Cross-stitch pythons

You know, I live for days where I crack a joke and a slow wave of appreciative mirth spreads across the table and I am left in bewilderment, in the unbelievable luck of having been funny. Beauty may have power, humour has all the love.

Lately, I live for the things my son does that make the world seem fresh, dewy. He smiled at himself in the mirror one day, and it made me think, weren’t we all sent here quite pleased with ourselves? Everything after is just programming.

Obviously I live for dessert and orgasms and all the pleasures of the senses like a good scratch, a great back rub and those closed-eye-kisses.

I live to tell some people, they were wrong about me.

I like stumbling upon water bodies on a walk. Picture a pond, sparkling gold in 5:30 pm sunshine, a white bird swooping down to its water, its wing weaving a slow ripple across silver and gold. It’s worth living for.

And then there are days where I dig into family storage and come across cross-stitch embroidery on a cushion by some grandaunt or the other who sewed her initials under an embroidered boy in a hat with a rabbit at his feet. I love that kind of stuff and I cannot explain why such discoveries make me want to live.

I feel the same way about trees in the wind. I live for the sway; a dance performance, a hello, a nod, a ‘no’, a goodbye, a dismissal, a welcome. I read my whole life into these tree-sways.

An Ibex jumped across a crevise in Ladakh, a recently full python poured is thick body in a slow hypnotic slither across a road one night in Goa, an elephant turned around and looked at our parked car in Nilgiris, a skink sunned itself in my garden and a sunbird came so close to me I felt alive. All of those times, I felt alive.

I live for the harsh pain of early grief, the emptiness of one sided love, the blunt edge of being forgotten, the longing that comes with distance, the sweet pain of a healing wound. They remind you of what you have and coax you to live harder.