Spectate

 

Someone told me recently about a fun activity they were about to do. I remarked that I had just seen it happen in a movie the previous day. They responded that they were living life while I was watching it. I think they felt the weight of their words immediately because the conversation switched instantly. But they are right. Life is passing me by. I am trying to cling on to a sense that I too am living, primarily by reading and watching movies. I am, at some level, trying to live vicariously through art. It is my way to see the world, my way to imagine a life less miserable, my way to imagine happiness. Not that all my happiness is imagined. There is a line that United fans put on their flags and banners: “If I had not seen such riches I could live with being poor”. That is how this year has felt. A glimpse, nay even a taste, of happiness that was offered to me, only to have it taken away with no path to recover it.

For half a year – but especially in the past month – I have been waiting for the day I can just home, take a shower and kick back with a cup of tea. Go ‘home’, here, barely exists outside the world of ideas. When I do imagine it, however, I am thinking of my room in the Hague. The only place I have inhabited that I also attempted to populate with a semblance of personality. There was even a gavel I meant to bring there; it did not arrive in time before the last time I left India. A minor one in a string of unfulfilled desires I left that country with. Everything I came to love in my time there has become indefinitely inaccessible. I cannot step out onto the canal and read a book again. There is no filmhouse that will show Donald Sutherland’s best works when he dies. I cannot so much as enjoy a walk without being fully aware of my surroundings and worrying about being poisoned by the air breathe. Worst of all, I do not even get to not feel like an outsider; that might have made some of this mean something.