At some point after you grow up, you begin to see people in your memories of others.

Passing in the metro. A skip on the steps. A familiar face in a rickshaw. Walking on the pavement. On your way to work. Days of blueness. Days of bygone spring. You will rummage in your diary of memories, until you come across someone against whom you can chart this face. This face. The mind craves familiarity, cannot function without it. It scrambles to find that resembling card, to put two and two together.

Baudelaire, French poet of nostalgia, wrote a poem “to a passer-by” in a crowded street in Paris. There is the sense of shock, a lightning flash, when you catch someone’s eyes- an almost electric jolting. The only intimacy that the city allows: small fleeting glimpses before we settle into the monotony of our days. Lightning flashes before everything fades to grey, and life devolves to one reel after another as you journey home on the metro. The stark, singular moment of intensity right before it dissolves for forever.

~

Loss is a continent with many countries. Which may be a roundabout way of saying that there are many kinds of loss, but also that loss fights within itself. And loses to itself.

My mother comes from a lineage of loss. There is a story of the time that has always stuck.

“The first time all of it came crashing down was during my Master’s exams. I went to the exam hall, completely prepared and having studied diligently days before. It was the penultimate Physics exam. The moment I sat in the hall and got handed the question paper, I went blank. Completely. I sat three hours in the hall, blank, not writing a word, staring at the board – it was when I knew something was wrong with me.”

~

I think often of what Elena Ferrante defined as smarginatura. A dissolving of margins, a fragmentation of the self. Literally, the word means the act of cutting off the margins of a page in the process of bookbinding. In Lila, one of the two protagonists of her Neapolitan Quartet, smarginatura is a sense of collapse that is almost beyond language, when things lose their edges and violently come together in formlessness.

A disembodied embodiment. Fluid possibility, flowing like a river: and the fear of knowing this and recoiling. Not because you finally recognise the face in the mirror, but because you realise you will never recognise it as yours. That you does not exist.

Through her works, she prescribes ways to deal with this. One is to enter into a relationship of entrustment with friends, women, loved ones. This is affidamento, “a practice of ‘putting faith in’ or ‘entrusting’ between women . . . the basis for a new symbolic order to counter patriarchy.” Italian has a way of making one feel understood.

~

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver demands an answer. I thumb through the collection. I’m lying of course, I’m only scrolling on my phone. Poetry is the worst thing to read on the metro: imagine being surrounded in a sea of bodies, feet heavy with lethargy, knees paining like pinpricks, hands red from holding onto the pole. What is wild and precious about being alive? What is wild? What is precious?

~

When I was in tenth grade, our class was being taught letter-writing, when our English teacher very astutely told us to never use an “I” in a letter. The entire class was quiet, but the calm was more of an unsettling kind. What does she mean that we cannot use an “I”? What else do we say? And finally: How do we talk about the self without the “I”? Our teacher was silent. Our questions floated in the void whose existence you’re not aware of when you’re in high school. She never answered us, so my first awareness and self-conscious erasure of my “I” ballooned itself into a plastic purple-coloured monstrosity and has hovered over my head since. It journeyed from letter-writing to essay-writing to short story to poetry to academic papers to almost all of my communication. Mostly, I wondered: what did she mean to not use an “I”? But, also, I answered: is it selfish to speak of the self so much? Does the world know how inherently selfish all of us are? Is that why she asked us to run away from it?

It took me awhile to realise for how long that purple balloon had stayed with me. My process of studying literature was also a process of realizing how agonizingly slow writing can be when language evades you. And for the person who lacks an “I”, language is forever running, a prey to be chased. This is also an escape from jargon, since there are hundred fancy ways to say the usual, but only one that sticks. Similar to almost all experiences of life, you need the one that will stick, the center, that crafty red button of the video game, the grandmother’s cottage you come back to.

No wonder we are so surrounded by structures. No wonder the self wants to run away from itself.

Recently, I discovered an old poem of mine, written four years ago, which ends with “when I say I, I choke once again.” Turns out I have, and always will, struggle with self-articulation. The “I” is non-existent. Just like how, when I’m alone in my house, I feel so free I could spontaneously vanish- not combust, not a violence, but a virtuous quietness that one feels when there is no one around us to remind us of the fact that we are real.

How much are we the measure of our other’s presence? Of lives around us? How am I supposed to “talk” about it when I do not know how to talk about myself except in metaphors of cul-de-sacs and eroded landscapes?

Does blankness have lineage? Does this lack – of words on the tongue, of roots – carry from generation to generation?

I imagine my mother sitting in the exam hall, quiet for three hours. It stretches in my palms, I hold it.