Halloween weekend

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 Sean Connery passed on.

I was so sick last night. My head was throbbing so badly I actually had to wake my father up late at night or early morning. It was unbearable. 

There was some medical content that I was working on and it seemed to go on endlessly. There was some sweet joy on getting that out of the way.

Was talking to my friend in Bangalore. We go back nearly 18 years. I stayed with her the first time I went to Bangalore. Had left my passport with her for safekeeping. Today I connected with her to ask her to send across my passport. We chatted about this and that. She has really done a lot for me. 

I said that I really can't manage to travel to Bangalore now. Otherwise I would have come to collect it. She said it wasn't required. Then she said that it would be nice to meet again. And I don't know...I told her that I felt that we would never meet again now. And she said that somehow she thought so too. We moved on to watching Netflix.

Then I called up another friend and she was asleep. I said hello to her daughter who is now 16 but who I had met in Pune when she was only 3. Those were really fun times... spending time with my friend and her daughter, Cy, in Pune. I would sometimes pull her leg and say that she was my daughter and not J's. (J is my friend.) And to substantiate my claim, I would tell her that we both had moonshaped faces, we both loved rice, we both loved Bombay, we both liked watching cartoons...I think I even convinced her for a short period of time. It was fun!

A month ago, I got the feeling that I will not live through 2020. Don't know why but I did. Then the next day, I found a swelling and fell sick and now my head is just splitting. It's sickening. It also could be that I watched Haunting of Hill House and Haunting of Bly Manor back to back. And both are such tender tales of the loves of broken people... it's not really horror. 

Then of course I think of Ma. Not sadly. But with a lot of affection and wonder. 

Of course, this is not the first time I thought I was dying. Nearly a decade ago someone predicted that I would die in 6 months. (At the point, I was so exasperated by how flatline my life was. But as soon as he said you only have 6 months, I felt such love for my life... it's funny.) At the time then I read 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying' to prepare, so to speak. Reading that book is perhaps the most important investment I have made in my life. It's a gorgeous poetic landscape of our fragile existence. There's a line in there that has stayed with me...that as you approach death, you start seeing all your problems and 'tight, dense' emotions dissolve. It feels like 'untying knots in the sky'. That line fills me with such ease.

Anyway, as we get closer to 2020, it doesn't feel like I will make it. My doctor friend who has no regard for my melliflous poetic goodbyes says it's iron deficiency and I should either take tablets or palak and prunes. Buddhism is not entirely sufficient. It is a little jarring to the narrative in my head, as you can imagine. Doesn't feel 'chiffonesque', if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I watched Identity Thief on Netflix and I loved it so much! Melissa McCarthy is a fabulous gem! I didn't expect to feel so weepy through the film... it's a comedy, after all. But in parts I did. It's really good. 

Oh...and this blog is doing really well. 

Starting your goodbyes... that's the new normal. 😊

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