Book 2: Change. Chapter 1: Quarter life crisis.

[Recap 2010 - 2015]

"You fucked up dude. No excuses. You fucked up"

"Yes, I did"

"Good. What are you going to do next?"

"I don't know. Sit back and see where this is all going to go to?"

What else could I do? What else was there left for me to do? 

This was September 2013. Or was it 2014? I don't know. I really do not know. So much has happened, and yet nothing has really changed. I'm still here, you're still here reading this, and the earth continues to twirl, whirl and hurl itself through space.

To you all who have been with me from the beginning, here is a recap. To those of you who don't know me, here is a good point to start from. To those of you who know this story or have been part of it, this is how I remember events and I still love you all.

Part 1: Save Point

In 2010, an idea that was lurking in the back of my head finally matured: it was time for me to grow up and move out of my parent's house. In 2011, I graduated from our beloved VTU, had my heart completely destroyed and I enrolled myself at the University of Texas at Arlington. I flew half way across the planet, started a new life with absolutely nothing but myself and a little financial support from my family to pay for my school.

Long story short, The University of Texas at Arlington made me the person I am today. I had a lot of growing up to do and I had a lot of issues in my life that I wanted to fix - I learnt to live with and accept an imperfect world filled with good people and good hearts. I found friends. I made friends. I let go of some of my old beliefs. I strengthend some of my old beliefs. The world continued to twirl, whirl and hurl.

In 2012, I was playing Ultimate Frisbee one day. A guy on my team walked up to me and gave me the best advice I had received in a long time. "Man up!" he told me. "Stop complaining, deal with pain, deal with exhaustion and man up". And I did. My life changed forever

Part 2: A New Hope

"The only thing left inside the jar was Hope"

Few people are lucky enough to find Hope when they need it the most. I didn't just find Hope, I kissed her. The odds of me finding someone so perfect is so incomprehensibly small that I was left wondering if there was something other than a rational, deterministic universe at work here. If I needed any fixing to be made, she helped me fix it. I learnt to trust, love and laugh. I learned to Hope. I fell in love. I found myself a job, I purchased my first car, I got my first paycheck, and I was making more money than what I would have ever dreamt possible. 
If fate was a person, living, breathing and moving, she would have a very cruel sense of humor. In 2011, when I was at the bottom of a deep black depression, I had asked if anything was worse than living with a broken heart. In 2013 I found the answer - I broke the heart of the girl who gave me hope and I had to live with it. We tried to see if we could work around fate, see if I could avoid having to see her suffer, but it could not be so. Fate is a harsh mistress, and I can only suffer for what I have done.   The world continues to twirl, whirl and hurl.

Part 3: Enter the Void

Wake up. Shower. Morning traffic. Meetings, email and cubicle buzz. Evening Traffic. Dinner, podcast and bed. Repeat 475 times. This is not meditation. This is not discipline. This is just boring ol' adult life.

Welcome to being an adult. Where friends are hard to find, surprises are never around the corner and a weekend doing laundry is more desirable than a weekend with alcohol and hangovers. Every day is the same as the day before, every hour is just a relentless military march of seconds tick past, never slowing, never stopping, never giving a moment's break to pause and take a breath. My job description does a better job at describing my entire life better than it does describing my regular job. I have a shoe box filled with failed hobby attempts. I have to calorie-count to not grow any more fat. If my computer breaks down, I would rather buy a new one than dig through config files and ubuntu forums. My box of 16 pastel colors could have been 16 shades of greys and I would see no difference.

The world continues to twirl, whirl and hurl

Part 4: Learning to Fly

I have a theory - every once in a while, the world runs into something unexplained, and wakes up its inhabitants with a violent jolt. This is not physical. This is quite possibly not even real. But it is helpful to think this is real in order to understand what happened to me next. I woke up with a jolt.

I had fallen asleep without knowing I had fallen asleep. I had explained away a long string of life events as a simple consequence of good and evil forces playing a tug of war with my Facebook timeline as the rope. Today I have woken up. An old fire, perhaps one put in here by Eru Ilúvatar himself, has been rekindled, and finally I want to live again.

It is time to let go of the void and learn to fly.

I hope you all will join me for this ride. Let's go and explore the unknown.

Crippled by my laptop power supply

Who would have thought that the easiest way to put a complete halt on my productivity would be as simple as separating me and my laptop's power supply.

In a day that would prove to be a difficult one to endure, I learnt that a 40 mile drive in really bad traffic was completely worth it given the alternative was to sit at home with a dead computer.

Thankfully, the day ended on a positive note, thanks to this guy:

Any day that has me eating pizza in it simply can not be called a bad day.

Turning 23

I turned 23. I got an iPhone. Now I'm going to super-blogger mode!! Allow me to bore you with all the boring details of my life.

Starting with the most awesome recent addition to my life.

Blood red eyes

Ah, so whats the biggest change in my life in the past 2 months?

Well, I've moved across the planet and found a new home!

Yep, thats right. I moved from Bangalore, India to Arlington, Tx, USA this August. I'll probably get down to explaining why I moved in a later post. (All you folk in India who twitch at the words GRE, SOP and reco letter- stay tuned!).

Today however, I do not want to talk about Arlington, my journey or my life here. Today, I want to write about a very special person. A person who saved me from insanity. A who gave me confidence to be myself. A person who grew to be my angel. A person who walked out of my life forever.


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This post is about you.

I know you never read blogs and you are never going to read this post. Yet, if you ever come by this page, and read this post, you know its about you.

I woke up this morning thinking about you. I woke up with a desperate need to be with you, see you smile, see you happy, laugh, talk and have fun together. I almost wrote an email- saying how sorry I am for everything that happened, that I wish there was a way we could send things back to the way they were before. I wrote about how much I missed you and missed being with you. I wrote about how I wanted to forget everything that happened and try and start afresh with you.

Then I remembered how it all went bad: you told me you picked him over me.

I put a painful finger over the backspace key, and watched as the cursor ate away everything I typed letter by letter until there was only a blank white screen with a blinking cursor staring at me from behind the screen.

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Guys don't cry. They just go to bed and fall asleep and surrender to their personal nightmares. They toss and tumble and moan as they take gruelling punishment in their sleep, and wake up the next morning with bloodshot eyes.

"You look like a zombie", my flatmate tells me. "Your eyes are horribly red".

"Its nothing- was just rubbing my eye" I told him, as I walked into the shower.

Shattered glass

One of the best moments in life is when everything in life is suddenly as clear as the sparkling blue surface of a freshwater lake. Everything that ever was, everything that is and everything that will be, a beautiful symphony of pointless causes and their effects dancing a dance that binds everything together as one.

And then, there are those times when you have to see this very same vision through a shattered glass, a disturbed mind, a frustrated soul.

When you know the world is perfect but you couldn't care less, when you know see cracks and distorted images everywhere, when the closest thing to peace you can think of is being left alone surrounded by the shattered fragments of glass...

That can safely be called one of the most frustrating moments in life. Right now, I happen to be there. I am disturbed. A million horribly harsh colours are being reflected a hundred times inside the glass shards in my head, denying me the luxury of being wrapped in darkness.

I am disturbed.

Midnight call

Its midnight.

Only 9 hours away from a big exam.

You're deep asleep.

You're sleeping because you know you need to sleep if you have to do well in the exam hall.

Your friend calls you up crying. She's been dumped, and she's not able to take it well and you're the only person she can talk to. She asks you "Why? Why me?".

What do you do?
What do you say?
What can you do?
What can you say?

Sometimes, the closest of friends cost you more than just time, laughter and joy. Sometimes, you have to gamble BIG with your life for your friends. And sometimes, you'll have to choose between a big exam, and your friend.

Exams are important. They tell you how much you've gained out of a course. They tell you if you're ready to bear the responsibility of knowing something. They result in marks and grades and an official doccument that can haunt you for the rest of your life.

But here in India, exams are bullshit.

I chose my friend.

Epilogue:
I slept at three that night after a nice long talk. By the time I hung up, she was feeling much better. I woke up early enough not to be late for the exam. And surprisingly, I did well!

In the end, I guess the satisfaction of helping out a person you care about is just as rewarding as a good night's sleep. Next time someone decides to call me 9 hours before a big exam, and asks for help...

I know what to do.