“Not romanticising the past, just learning to breathe in the present.”

BY Pallavi Tripathi, Durg (CG)

I’ve always felt there will be more time. More time to fulfill my dreams, more time to do everything I’ve ever wanted to do but with this I feel this is it. My body is at a war with itself and I’m the one getting murdered, soon there will be no desire, no hopes, no fear, nothing. Soon I’ll be a ghost of myself wandering probably in my bed. I’ll be unrecognisable even to me. As scary as it maybe it rings true to my condition. I’m scared shitless but there’s nothing I can do. I think nobody can do much. Except to stare and bear with me this exhibitionism of decay. All of the stories I wanted to, still want to tell, are suffocating inside of me. They’ll soon die with me. It’s like I’ve been waiting for a divine intervention, a miracle, that I know might never happen. Living with this condition is called growing up. This condition itself is called ageing.

In the era where billionaires were buying their islands, we made our own personal island with cinema, internet, snacks, her and me. I know there’s this whole life awaiting us, reality about to hit this sailing ship, the gargantuan money ready to take all over us, but that moment, that little island can stay forever with us if we survive this.

I remember the time like the outline of my face. Details keep changing, yeah like my face itself, sometimes it gets chubbier, sometimes it’s skinny, sometimes I have the perfect Jaw. Similarly, the time I spent with you is sometimes satisfactory, sometimes lacks coherence, sometimes erotic enough for me to get all wet, other times it’s dry as the tissue paper. But I like to go back to those times, when we bunked classes just to create an island for our cinephile selves. Curating the best of world cinema. Long before the criterion closet existed, torrents did and our love for cinema did. I would download 81/2, I would watch it and then give it to you, then whole week we would discuss it. You would arrange In the mood for love and we will be so much in love with the plot(Maggie and Tony). More than love and respect for each other we have immense love for the new cinema we were discovering! The act of discovery of our emotions, giving writing a chance, collaborating in projects. Leaving projects midway to complete a couple of shorts we so passionately made and then seeing a writer and a filmmaker was writing about our lives or some other cinephiles lives, that we shared too when Me, Earl and the dying girl came out. Like that fight club saying goes: Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy so was our lives! A rose is a rose is a rose as Stein would say it but do you smell it in those pages?

(To be contd. …)