Chiffonesque

 I had a good day today. 😀 Well... that's it, really. 

 When I was growing up, there was a shop near my building called 'Funky'. I didn't go to that shop until my friends started having boyfriends and they wanted to buy something for them from there. I never quite fancied the place. But now that I think about it, I think he might have stocked good stuff because my friends would buy things for their men when things were getting serious. Funky was expensive. It's quite a cool name for a store. A friend came over yesterday and it was nice. Very nice actually. I really needed to unwind after a hard day at work. It promises to be this way for a while now, at least a year maybe. A little bit of toffee-type joys that I get are from the texts and messages that my close friends send me...a forward here or there, a picture of what they are eating, a bizarre tree or bug they saw in their balcony...it feels good. Together, I think, it's an atlas of delicious resilient ordinariness...our daily lives as continents. Papa will now be s...

 I just finished an assignment that has been really tough for me. By tough, I mean REALLY tough. It's the sort of assignment that I had taken up many times before and left it. Mainly because of fear of rejection, mainly because of mental and emotional blocks, and mainly a crippling lack of confidence. I cannot explain the sickening procrastination that kept coating my gut everytime I opened the document, panicked, felt sick, and closed it again. I cannot explain that fear, the extent of self-loathing...but today I finished it.  I.finished.it. I'll put that on my tombstone or have someone write it and tuck it with me when I lay on my funeral pyre. I am THAT peaceful now. Monday will begin with a full day but a lot more confidence. 

Pliro usually slept late, after folding up the pond and cleaning out lily beds. Then he'd scrub the night, dispose stars in the alligator furnace, and dine on ravens pickled with dust from the black locust flowers. Lavender rain was his favorite beverage and he always sipped the very last drop before throwing away his cactus cup.  No one had put Pliro in charge of anything.  But one day, when Pliro was mindlessly wandering about the Herchken forest, his heart had rolled out of his chest, through the rocks and boulders, across the streams, and finally burst into feathers and flames.  Pliro could not save his heart but he did feel a connection with and responsibility to everything his heart had touched. So, basically Pliro felt connected to everything. This was inconvenient but also useful. He could get the world to look out for him as much as he, now, cared for it.  One day, in the continuum of such strange quid pro quo existence, Pliro found a little bird that trembl...

 Today I begin a new chapter. So, in one sense, yesterday, some other chapter got completed.   I had imagined this last day to be different. I had imagined flowers. Maybe a blue dress. Something in silk or pashmina. And definitely my mom. There was none of that. It was a regular day. Same dose of panic. Same segments of joy because the weather is so luscious outside. Same pockets of relief that dad is okay. But it was quite beautiful towards the end. V came over after nearly one hundred years. I had forgotten how irritating he could be, with his know-it-all attitude, and how much I had missed hanging out with him. I had to attend to a call and he sat by the window looking at birds. From the time I have known him, he has been quite exasperating - the way one's close friends generally become. But it is a treat to watch that man look at birds. For one thing, he is silent. And not just quiet in the sense, not giving unsolicited advice about everything. But silent the way a pa...

 Rolf sat on the park bench, the way he had since the last twenty years. He saw a couple of deer gamboling about. Some children with orange-striped cotton candy made palaces with pebbles and flowers. Rolf looked at them but did not really see them. Far across the park, he saw the theater lit up with globs of marquee lights. For some reason, these lights alternately strobed between golden and ice-blue. It was a nice touch, considering the weather was chilly and it was only a matter of time before it started snowing.  Rolf remembered the first time he entered that place. He was a child. His father had spent more time grooming Morney, the monkey, than him. But Rolf was a born performer. He could jump, dance, juggle, do the splits. The world was usually amazed by a four-year-old doing these things. For his father, it was routine, though. After all, they came from a line of Gillets - the tribe that shone with feverish energy whenever the spotlight hit them. It was, as they say, in ...