The day in Creil.

I woke up early this morning, to the last vestiges of dawn over the city beyond my bed, and to the unmistakeable sound of fluttering wings, that was far more effective than any alarm in getting me to spring out of bed and shut the balcony door. The balcony by the hall had already turned into a pigeon coop; I refused to allow one into my bedroom as well. 

The maid arrived; I opened the door, and we took stock of the kitchen. I told her the chicken last night was nice, that we wanted dal and beans for lunch, and that she needed to stop mixing up pattha gobi and phool gobi. 

I responded to some texts, and made my list for the weekend - life insurance, provident fund, savings; pick up the shoes from the cobbler, call the plumber and the carpenter; go to the bank; get a password manager because I am finally the kind of adult with too many passwords to manage internally. Maybe see if I could find the time and energy to go someplace pretty and write about my feelings. 

I was still awake, and it was still too early to start getting dressed and acknowledge that it was a work day, so I meandered onto facebook, to be confronted with a picture that kind of rang a bell, like someone else's memory, one you've heard spoken about often. 

Except this memory was mine. 

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I was exhausted. I don't remember this much about exchange, but it truly could be exhausting - early mornings and overnight buses, long distances on the road because flying meant I'd only be able to afford half the places I wanted to go to; the constant question of food - what to cook, what to buy, how much to buy, how to split. Excel sheets and requisition lists became a part of my life long before due diligence did. 

We'd been traveling for about two weeks at that point, or perhaps it was three. Venice, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Berlin, Groningen, Amsterdam and, yet to come, Bruges. I could rattle the names off the top of my head at that point, after the weeks of planning and replanning, booking and rebooking. I had had so much bread and cheese that the reality of it had finally outdone the allure, even if it was my favourite Swiss cheese, even if Brom and Eragon and every other adventurer in a fantasy novel had subsisted on bread and cheese on their great travels. I would've killed for some mess food and a night in my own room. 

I could have gone to Keukenhof, the tulip gardens, the entire reason I was in the Netherlands in April; or I could have gone to the Hague, home of international justice and just really goddamn pretty. Like everything back then, the most outlandish options were at my feet - all I needed to do, was open up my flixbus app, book a ticket, and hop on. 

All I wanted to do was sleep. 

I'd seen pretty places, eaten good food, written about my feelings, and taken pictures I'd throw back to for a lifetime. But I was tired, of traveling, of toilet paper, of the burden of knowing that these spectacular opportunities were unlikely to come my way again, that I needed to make the best of them. Of wondering if maybe I should've gone to Bratislava and Cesky, Salzburg and Poland. Of carrying my goddamn overpacked suitcase up and down subway staircases. 

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I regret nothing about that day. It unfolded as if from a novel: an early, cold Dutch morning; almost missing the bus, our first of, if I remember correctly, six that day; our carefully packed picnic (ham and cheese and hummus and cucumber sandwiches, and entirely too many muffins from Albert Heijn) and, for a change in the Netherlands, the most gorgeous clear blue sky - that boring staple Windows wallpaper was so much more appealing when you could walk right into it. 

The plan was hazy at best: go see the tulip fields. After the tourist disaster that was Prague on Easter weekend (more Lajpat Nagar than Charles Bridge), I wanted to avoid mainstream tourist spots for a while, which ruled out Keukenhof; but that didn't mean I didn't want to do the touristy things. It was April in the Netherlands: of course I had to see the tulips. 

A bit of lazy research led to something called The Flower Route, a sixty-odd kilometre stretch along the tulip fields of rural Netherlands. But neither of us could drive, and I couldn't even ride a bicycle, so that seemed out of the question.  I had nearly resigned myself to simply sticking to the tulip fields I'd cross on my bus trip into and out of the Netherlands, when I stumbled across some mentions of a place called Creil. Located along The Flower Route, it was a little hamlet of about fifteen hundred people and substantially more flowers. A couple of tourists had made their way there and written about their experiences, and it sounded promising: it had tulips, and potentially some kind of tulip festival, but also seemed to be nearly untouched. It was perfect. 

We packed our sandwiches and threw on all the clothes we had, pulled out the bus route, and then we were off. I cannot for the life of me remember what we talked about on the hours on the bus or at the little McDonalds we made our way to for a mid-journey snack, but after weeks of co-existing on the same trip, I remember finally feeling the ease of old friendship, in both words and silences. For the first time since we'd missed the bus to Vienna, we had the time to just sit and talk and think and see and be, and it was wonderful. 

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The first field we saw was from the bus window, our backs automatically straightening as we peered out at the gorgeous colours, the pleasing symmetry, the unfailing windmills. The bus dropped us off at Creil, the village a few kilometres from the fields, and, after taking a moment to absorb just how  tiny this village was and how far away from everything we were, we started walking back towards them. Nature bent to our will, put on a show for us: it gave us Australian blue skies, poetic crossroads, tree-lined avenues and, of course, the fields. We stumbled across a flower show - full of old couples from nearby villages strolling about, nodding benignly at the odd pair from far, far away - where they were happy to let me stumble about the rows and rows of tulips, making myself a bouquet of all the broken flowers strewn about. We settled in for a picnic lunch in a wooden shed overlooking the field, and every elderly couple that passed us by unfailingly smiled and wished us the Dutch version of bon apetit, with a handful catching our confused expression and kindly, albeit laughingly, switching to English. 

With a bit of well-time serendipity, we wound up at the refreshments tent, where we got talking to an angel of a woman who offered to drop us to another field nearby, one that had been set up to resemble some sort of a painting. (If it was a painting, it must have been modern art, but it was gorgeous, nonetheless.) The neatly colour-segregated sections of tulips stretched out ahead of us, in colours that words like red and pink and white and yellow didn't do justice to.  Windmills dotted the fields, reaching up to the sky, making the whole scene resemble a friendly giant's well-tended garden. The cloudy, sunny sky stretched over it all, providing the perfect relief. It was like breathing in a calendar shoot.

Having crossed hitchhiking off the list, we moved on to trespass: there was an unending field of yellow tulips, and DDLJ demanded that I go have a closer look, even if the flowers were different, even if it was, technically, private property. The tulips were gorgeous, the commission of the crime uneventful - I am reasonably certain the owner of the field offered us a friendly wave from his tractor out in the field.

Eventually, we maundered back to Creil and our buses, to Groningen and the Dutch variation of Indian food (butter chicken, with a side of sauteed spinach) at the University. From airport to airport, through trains and cabs, to our law firms and our lives, our maids and our pigeon coops. Back to reality, to the range of human emotion aside from pure contentment and peace.

But those fields, they stayed with us. And sometimes, we wake up, and we see a picture, and reality recedes a little. Lets us breathe a little. 

~Sam

Ed Sheeran, JioGarden, November 19, 2017.

I wore red lipstick and a red dress and a lotion that made my bare arms and legs shimmer in the dim-lit darkness; kajal and mascara and a band that declared me a superstar. 

I stood in line for six hours, with determination and confidence I had forgotten I could possess, and also with my three most favourite brownies from Theobroma (for the record, these are the millionaire, the red velvet, and the cookie, in that order, although I am convinced each time I have it that I like the cookie brownie more in theory than in taste). 

I joked, laughed and danced with strangers, with the college kids with lamer puns and greater fanaticism than even I; and the girl who'd come here all by herself from Delhi, who was awkward in a way that would have been very familiar to my near-friendless fourteen year old self, whose story I wanted to hear and write. 

I enjoyed the opening act, Lauv, as one enjoys all music that is not noise, and sang along to the one song I knew (I like me better). Things were fine. 

And then he came on stage, and it all changed. 

_________

I've been looking for perspective everywhere. I've talked to older people and younger people and peers and colleagues; parents and counsellors and myself; strangers on Tinder and my best friends. I've looked for it in books and in memes; in the ocean waves and in city lights. 

I did not expect to find it at a concert.

I should have, though. I went to the concert because I love Ed Sheeran; I love Ed Sheeran the way I do partly because I have the most mainstream taste on the planet, but mostly because, no matter what he sings, Ed can pull from within me the feelings I need, and banish the mental clutter I really don't need. His words are specific, his songs situational, and yet, whether I'm homesick or heartbroken or just lost deep within myself, he can pull me out - paint me that larger picture I can never quite capture by myself, make me understand, acknowledge, absorb all those comforting things I know in theory, but cannot feel in practice. 

He can make it okay for things not to be okay (which, let's face it, is how things usually are). 

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He sang Castle on the Hill, and Tenerife Sea, and Thinking Out Loud, and Perfect. Shape of You and Eraser and Galway Girl and A-Team. You Need Me, I Don't Need You. 

And somehow, in all the singing along and dancing and feeling and hugging and holding hands, somehow, magically, miraculously, inexplicably, he turned lead into gold. 

Somehow, standing there, squashed between the balustrade and the heaving masses, I was no longer a lost, overemotional, fucked up twenty something questioning every aspect of her life to the point of perpetual misery. I was a kid, an adult, a complete person; not a daughter or an ex or a sister or a friend, not an employee or a lawyer or intelligent or dumb, not a good writer or a bad one. Not a label or a generational stereotype; just...a person, with all the complexity and simplicity that involves. 

Yes, I was young and lost and confused and at least a little bit fucked up. Yes, I was old and had lost so many years, months, minutes to useless endeavours, time and energy and optimism I'd never get back. Yes, I had said and done awful things, and had awful things said and done to me. 

But that was okay. This was life, and we didn't get to type out a draft and review it thrice before finally deciding on a version we could look back on and regret. We had to do the drafting and the reviewing and the looking and the regretting all at the same time, and more often than not, nothing was so unbearably irreversible that we couldn't find a way to live with it. Awful things happened and would happen, but it was okay to be overwhelmingly, unreservedly, guiltlessly happy around the awfulness. 

And it was okay for things not to be okay. At least for tonight. 

~Sam 

To: The Universe, Re: The Boy in the Lift

It was 9:30 p.m. on a Thursday night.

I'd been at work since 8:00 a.m., in a small, musty client office located about forty kilometres further from civilization than strictly necessary, surrounded by documents that seemed to have been drafted with the express intent of exasperating some poor lawyer someday. I had just returned to my own office to wrap up the work. I walked in wearily, weighed down by three heavy bags, two dark circles, and the singular certainty of another late night, and noticed, without really noticing, someone entering the lift ahead of me. I sighed deeply to myself - the lift was too far away for me to reach before he left, even if I ran, which I was in no state to attempt in any case. I took it as another bit of bad luck on a bad day, and reconciled myself to holding my bags a little longer and waiting for another one of the lifts to come down, a complex mathematical process that could take anything from mere seconds to what felt like hours. I punched the button and got ready to settle into my discomfort, because obviously, on a day like this in a week like that, the lift was going to take hours.

Except it didn't. Instead, the light on the lift the boy had gotten into lit up almost immediately, indicating its presence on my floor, and an inquisitive head popped out - was I coming in, or not? He had waited for me! I rushed in with a burst of energy I didn't realize I was still capable of, and was overwhelmed enough by this act of simple generosity to breach the fundamental rule of awkward lift encounters: maintain silence. 

"Thank you, so much!" I breathed with, perhaps, a little more effusiveness than was strictly warranted for an act that was ultimately not much more than simple courtesy. He smiled at me, somewhat bewildered by the crazy lady with the strong emotions, and gestured that it was, like seriously, no big deal. At this point, a few things happened at once: first, and most importantly, I noticed him - his plaid shirt and his awkward smile, how wonderfully unassuming and kissable he was.  Second, I realized that I had crossed the point of no return - there were no fucks left to give, he was a cute guy, and I'd already painted myself crazy, so I might as well go ahead and find out if he worked here, if I was ever going to be able to see him again.

No, he said, in a voice and accent as wonderfully attractive as the rest of his being, even as the words themselves shattered my fantasies, he'd come to visit someone, but did I work there? Yes, I replied, and gestured ruefully at my office - because my floor had arrived, and evidently Hollywood had misrepresented the amount of time available for an elevator meet-cute, so all that was left to do was wave goodbye and watch him be whisked away from me.

I never even knew his name.

They tell me, in Bollywood movies and commencement speeches and WhatsApp messages, they tell me that if you want something enough, the universe will conspire to bring it to you.

I don't know if the boy in the lift was a result of all the wanting I've been doing, the personification of everything the universe thought I needed based on my vague, overwhelming yearning; or if he's to be the object of my wanting, to be mine when I've fulfilled the quota for desire and wanted enough to warrant such intergalactic intervention.

I don't know if this should be a "thank you" or a "please" - if it's time to be grateful and count my blessings, or to be greedy and focus my desires.

I do know, however, that the most likely outcome is that I'll go to sleep, drown in some work, and forget that such an encounter ever happened, that it had magical nuances that went far beyond "a cute guy held the lift for me and now I want to marry him".

Which is why, before I forget, here I am. With a thank you. And a please?

~Sam