re just always here, staring at me, with me staring back at them. Can you look under my bed to see if there’s anything there? Just, just a peek. Oh, I’m sorry. I just get so annoyed when I lose something, and now there’s this hair in my eye, and I can’t push it back, and now my hand is hurting, but I suppose yours was too, with the way you kept holding mine.

That’s why I don’t like these walls here. I don’t like these walls. These walls. They change people. I don’t think I am who I used to be. I’m not anymore, you know. No. How would you know. White walls and a steel door. And I know…I know there’s color in the world outside. It’s all behind that steel door, isn’t it? I know. I’ve seen it. I touched the red brick wall remember. That’s when I dropped something out of my hands. It rolled off to the ground and it was so light, I didn’t even feel it slip out of my hands, but I was holding on so tightly. I’m so tired now. I think I’m just going to keep my eyes close and let my head roll to the side. They tell me I sleep better that way. Maybe I can go find the life that I lost out of my hands in my dreams. I know I lost it. It slipped away so quietly, I don’t think it even wanted me. I’m going to sleep now. Are you going to leave me too?

Some lives are lived in the solitude of darkness. Some lives are lived in the dazzling brilliance of glitter. And some lives are lived in the waiting room with a cup of coffee warming shivering hands; they're lived on a beaten threadbare couch because standing hurts aching feet and because the line in front of the window just keeps getting longer and longer. Searching eyes look through the pane of glass at the buses that keep leaving behind their tracks on gravel and idle fingers unravel the loose thread on a scarf, twirling and untwirling, wondering what the road beyond the parking lot had looked like before the wait began, and what it would ever look like if the wait ever ended. But the night falls and the crickets begin their mirthless chirping and in the murky blackness of flourescent lighting, the eye becomes myopic, focused on the unwanted entanglements that made the waiting room a reality. And slowly the dust begins to settle in, the bones become weary and before long, the threadbare couch has a heavy skeleton dangling off the ends. And to think the wait would have been over if only the line had been tolerated for five more minutes....

Currently listening to: The Best of Bob Marley.

Currently reading: 100 Years of Solitude, Kahlil Gibran and a Hindi biography on B.R. Ambedkar.

I can’t particularly judge the quality of the translation that I’m reading at the moment, but considering its Marquez, I feel obliged to bow my head in respect. Lately, any and every stimulus leads me to thinking about identities and the way they’re shaped, especially by language. We adhere to language as the last straw of hope. I know I do. For me, language crosses all barriers that seem to be imposed by living in a foreign country and creates zones of comfort where I can finally “let it (insert preferred cliché here).” Whether I stick with English or revert back to Hindi or any of its dialects that I’m familiar with, my speech and my writing help me jump the good fences that good neighbors seem to erect around themselves.

So what exactly do we lose in translation? The fact that there is an interpretation standing between Garcia and myself is a given. When I imagine a hot, lazy summer day, I’m not sitting on the porch, talking to Garcia between sips of coffee. I’m quite possibly at loggerheads with the translator, disputing the direction of the winds billowing from east to west or whichever direction that they were given. My point? I feel as though I’m being manipulated. But I’m a long way from reading 100 Years in its original language. Thoughts?

On the other hand, how cool is Bob Marley? No really. Here’s to breaking barriers and just chilling on the floor with over stuffed pillows, good friends, good books and good food. I like being back. For the nonce.

Writers spend a lot of their time in dream worlds, conjuring up visions, vistas and worlds that somehow correlate to the descriptions of their favorite authors. There's always an adventure waiting to happen around the corner, always a stranger waiting to be enveloped as a passionate lover, always an earth shattering moment waiting to redefine the meaning of a floating existence.

We wait in the darkness for someone to switch the light on. Our conversations are peppered with symbols and hidden meanings and jokes shared in the arch of an eyebrow. Someday. Someday the book will be released from the tangles of worldliness and coffee cup stains and take on a life of its own and breathe the way we never did, and suddenly our names will be taken in the same breath with the pillars that we admire.

We wait for epiphanies. And we write by the light of oil lamps just to prove to the world that we are, in fact, living images of the hopeless romantics we refuse to see. But destinies are choices and ephiphanies are created. So here, for my hopeless love for an epiphany, and for the love of all things written, I welcome you back into my world. I think I can see the light.