Living through Chronic Disease

Carpe Diem

Lost clouds, Searching Cafe, Catching the Ray

Photo_https://nefelibata.in

W hen you will feel better from this — and you will — you will walk into your terrace and smell the first jasmine of the season, summer in the air, inhale the tangy raw mango being roasted in the oven. Your pace will not return at once, but you will take a stroll of your home, checking on curtains to be laundered, cushion covers to be changed and picking up the book you left on your table, a monkey tail hanging (book tag), dividing read from unread. When you will feel better you will bake the first cookies of the season, your kitchen, aroma of fresh vanilla and chocolate invading every corner. You know it will not be for long — you will dial for your mother and sister and make a round of your favourite farmer’s market, laugh and joke over your favourite aglio elio and lemon-honey kaskara. On your way back home, the sky will open up — pink, purple, crimson, a murder of crow dashing home, flapping, screaming as if to remind you — “life is fleeting, seize the day my friend!”

Roving Cafe: Coming to writing at the back of loosing a family member, post health-scare, some new things that has kept me excited even in these trying times and a wonderful poetry workshop, which came a bonus in the last hours. All of this has contributed towards me staying away and getting back to writing.

Every hiatus brings me at a juncture where imposter syndrome sets in, making me wonder if this was it.But every time getting back to words, writing, spending time with poetry makes me believe in summer, in sun, the heat, the warmth. How life takes away and brings you back to the centre of belief if you learn to say — never say die.