Slow Day

 A day filled with books.

It’s the year end and it hasn’t been a great one, professionally. There have been lots of lows and some ups and every day the future is unclear. Maybe it’ll sort itself out maybe it wont and maybe I will have to really get down to working though my lows to come through. But that is not for today. Today, I have no boss around and I have no urgent (pressing) work and so, in the middle of  the work week, when I am feeling low on funds, I decided to go to the market of my youthful aspiration and entered the shop that is my most favorite of all.

The bookshop was just as always, maybe less warm – people-wise, but still the same. Stacked with books and recommendations and covers which are exciting and boring and backflaps with praises and summaries and names that are myriad and senseless and beautiful and paint a picture and it is a beautiful cover picture and there is peace with some rustling of clothes and the few shoppers' whispered words and floating heads and boxing of books for shipping and me, lost in all this, sticking to the wall of fiction and recommendation and wondering whether I should buy more books (I know I will) when I know I have too may unread books already at home and at the other home and in the car and in the office and in Kindle and the unofficial/pirated downloads. I waded my way, and as I started to read through the books that caught my fancy, whatever that might be, I started to get lost. And then I was there, within the books. And my head started to hurt because I just could not cope with the images that kept jumping in. Why was I stuck in the warm cozy room when there was so much happening, a cruise, triplets going to college, baldwin telling story of love and lust, limbs flying everywhere, old Bombay, Germans, a book written in German and translated in English by someone who sounded like she was from India while the book itself is set in old Bombay and travels through Himalayas, the story about a parisian bookshop owner which is based on the famous bookstore in paris and james joyce (why did I not buy that one, I would have liked it), and murderer on a ship with two detectives and, and, and.

I purchased two books, paid a lot for it. Went for chai upstairs and ended up having a dry tasteless cake. There was no one there except for one more lone person, even the café staff were hidden. It was too sunny and my head was pounding. And I left, I did not want to spend more on coffee and some part of me thought that the only other lone customer in the café wanted me gone. So I left, and came to office, while listening to another novel about friends working together and how real it all is, how the friendship may or may not last, but the pain goes on and so do you. Cause you have to. That is how one deals with pain, get up, work, sleep and get up again.

I came to office, having promptly forgotten the memorable line I quoted above. And started browsing more books on amazon. I almost added two of them in the cart and then stopped short and instead added them in the wish-list as I really shouldn't purchase more books, after all I purchased another one on kindle just two days back and also, I am already reading one book. About afterlife and death and the ghosts and helpers in the afterlife and the jumping timelines of being alive and being dead and its heavy for sure and its not a good story cause stories about war never are, and yet I read that while having my tea.

And now here I am. I need to wake up, its almost 2 pm and I have been doing what I wrote above since 11 Am. My meditation was not meditation at all. It was just another way for me to get lost in stories that are not mine. What will be the purpose of my life, to pass time being lost in fiction or maybe they aren’t fiction, but reality which exists in some form or another. Yet its not mine and I am fine to be lost there. Only I have to get back to work now. I need to.

I need money to buy more books. That should be motivation I guess.

But first, lets sleep cause I need to wake up.