It’s a long time to 9:30, I try to keep myself busy, I’ll shave and bathe. But the geyser is off and it’ll take a while before it will heat. Pour myself another cup of warm tea, make small conversation with those around.
The house is oddly designed, they used to make them like this in the early days, every room has a door into the other. Sound carries easily from one room to another and people are carried easily too. I grew up with this (only partially, growing up I did not spend a lot of time in this house), and have always been aware. But just now, since yesterday, there is a particular urgency. A tearing down of my refuge. I get the sense of the urchin, making a private life in the midst of overflowing refuse, blaring traffic, the sun shooting coals.
There is not much sun anymore, early winter is here. One morning the house turns cold, just like that and just a bit uncomfortable. There is a perceptible drop in moisture, more noticing of the wind and it’s cold with the temperature unchanged. It happens like this in the summer too just the other way round. Too many draughty openings.
Dry winters are my bane. I need moisturizer every other minute, so there is always some in my pocket, my car, my golf bag, my desk, scattered all over the house. Tiny little bottles pocketed from some nice hotel and perpetually refilled.
And I think of your skin and how little memory I have of its particulars. You need a distance, just a little. You can’t create a map without this distance. And when I had the distance I did not look, you need to look intrusively to make a map you know. And now I am suffused by you, krsna has not form just a being. So the next few days will include little interludes of map making, all forms of maps, a catalogue of tapestries painted with inks that give color without permanence and on paper that helps define but does not confine.
kalpaean 