Everyone who gets to know me would, by default, realize that for a long time I have been by myself; and that I don’t know how to live any other way.

Here, I am very careful to not choose the word alone because I am on a quest to change the tone of narrative in my head. Besides, I haven’t been alone, no, even when I have been by myself. I have been away, aside, afar—but even in those moments there have been people around.

My parents, for one, have spent all these grueling years trying to understand me and my multitudes that surface, hide and resurface more often than they should be made to appreciate. Neighbours would ask, Nanu ghara chaina? Aachkal dekhdina ta, and my parents would just tell them kotha ma cha, kothai ma bascha, baira katai jadaina— I’m in my room, I’ve been in my room, I don’t go anywhere. For hours, days, weeks, I’m in my room and I am able to stay within the small space between four walls because my mind is expansive. I have never been a physical being, after all. I live in my mind.

I could be classified as a hermit crab. An alien-looking thing that finds home in its own shell. The extent of that shell has always been very small to an outsider. The possibility that it could ever expand, even just to house a partner, has been null forever—or that’s what I’ve been made to believe by my vices.

I worry sometimes, if the hermit leaves its shell what would happen to the shell? Where does the home go without the inhabitant?

The home comes along, in my case.

I live within myself more than I do in the outside world. I think that is also a reason why I am adjustable—I can make a house out of any given space, make a bed out of every surface—because safety and warmth has always been something that I source from within and carry along, rather than seek from the open world outside. This realization was a slow one, it crept up on me from behind but it wasn’t an unkind threat. It was looming, but never obvious.

The fact that sometimes I’m not there, I’m not here. I am, I want to be. But I cannot be fully present unless I am by myself. What do you call it? What is this, if not homesickness? A continuous need to be hyperindividualistic, be by myself, otherwise I don’t feel like myself. Homesick for a place that is within me.

On homesickness

I have always thought houses should be portable. Ever since I was a kid, I thought I would one day create a foldable house. Collapse its walls onto itself and fold it into a neat two-dimensional layer that I could chuck into a bag. I used to hope the future would hold portable homes and I could carry mine like any other cartoon character with their motifs.

When I moved away, that was when I truly wished someone would find a way to teleport places to people instead. A little castaway, a little lost, I was shattered at having to leave my little crab shell. I felt naked, visible, so seen without that covering to hide behind.

So if I can’t make room for another in my shell…is it so terrible? Does that mean I will be left to my vices forever? Yes, most tell me, yes.

My coworker and I were sat outside one day this summer when the flowers were still blooming and pollen was everywhere. The days now have turned colder, the rain doesn’t drizzle, it pours, and misty darkness spreads over the day earlier.

I cradled my water bottle within my two hands because I feel empty when I have nothing to hold. She was smoking, as usual, pushing the nub into an empty-of-liquid full-of-nubs can of coke. By now I am convinced half her blood is caffeinated cola, her lungs are tar, and her soul is far away. Her eyes are sharp but forlorn too. Even as she sits beside me every day, she is back in her home in Romania, painting her nails in her garden and singing into a mic from the roof to wake her neighbour-friends up. Is that what I look like too? I wonder.

“No is okay,” (Translation: It is not okay) She vehemently shook her head at me. I can never look at people when they’re seriously confronting me about something. “No is okay (for) someone (as young) as you to be alone like this. This is life? Fuck that.” Her English always comes out sharp and bitter when she curses. All things sharp and bitter nip at my skin, swoop inside my flesh and take a jab at my heart. I couldn’t look at her.

She calls herself my Romanian mother. She gripes like a mother would— it fills my heart.

These days, I’ve realized, I look for a mother in everything. Maybe I just miss mine.

A few days ago after I moved into my new place and met my housemate’s intimidatingly kind and composed mother. When she left after a few days and hugged me goodbye— I couldn’t help but tear up a little in secret. Every time she would look at her daughter, a softness came over her features. Her already composed demeanor shifted into something cloudy. Their heads on each other’s shoulders, a comforting pat on the back here, a soft caress of the hair there— such easy display of affection, such comfort in loving someone.

It’s all something I hadn’t had with my own for a long time. My teenage was not kind to us. We’re still trying to repair everything we broke between us.

I’m just not greatly expressive about my affections; and when I am, it is difficult for the other person to interpret. As it stands, I haven’t been a very great pretend-child to this current dynamic with my coworker either.

Romanian-mother continues: “I know what you think,” Her whats and yous mesh together like they are singular, it sounds like whatchu. “No good people these days, your age.” Her no is always nu.

I had bluntly laughed it off then, but what if there’s another hermit?

What if I find another crab in a shell and instead of inviting this crab into my shell, or leaving mine to go to it, what if we just create another covering, over the both of us? A bigger shell that can fit both of our shells and so much more. Maybe we could create a world where unspoken affections aren’t cowardly— they’re just understood in silence.

I also had a conversation with my housemate last Friday night. I asked her if physical intimacy, skinship in general, ever gets too much sometimes, even when you’re in love with the person. I wanted to desperately know if what I feel is normal, that it’s okay to not want to touch someone else most days—not without a layer of clothing in between at least. I wanted to know if a relationship can last, without skinship. I felt like a fool asking and wondered why my curiosity always wins over shame.

The conclusion? I haven’t gotten there yet. Maybe it is impossible to want a type of love, a relationship, where we just let each other be. Where we are more companions than lovers. In which we have our own orbits and we just meet in the middle somewhere. A small collision.

My idea of a perfect relationship dynamic must be skewed, because every time I ask people hoping they would validate this image I have formed in my head about my ideal “relationship”, they tell me the opposite of what I hope to hear. That’s why I don’t know how to be around people who fit in each other’s lives as puzzle pieces— is that fateful union or created convenience? I can never tell. All I see when I look at two people who love each other, in any way, is an ocean.

I can’t swim. When I’m by the sea, all I can do is pick a bench by the sandy beach, sit and sigh. I am afraid of the water, even though waves are beckoning.

On promises

Talking about the sea always takes me back. When I was prepubescent, I saw the sea for the first time in my life on my first out-of-Nepal trip.

Goa—a breezy piece of land at the edge in some south bits of India. Not an island but felt like one. It was still much untouched and pristine back then, almost 15 years ago. When I think back now, it seems like another life that I’d lived and forgotten. Remembering is the only way to relive it, but sadly, memory fails me nowadays. Whatever I remember, I remember them as scenes from a film.

A run down moped that my father drove without a helmet—helmets weren’t really a thing in south India, I’d found out then. It was a different world to me, the first taste of risky freedom. If I reached out with my tongue into the atmosphere, I could taste the salt from the sea, the sweetness of my mother’s happiness as she laughed from behind me on the moped. Sandwich filling is what I called myself—all the goodness between two slices of bread (the slices being my mother and father), everything that held us together in that moment. Us three, on a moped, in the church adorned streets of a humid Goa, without helmets. And none of it was illegal.

Joy wasn’t illegal, laughing with my mouth and heart full wasn’t illegal and my parents turning to each other and sharing a big smile that reached their eyes wasn’t illegal. Goa was the first time I felt freedom. I felt it so deep within me, that liberty, that if you cut me open today and rake away all the flesh, it would be etched onto my bones. Back then, I could see this mark of freedom as tan lines from my skimpy swimsuit on my body.

So much water to be unafraid of, so much air in my asthmatic lungs, so many smiles.

Our heads were always full of salt, all seven days. Whenever I raked my fingernails through my dried hair after a dunk in the sea, they would be filled with white salt flakes. I’ve never loved water since—that was the only time when water didn’t feel overwhelming, when it didn’t feel like an ick and felt like something to glide on instead.

On our last day I made a friend at the hotel swimming pool. All the best things come suddenly, leave and never visit again, but maybe we remember them in such good regard because they stay so short and leave to never return.

Sometimes I still think of her— it was nice to have a friend at last. At school I was an alien, but in Goa nobody knew I sat beside the rubbish bin in class with the only other shunned kid from class. In Goa, I was human. In Goa I was just another kid and I could make friends. And I did. For a whole day, I made a friend. I felt like I fit into the world that day, I felt normal. I wonder where she is right now. If we were to trace back the steps of my sexuality crisis, I think that’s where it would take us. That squiggle-shaped swimming pool.

When we left, I promised the wind, the waves, and even grains of sand that I’d be back again. Funny how the promises I am sure I can keep end up as ones I never fulfill. I never set foot in that land again, despite countless attempts. To keep a promise is to fulfill it before you make it. Before you say it out loud, I know now.

I remember bringing a jar full of sand to give to Aama who I knew would probably never get to see the sea—no, not like I could, not the ones I would go to. I even picked out seashells, encased them and brought the jar home. When I gave it to her to open, the sand smelled putrid. I wanted to bring some of the sea along too, so I had filled the jar with wet sand right from the edge where the land met the water. Magical, isn’t it? I had thought that, at most, the sand would dry out. But incubation was not a concept familiar to me; and who could convince me of evaporation, of any kind of disappearance, from things I’d loved? Losing was never in my mind. Grievance was just a stranger— could’ve been riding the moped next to ours.

On collisions

I have been in quiet company with myself for 22 years and 7 days now. How could I ever expect someone else to understand this bone-deep need of hermitage? How ever could I subject someone to such terrible, lonely love—which is the only one I can offer? I will disappear into myself very often— why should anyone wait for me to get back? Why, when I cannot guarantee to make them the home I come back to? These are all questions I am constantly plagued with when I think of myself in the context of romantic love. One that lasts into marriage, through grief, and creates a home that lasts through some storms. I am always quick with a rebuttal when I am placed in the context of romantic love: Mero lagi haina. It’s not for me, I told my mother on a call.

But the idea of love, as I age, changes. Evolves along.

At eighteen, I thought love would be all encompassing, a raw bud, a sudden thunder strike, a lavish storm that leaves nothing within me unchanged. I thought a lover would be someone unafraid, someone who would grab my hand in public spaces, someone who would laugh with their eyes and wipe at my teeth when I smile if there’s a little something there. Maybe the girl in a long white skirt at my favorite bookstore in Thamel, or the guy standing next to her. I thought love could be someone I grew up with. It was bitterly platonic yet all-consuming. It was music and arguments and learning through trial-and-error each other’s boundaries and routine. It was to realize that it wasn’t love at all.

At twenty-one, love was independence, love was everything I touched, everything I could see and appreciate— love was a form of gratefulness. Of life itself, of myself, and the existence of everything that exists. Love was me walking through a park with a dear friend. Sharing a kiss with a stranger in an unfamiliar place. Watching a squirrel skitter along on a tree. Ripping into a bhogate with my bare hands and dipping it in sugar and spice. Love wasn’t just a feeling I felt, it was something I was pregnant with. I thought it was something to radiate, something to grow in me. It was within, and it felt fleeting too because one day, it would have to be birthed out.

At twenty-three, I think love could be a part of my daily routine. As simple as breathing in air. As simple as internet in everyday. A ripe fruit. Or the plant of aloe vera I own that sits at my desk and soaks up any sun that visits through the blinds. Love feels less burdensome of an idea now— it’s how I imagine love should be. Its prowess is the same, intense and burgeoning, but the weight has lifted tremendously. It is easier to carry when I am in love with myself first. It is easier to love someone else when I know who I am, what I love, what I want. In knowing myself, I can love others. At twenty-three, after 5 years, I am thinking maybe it’s time to give it all another chance.

I enjoy my own company far more than I would anyone else’s, but in moments where I feel like a mature person who has grown into sensibility, I feel I could do everything I have ever feared— to love without being afraid, to love when people are watching, to enmesh our orbits.

My deep hermitage is no longer a keep-out sign, it is just the way I live. A home I own that is within myself. I welcome others, I welcome you. I welcome love and I welcome friendship. Maybe we could build a bigger hermit cave in which all of us can fit, and then I could show you— the calmness with which I love and why it feels like a collision.

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