I am tired

I am tired. I want to give up. But that can not be, for the ghosts follow you wherever you go. I have done that in the past. I have walked away from situations in order to enjoy irresponsible rest. I have managed to rest a bit, but it was not well earned rest. It was like a loan, something to be returned at some later date. The loan I had taken of rest has to be paid off now. I have to start paying off that loan just when my friends have started buying folding chairs and hammocks and fast cars with strong engines. And this feeling is so terrible, that when I hear good news I don't quite know my emotion to be joy, as I know joy. It is more like sadness that I feel on receiving good news. I hope that is not ill will. I hope that is not because I regret my choices.

***

1. I have put on weight. My old black pair of pantaloons grip me on the waist. They did not before, and, my swatch strap fits like a hand-cuff. It did not, in January, when I came to Goa from Auroville. Auroville!.. I say to folk who ask me questions like," what is better, Goa or Auroville?", that Auroville is 'home'. Is it really? What is 'home'? A few definitions right away before I lose them:

1. Home is where you live.
2. Home is where you feel 'at home'.
3. Home is where you are yourself.
4. Home is where you are happy.
5. Home is a house.
6. Home is a room or rooms where you store your belongings...
7. Home is where you live with your loved ones.

***

Yesterday, my son Mir said on the phone," I miss you Charu. I wish you were here." Those two sentences have/ had a great pull on me. If not for them, I am quite unsure why I should return 'home' to Auroville. And yet, Goa is not 'home' anymore. I experience a vacant sort of emotion, an empty feeling of incompleteness...WHERE IS HOME? I wish to go home, and never venture out in the world. *** I woke up this a.m. remembering a short story I wrote in my sleep. By the time I smoked my first cigarette, it had gone. similarly, I wrote four lines in my sleep the other day. I woke up and wrote them in a book I am reading:

• Treachery grows well in western soil,//

• Vengeance thrives in Asia & East, //

• The weed of pathos all over grows-//

• It thrives even in fallow fields

Don't know the poetic worth of those lines but they seem to qualify, metrically speaking.