Let me now sleep, let me not think, let me Not ache with inconsistent tenderness. It was untenable delight; we are free-- Separate, equal--and if loverless, Love consumes time which is more dear than love, More unreplicable. With everything Thus posited, the choice was clear enough And daylight ratified our reckoning.

Now only movement marks the birds from the pines; Now it's dark; the blinded stars appear; I am alone, you cannot read these lines Who are with me when no one else is here, Who are with me and cannot hear my voice And take my hand and abrogate the choice.

Sipping on coffee, as if caffine can jerk me out of this shivering dazed state, coffee I can ill afford with the income I make, each cup costing about 0.1 % of the inflow. I sit on this perched stool in front on a Mac, the one they advertised as a machine with a human face and an ajustable neck, that it can propell like a giraffe to peer into gawkers eyes like a baby. Red oaks outside have gone bare, I know that they are red oaks because granpa taught me some botany and I try to remember these facts so that I don't loose it. I don't want to sit here and cry although I suspect if I don't control myself tear will overwhelm me. Public display of grief will only distress a few others around me, so why do it? I won't, I know I won't. I have gotten good at freeze drying tears, although I suspect they will taste bitter if I try to taste them, so I won't do that either. These days I lounge around a lot in public places, I have stopped going to the sixth floor isolation on the library from where Stone Mountain can be seen. I am afraid I might go screaming out of the windows.

I have finished crying, evidence a puddle on the chair and a wet sleeve. If these tears did their therupatic function of pain leaving the body I don't recognize that beyond the dull throbbing ache that seems to be my body. I guess sometimes it gets even too hard even on the thick armour experience has bestowed upon me. I go to church every Sunday, have I lost my head? Or is this clawing at God somekind of a trick I am perpetuating on myself, the trickster tricking himself. I later justify that as the day I become sane, even act sane for a while, instead for circumbulating the campus in the cold obsessively talking to myself. And as I get to see some children and if possible later in the day watch some birds, last week it was a lone blue heron at Lullwater standing still like a Buddha, who prove the exisitance of God and silence all theological arguments, I wake up, shave, pull out clothes that my mother who wanted nothing but the best for me got in a fortnight spulgre as I was abandoning a country, something on the order of what both she and my father make in a month and go to Church, where I have to try very hard not to breakdown when the music comes on, usually written by some long dead tortured German soul.

I sometimes sit and examine myself, in the bath tub poke at the organs, the slight flabby fat tire on the stomach from eating too much and running too little, my wonderful brilliant mind which can churn out poetry and poelmics on almost everything under the sun except not knowing how how to make itself happy. And my bruised sense of self esteem which has shrunk so much that when granpa calls me pea nnumber three, to refer me as a triplet sperated by a continent and about half a century from he and his twin brother, I mentally take notes to say, oh well that describes my sense of self esteem as very well.

This morning I awoke at five, I know that fact is no big deal because a lot of people wake up at that time but because I was too tired of sleeping and I was aware of watching myself sleep and as I was standing in the bathroom, running cold water over my face I had this image of my EX no 1 standing and watching me in a Kroger shop aisle, strangers eyes taking in the loss of hair, furrows around my mouth, 700 days between this little neruotic college senior whom she was yelling at into the phone, 'hell no I don't want to marry you and I even don't want to talk to you. You don't love me, all you want me in your life is for yourself, your little private lifejacket to prevent you from sinking and to take the blame for everything that bothers you." She was right, at the end she was just a raft I was hanging onto, she was my only chance to make sense of a confusing life. With her I knew exactly what I must be doing, get a 4.0 GPA, get a 100,000 $ job after I blaze through my Masters program in a year, go to Harvard Business school, have two kids, a girl and a boy in that order and live a persumably happy life. Only if things were so easy with me, for I hadn't been normal for many years when I made her fall in love with me wooing her with searing poetry that I fashioned sitting in a roomful of unwashed eccentrics, mostly male at 2.00 am in those nights of the last semester of college, because I needed a life raft, because I wan't going anywhere as some of my more ambitious classmates were headed, MIT or IIM, the fast track to success. In quick sucession I disciplined myself enough to get in and out of two jobs in six months and after that live off my parents for about six months, they didn't say too much for they sensed my confusion perhaps and then managed to bluff myself into the best graduate program here which later turned out to be a hoax, just to spite folks around me I never took cheat sheets to exams for graduate level classes, somekind of low level copying. But she never understood this side of me, this wild eccentric side that had swore, that screamed at his parents for the slightest bluffs, that once in fury hit his own sister because she was acting dumb, that put his fist to the nearest wall just to prove how much he "loved' her, it would have been too bewieldering to her, too strange and perhaps too out of control. and after a while just too painful to deal with this crazy person. I see her watching me with a questioning look wondering how what I had become after two years?

I don't shout at my mom when I talk to her on the phone, perhaps I am too aware of the fragility of dreams that I don't have it in me anymore to take it out on her for making me live out her own fargile dreams almost a decade ago and perhaps I sense love I have denied myself in her plantive voice which asks me when I am coming home everytime I talk to her. What should I say? I have failed mother and I am too afraid now to come with this fragmented self. Or there were days in college when I drank so much that I fell down unconcious in my own vomit and then I wished I wasn't your son? Or that two days ago when a little girl of nine gave me,a stranger whom she met 15 minutes ago, a hug how much I felt her confusion of living in a world that's falling apart for her? Will any of this make sense?

This coffee which costs more than the daily wage of an average Indian has gone cold. Outside it's Sandhya, dusk. The midtown spires painted pastel red, across the square folks are walking home, I haven't cried as much in many days, the last time was in a different city when another girl whom I loved much was speaking words that I couldn't comprehend as she held me, two contradictory actions at the same time, cold and insidious logic against emotions as wet as tears on her cheeks.

Time for me to go home and sleep so that I can work later into the night.

The evening of seperation came upon me and passed on, there was just my broken heart which somehow stuck together and there was my tottering life that somehow didn't fall.

And in the assembly of these thoughts,as my body is set on fire to light the rooms of the night, clear pain as translucnet as a bright moon has somehow risen over the dusks of this exile.

And when I remembered you, all my mornings became perfumed and when you flowed through me like blood, all my nights flapped like clean wrung clothes hanging on straight lines.

I tell myself that I should wipe my heart clean but when it's time to confess, words change without violition into something different, of unwillingess to forget you.

And where have all the travellers of the night gone, O Faiz, and where was the breeze left behind and when did the morning vanish into this endless night that came after the evening.

that evening of seperation that came upon me and passed on, there was just my broken heart which somehow stuck together and there was my tottering life that somehow didn't fall.

2002:12:01 20:30 Atlanta

My translation of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's ghazal: "shaam-e-firaaq ab na puuchh aaii aur aake Tal gaii". It describes my desolate state of heart and mind this evening. Hope others are more peaceful and more at rest that I am.