Lately, I’ve been wanting to disappear. There’s a painting in my room with sunflower fields and a vast countryside with two little white houses with those slanted red roofs. I imagine it to be somewhere in south of France and often find myself inside that landscape. I wonder sometimes if I didn’t leave my room for days and then when my family comes to check on me, would they even look at the painting and see a woman painted in a red and white dress with a triangular scarf tied around her hair as it blows in the wind?
As much as disappearing into a painting with no one to be responsible for sounds lovely, unfortunately that’s not how the real world works. Fortunately, however, within this reality, we live and breathe in multiple worlds. As long as the performance in each of these worlds can co-exist peacefully —without it feeling like a performance — scenes blending seamlessly in the multiverse of our layered existence, it’s all good. However, the minute there’s an imbalance and you start to feel the theatrics of one of those worlds tipping the scales of reason away from sanity, it’s probably time to take a step back and take the whirling inwards.
So I disappeared from the world of social media for a while and oddly enough, it somewhat fulfilled that desire to be invisible and for the first time, hoping not to be missed, forgotten even. While I understand the former as something I have always wanted, I wonder where the latter wishings (if that’s not a word, I am making it one) came from, that too with an air of resolved contentment. I mean, I’d always wanted to be missed, never forgotten. What’s going on? Am I really depressed or am I on a precipice of something greater here?
I don’t feel depressed. On the contrary. In my solitude away from the distractions of the madhouse world with so many known faces with so many stories, I felt calm. I talked to myself, I talked to one or two other people, both in my head and sometimes out loud, made silly faces in the mirror and then laughed at myself. I started cooking for myself again and realised that I can cook for just one person too. I marvelled at the sun and clouds from dawn till dusk and wrote poems about the moon and the stars. I won’t lie, there were moments of sheer loneliness as well, I burst into tears randomly. Experiencing that total lack of control while knowing that I had lost control already felt soothing.
It felt good to simply read and write. At first, I kept feeling guilty for being a useless unemployed confused human approaching the third decade of her life in another nine months. So many accomplished people in the on-screen world don’t exactly make it easier. You learn so much from them, so you keep telling yourself to just focus on the positive, but sooner or later, the words on the screen start to make up a different story in your head — one in which you’re definitely not the hero. Going away from this world also gave perspective on that. May be I should just revel in this time and privilege I’ve been granted by the universe and just do what I do best — eat, sleep, read, write, and of course the inescapable duties of a daughter towards a sick mother which inevitably pave the way for revisiting old ways of bonding as well as creating new ones.
When the guilt and shame start to return, I remind myself of what my friend Marx wrote that stuck with me, “To develop in greater spiritual freedom, a people must break their bondage to their bodily needs — they must cease to be the slaves of the body. They must, above all, have time at their disposal for spiritual creative activity and spiritual enjoyment.” Capitalism and self-estrangement can wait as I spend my days reading, writing, thinking about poems, amongst other creative pursuits. I don’t consider myself a poet but I’ve loved reading and writing poetry since I can remember. My dad used to have this book of really old poems that I didn’t even properly understand at the time and got frustrated inside when he would expect me to spend time with him analysing them. I was a kid then so I can understand why kid-Maliha would not exactly want to analyse beautiful albeit difficult poems with her dad but I can’t tell you how much adult-Maliha wishes her dad was around to do it now.
As much as this solitude was self-imposed, it has been imposed on me by life as well. For the past few years, December has never been a lonely month. On the contrary in fact. I found kindred spirits across the border to celebrate Christmas with, something that’s almost cultural for me, having gone to a Catholic missionary school growing up and also spending a year in the US in my teens and witnessing the celebrations I used to only see in movies, firsthand. Unlike Pakistan, Christmas is very much a thing in India so coming back, I knew my excited passions for this time of the year would not really be shared or understood, perhaps even mocked by people here.
To be honest, for the past few weeks, I wasn’t even in the mood for any of it myself. This time of the year represents love, friendship, people coming together, food and drinks for me and I didn’t exactly have much of all that this year. I barely sat through one Christmas movie and rolled my eyes at the same old plot as always the entire time. And then something happened. The Festive Gods took pity on me and sent a film my way called Something from Tiffany’s. Now anyone who really knows me, knows that Breakfast at Tiffany’s is my favourite film of all time so I was intrigued. I’m so glad I watched it because it wasn’t one of those bad Christmas movies Netflix releases every year.
Prime Video did much better this year with two contemporary-classic style films centred around this time of year, Something from Tiffany’s being one of them. The protagonist of the film played by Zoey Deutch reminded me that I am cheerful enough to celebrate Christmas by myself. My slow but steady collection of ornaments came out of the suitcase while a real pine tree travelled all the way from Lahore (albeit a bit different than what I expected), jingles were played, the ugly Christmas sweater was worn and it was a great party of one with mulled wine made with fermentation experiments like Essence of X-mas. Oh and Christmas poems were read, some people were fondly thought of and turns out, a solitary Christmas is probably the best one I’ve ever had. The nature of impermanence truly humbles me!
If you celebrate this time of the year, I hope it wasn’t too difficult for you either and if it was, you’re in my thoughts. In any case, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, considering this is the last newsletter of 2022 from me.
Until next year,
M
P.S. No recommendations before I go this week, but I recently finished reading Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and if you’d like to read my thoughts on it, you can find them here.
Merry Christmas! Glad you had a good one. Enjoy your newsletter.