Labor Day

Exactly one year ago I boarded the flight from Kochi to Singapore (via Colombo, was thrifty back then) with all my life’s belongings in one suitcase, and starry eyes. I had arranged an apartment through an online broker (which had been vetted by my father’s friend), boarded for a night at a distant relative’s place and had my cousin sister around to help me move in. A smooth and painless transition, or so I thought back then. Unlike my friends who moved here at the same time, the onset of my reality check and home-sickness was much slower.

At the risk of coming across as ungrateful (which is not the intention), I had never anticipated exactly how mundane life can get. It is the same day on repeat, with no change whatsoever. Yeah, there is a dinner here, a cycling trip there, but those moments are fleeting. Maybe it is because my life so far had been spent in dreaming up the perfect future, with the best degrees and the best jobs, that I hadn’t planned what I would do once I had them all. Living in a distant ideal future means you never lived the mundanity of your present. The existence of this blog is proof enough of how I like to find moments, make stories and romanticise our existence. But to what end?

How do you go through this stage of life – of having completed your jawaani (even if it was barely deewani)? My sister while trying to sneak me in to her campus last month says “wear a mask, no one will believe you are a college kid cause you look 25”. That hurt, but also pointed out that I no longer am a college campus person, and haven’t been one for a year now. I am an employee – while the salary notifications don’t hurt, that does seem like a stepdown. Is the rest of life going to be this – the same day on repeat with a vacation peppered in here and there?

Again, this might be a unique problem. When talking to my best friend of 23 years (we were introduced basically in the crib), we spoke about how multiple aspects my life are so close to what I wanted 10 years ago, even to the details, that it’s hard to pass them off as coincidence. Now that I have no clear dream in front of me, I don’t know what future will manifest in itself and whether I am ready for it. How do you enjoy the present knowing every single thing you do, every choice you make might be what differentiates your current future from a totally different one? Is everything already decided by fate, or are we fooling ourselves by using kismat to justify our choices?

While today’s blog has truly been a rambling from my brain, it might be late onset quarter life crisis. Like everyone who is 5 years or more older than me keeps saying, I haven’t seen life yet. So, I decided to thank my luck that my problems are mostly superficial, and move on to the next year in this lovely city. For centuries now, people have lived beyond the age of 25, and quite happily, so I guess there is a point somewhere. My 27-year old friend is always buzzing happily with friends she is meeting, classes she is attending, trips she is going on. My 30-something colleague is 3x happier, cracking cheery jokes and nodding along to music at work (like a laughing Buddha doll) when his workaholic manager is on leave. It’s the little things, I guess.