How to let go

of a friendship gone bad:

put a soured friendship to rest. take it where all that’s rotting must go. back to the earth, where it mingles with slippery worms and long dead leaves, where it further decays. and with time, it may even bloom.

of grief:

peel it off your body, slice it off your fingers, rip its sticky membrane off your knees, gouge it out of your eyes, feel every ache and scream. and then embrace your grief, hold it close, let it fill you up and leak out of you. let it change your shape, leave you hollowed, so you’re empty but different, new. and all there remains of grief is a dull ache and some wistfulness. but you’ll want those things, they’re memories.

of the thing that comes for you at night:

q: dear irma,

there’s this night-thing, damp and old, this creature with wet swamp skin that crawls out from under my bed and reaches for me at 3 am. it peels my eyes open and demands my thoughts. this thing that keeps me up, how do I let it go?

a: drag the thing out from where it hides, air it in the morning sun, prod it, dissect it, question it, squelch it, discuss it with the lady in the quiet room who just nods when you talk, expose it to hot, white reason, watch it turn to dust as it loses its power over you.

of all that loose change:

don’t take coins from auto drivers who are too far from home, who nap in hot Bombay summers stretched out like crumpled newspapers inside their autos and play songs like khoyakhoyachaand for themselves and maybe even for you. leave the change they need it more than you.

of a problem that’s weighing on your mind:

there’s a boy called Calvin and his friend, this tiger called Hobbes and they had some things to say in a book I read many years ago and never forgot:

c: if people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.

h: how so?

c: well, when you look into infinity you realise, there are more important things than what people do all day.

of someone who no longer loves you:

read the line above five times, may be seven, may be a hundred times, and once the truth seeps in and becomes real, it may still not be easy to let go, but it will be time.

of a mistake:

make a few new ones.

of anger:

release fresh anger in a rant on a private twitter account, in a text msg that will embarrass you later, in a revenge dress, in a scream caught in your pillow, in a rant that makes your best friend wish you would stfu, in colourful abuse in the language you think in, in a hot boiling mess of incoherent tears, in your novel where the villain is named after and based on the subject of your resentment, in lunch you cooked where shallots, chillies and garlic are pounded by hand and their scent rises in a wave that smells like sharp, pungent fury, in bullet points on a PPT cause you are not a cook or a poet, in a derisive joke, in deep breaths that yank the anger out of the pit of your stomach and leave it to gently diffuse in the air, in cold logic, in an apology you’ve accepted.

of a grudge:

reach inside you till you find that ball of anger, hurt and debris in the centre of your being, yank it out, examine it in the light, break it into tiny glimmering shards, run it through a grinder, shred it, juice it, flush it down the toilet…whatever you do, don’t nurse that grudge, don’t pamper it, never let it harden, don’t let it turn to stone and weigh you down.