"how she wished she could learn lightness!"*

this morning i woke up about every ½ an hour. i would have a dream, realize i was awake and then look at the clock, relieved with every hour of sleep that remained. in a way, i was thankful. unlike the previous week, i did not awake beset with anxiety (about returning to india) and foot-twitching restlessness, but full of calm. it was as if i kept waking myself up to enjoy my last morning in my bed. catching a glimpse of the rising sun. inhaling the indefinable smell of cool air entering my window and blowing the blinds against the window sill.

if i ever made decisions the morning i was supposed to depart, i would never do anything. the weight and comfort of unchanging inertia lull me into a sense of complacency. it’s the waking to the alarm at 5:45 and FORCING yourself out of bed to run because after 15 minutes of running you will be immeasurably happy. when you don’t get up, there’s an immediate pleasure coupled with a subsequent regret/ mourning for something that would have enriched your day. going back to india could be likened to returning to running after a painful injury—one that obliterates pleasant memories with those of other varieties.

i feel like the last two months have been spent gorging on the u.s. friends, food, convenience... absorbing everything like a sponge to sustain me in a land void of wine, new movies, salads, and many of my kindreds. really, part of life may be storing up moments. the feeling of laying in bed in the morning. cabin time with my mom. spinning top light riverside conversations. watching a storm roll in from a hammock. in particular, moments that can be reused and relived on darker, less remarkable days. like at funerals/ wakes and the like when the remaining reminisce about more pleasant times. (extreme example). they prepare us for any dark times to come. and though we shouldn’t spend our whole life re-living golden moments (or, for that matter, “shoulding” in general), they can be welcome lifejackets. most of that was taken from a journal entry from 2004. nothing and everything has changed between storing up moments to go on term in asia and to move back to india. living for the unquantifiable moment seems the constant.

“there’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined (though everyone but children [and perhaps even they] know these hours will be inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult) still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.” (MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, THE HOURS)

as i drove home from minneapolis saturday night i justified the windows-down heat-full-blast coldplay driving with the brevity of my time in minnesota. actually, i might have done it anyway. as i rounded the slow curve on 35w south, for some reason my favorite driving venue, i wondered if i would chose at that moment to return to asia. why must i urge myself to return to a place that i actually like?

today i cried for the first time as i departed from the minneapolis/ st. paul airport, a coupling of sadness for what was and hesitance toward the unknown.

“everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine… the brain appears to possess a special area which records everything that charms or touches us which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful… and therein lies the whole of man’s plight. human time does not turn a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. that is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.” (MILAN KUNDERA, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING).

i fancy the idea of storing moments and remembering the past. in a way, it is the weight of my life, the thing i use to center who i am. i only hope this love for what was does not blind me to what is to come. that i have not made lightness impossible with my yearning for permanence and comfort.

(*title from the unbearable lightness of being)