Groceries, Poetry and Despair.

April has always been but a ripple in my heart.

Hi there,

Seems like a while since I last wrote to you. Even though it was only a month ago, it seems this month has lasted for decades.
There is a gentle ache that usually accompanies April, an underlying wave of impending change, an often transformative one.
Or maybe it’s just me.

The month hasn’t been outstanding in its quality of melancholy though; just the usual, existential drudgery peppered with some moments of respite and laughter.
Yet, April has been compelling in the way I have engaged with poetry and ghazals this time. I have read Claudia Rankine and Aanis Moin, and have written a single poem that is longer than three pages and took me a week to edit.

This is a new development. Editing poetry has been a foreign concept to my Aprils. Until this year, every April from 2016-2022, I’d participate in something called the National Poetry Writing Month Challenge, or #NaPoWriMo as it has come to be known.
Hundreds of thousands of poets across the world take up the (joyful and testing) task of writing one poem a day for the entire month of April. Thirty days, thirty poems. No scope for editing. Just managing to write each day would feel like a grand achievement, the morsels of which we tear and feast on, as a large community.

This year I decided to step back from that challenge, for I wasn’t sure if it would be feasible given the all-consuming nature of my professional life, and growing up (whatever that means). And needless to say, this decision, while a practical one, has compelled me to feel quite distanced from myself. I have watched this month pass, stung by the feeling of having missed a train and watching it leave the platform as I feel gravitated by the weight of my luggage.
The train perhaps, was my youthy carefreeness (this only exists in retrospect) and the luggage of course, responsibility.
I’m not even shouldering any major responsibilities really. No one’s dependent on me, I have no one else’s bills to pay. I’m only responsible for myself.
Ah, that’s what this is; the heavy, heavy load of my being.

It’s funny though, I’m used to a lot more caregiving and household-ing than this.
Perhaps what I’m learning to shoulder is not responsibility, but its absence.

I’m not the kindest co-habitant to myself.
I often wonder if everyone speaks to themselves the way I do.

For instance, to remind myself to do something, I set alarms.
My alarms, well they're quite mundane. It's always an errand such as, ‘Buy bread,’ at 5 pm on a Thursday. But it's not always quite as gentle. It's usually in caps lock, so instead of a tempered nudge that says, “Buy bread,” it reads, “BUY BREAD.”
As if I’m really saying, “BUY BREAD (OR STARVE).”

I wonder why I approach myself with such extremity.
Why do I feel the need to yell this reminder to myself. Why do I feel the need to come around to this task of feeding myself, of procuring food, as an instruction. And that too with such harsh finality.

What births this pressure? What if I forget to buy bread?
If I forget, I won't have any bread, and if I won't have any bread, will I not have the capability to improvise in the kitchen and birth a breakfast that does not involve bread? Of course I will. We manage with what we can find. Then what is this punitive tone good for?

Wait, we’re not talking about bread anymore. Obviously.
Perhaps the point is that alarms can be gentler, and responsibilities can be shouldered with a cooler, softer, poofy pillow-like weight. They don’t all have to feel like military trunks. And youthy carefreeness may not be a train, but the platform itself.

For enduring my internal monologue aimed only at tugging my own heartstrings, I must gift you a parting verse by Rankine. May you have the strength to sail upon the April tide.
May May be sticky and full of shared mangoes.

”Ignore your own devastation and it doggedly shadows,
resurfacing
across the first version, the flat world, forcing you within
the real conversation you hold with yourself.”

Love,
Samreen