Monsoonami 3

Dear M

Bitter cold - Arctic freeze has arrived in Britain! While Toronto is warmer, I am told. I would love to think that this is caused by climate change, but this is perhaps no such thing, just an English winter as it should be.

This cold is, therefore, raising my hopes for a white Christmas. The last Christmas snowfall I remember was in 2010. That was a special Christmas season for me, which started with me getting pickpocketed in Covent Garden and ended with my brother passing away on the 3rd January! This also included a very special Christmas evening to remember forever. Yet it is the snow that came to my mind, first!

This cold and the customary darkness are making me feel lazy too. I didn't do much today and fell asleep in the evening, which is unusual. It has been one of those years that tested me, and I can't wait for it to get over. And yet this psychology of imaginary ends and beginnings - what would really get over -  fascinates me. Why wait for the end of the year? Why not begin tomorrow?

Surely, why not? Except that I don't know what the new start would mean. I gave my everything to what I do now, and my world would effectively end if this ends. This is a product of love, and I carry on not just with a sense of mission but also belonging here. I know it shouldn't be this way and I spent most of the year trying to find another identity, but I am not yet there and often, privately, relapse into who I was before. I want to start afresh but waiting for a psychological boost - a calendar trick that makes me feel that way.

I have a sense of how this next phase should be. Despite my sensibilities, I have signed up for a fully capitalistic venture, but I need to steer away from this. Valuations, investors - the prison of speculation I would escape - and turn what I do into a more research-focused, educational activity! I started with taking private money and I am now committing further to that path, just that we would perhaps need bigger money.

But I also want to live a different life and surround myself with different people. After resisting for a year, I have sent out the manuscript to the publisher - a random bunch of poems from the time when I still knew how to feel. This is the life I want to live - a life where I could feel! To be surrounded by people who feel, who speak about feeling and want to see the world in all its colours and sensations! In other words, I want to escape the grey, boring, routine world that I live in.

I want to live again.

S.