Should I write "Day 1"?

Hi you,

There's every chance I do not know who you are and you do not know who I am. There's every chance you are in a better or worse mood than I am. There's every chance I'm typing all these words and throwing them into a virtual void.

Well, it's 4:15 am on a May morning, I’m in my third month of quarantine and I’ve been paying the dues for this domain for a year. Thought to myself, maybe lets give it a try. You see, insecurities start to surface specifically at night. I still haven’t googled why that happens but it is probably because nights grant us the silence we can’t always bear. You try to paint them with a show on Netflix, a set of wise answers on Quora, and a bit of mindless social media scrolling that you don’t truly require. And, even though the eeriness is calming, the riot that sets off in the brain is unexplainable. Insecurities love the dark.

There used to be a time when it was easier for me to express myself. I would just pour my heart out into notebooks. Virtual ones, of course. We live in 2020. Put it up online as a 2200 character worth of caption on Instagram, people would tell me they resonate with me and I’d write “Thank you, you’re so kind!” and bam! Problem solved. Aah, technology. Makes us do things we never thought we’d do. We hate it but we absolutely love it too. We get fed up of it but we also can never have enough. As, you can probably observe, my thoughts aren’t well articulated at the moment. I’m frequently caught wondering about things that may or may not matter, right before I sleep. Is this a sort of self-help lullaby? I am unsure. But, wouldn’t hurt to try.

I guess, what I’m trying to say is, all I knew was this one thing. One thing that kept me sane. One thing that kept me grounded, happy, and positive. It’s funny how I am 25 and know nothing else that makes me feel this way. My loved ones keep trying to tell me what would be good for me to do, what changes I can bring to my life now that we live in a world where corona exists too and what would be a good idea to pursue. They are beautifully supportive. But, I don’t know how to make anyone understand what travel meant to me. I don’t know the words to describe this emptiness I feel. I’m in no way, trying to be ungrateful to my very privileged life. I’ve never finished anything in my life, maybe except for my years school and college. And, travel had no beginning or end. It was just what it was. People, places, food, their little traditions, their vast mountains, a distant wild animal, friendships. It was a state of flow. No, It wasn’t like a river’s flow. It was more like, me, in my body, flowing almost spiritually.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that I can’t travel for a while, ad I want to use this time to find something else that gives me half the solace it gave to me. Maybe, let’s not use the word “finding”..maybe I’ll just try and manifest it, try to find joys in little things. Can you imagine I get nervous laughing in front of my parents, so I frown instead, and then a really ugly crack appears out of nowhere in between my eyebrows, on my forehead? It apparently makes me think I look angry but I honestly look like a swollen potato. It just makes me really glad that it’s symmetrical though. Also, did you know, the word “just” has so many random meanings? You can use it to amplify any short sentence. English is weird. However, we were talking about little joys. So, today, I’m proposing to myself to write these conclusion-less blog posts about my thoughts and erratic gibberish to make some sense in a world that doesn’t make sense to me right now. I want to learn how to start things and complete them, use those hula hoops lying in the corner of my bedroom, burn my fingers and shriek a little more in the kitchen. I definitely don’t want to work out when I don’t feel like and I pretty much want to smile more. I guess, whoever has reached the end of this blog, bravo! You’re a good finisher. Hah.

Okay, bye. Not yours, Srishti