I turned 28 two days ago and there's so many things that made my birthday special. The party, the wishes and the camaraderie. I still cannot spell that word, so thank you Dictionary feature on Google Chrome.
It's been a strange life for me so far. I've loved. I've lost. I've become a rage filled monster and I've changed to become a mellow person but someone who has massive panic attacks sometimes and needs to do something with their hands to calm down. I've had a lot of struggles and I've been so messed up that I've not even acknowledged my achievements.
Anger is all I've known for so long, so very long. And yet, here I sit, hands flying over a keyboard, phone humming as someone in London wishes me on Instagram, as an email arrives for me from Dubai, as the person whom my mother considered a friend drops her number in my WhatsApp and as my book club repeatedly, repeatedly laughs at me, with me, sings for me, dances for me and shows me, I don't need to be angry anymore.
It was my birthday two days ago. Two days have passed and yet people still wish me. They say they feel bad they couldn't on the day itself. Another message arrives from someone who is a first year sociology student and says he has ordered a book for me and wants to hand deliver it to me with a birthday message. I finally found the confidence to tell someone in my life that I value them as much as The Little Prince valued his rose.
I do not know how it came to be that someone who saw only red and nothing but red, someone who was bullied in school because of his prowess in English and his skills, by those people who would just take advantage of him and blackmail him and take advantage of his loneliness to pass their exams...someone who lived his entire formative years in survival mode, is today sitting at this computer writing about how he turned 28, weaving a story about it in real time.
When I was about 20, I wrote a poem where I said that for a long time I've been staring into a face in a mirror and I do not recognize the face staring back. I repeated that experiment on my birthday, just before I walked into the kitchen and cooked a chicken dish. I came face to face with someone else. He was taller. He was fat, but he was not as fat as back then. He felt fitter and he felt he was breathing better. The child who stared at his 28 year old self could only wonder..."Is this who I've become?"
What has this birthday taught me, you ask? I have learnt that I deserve love. I have learnt that I am good enough. It's easy to say haters gonna hate now. It's easy to say, I matter now. I may not matter to those related to me by blood, but I matter to someone in Romania. I may not matter to the racist Hindi teacher who made me fail ten times in Hindi and was instrumental in me feeling like shit throughout class nine and ten but I matter to the English teacher whom I've found again after more than 17 years, who called me twice on my birthday and who waits for my visits with a cup of coffee at the ready as I curse her laptop for making her life hard and ask it to grow up. I matter to the computer teacher I have not spoken to for over ten years, who I reconnected with and who remembers my birthday and wished me. I matter to the girl I met and who yelled at me on the phone because I had removed my birthday from Facebook and who couldn't wish me on the day.
I matter to the people who don't want me to look back anymore. I matter to the people I am going to grow old with, to the people who will share their milestones with me. I matter to the Instagram stories I'm gonna see, the ones from the accounts I follow, where there's a potpourri of artists and humans who make amazing content and need to be seen.
I matter to the Spotify playlist I'm making. I matter to the book I've finished writing that someone very close to me is editing now and that needs to see the light of day. I say I am not good enough and yet I am good enough to find three jobs in a pandemic situation and decide to leave two of them because I realised that they were not good for me, that they were affecting my mental health and not letting me be me.
How can I still be an angry person in survival mode anymore? It is time I realized that life is something to be loved and lived, to be spent with the people I've found along the way who love me and want me to live my life and share my life with them.
The friend who told me I gave him the confidence to write a blog of his own
The bookstore owner who calls me "babu" and has always told me I can come and have tea with him
The oldest friends in my life, friendships lasting 17 years now
The stories I have to tell
The journeys I have to go on
The artist who sends me presents because I hugged him
The January baby who has her own scars and yet is always smiling, always growing, always full of ideas and always creating
The bespectacled, long haired, little goofball, with the Honda limited at 140kmph who calls me a brother and says I'm an amazing DJ (and makes fantastic gin and tonics)
The two people in a far away land whose kids aren't here yet but who want me to be around when they come by and I can share books with them
The elder sister whose father has the same name as my father and therefore has opened her heart to me
The younger sister just discovering Prufrock, with a rapier sense of humor who said I don't look as old as I am and nicknamed me
The person who helped me over one of the hardest losses in my life and set me back on my feet and wants to be at my wedding
The doctor who fought by my side and brought me back my sanity
The other people, in the shadows, waltzing with me, smiling at me, blessing me, sharing my life with me
And lastly, the life I have not lived yet.
Time to live, time to love.
Hello! Let's live a little!
Vamos!
The Bilge Master
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