Stone Cold Home

I’m here. And it’s all easier than it should be. Which means it’s harder, really. I must create my own drive and deadlines. Blah blah. Drive and deadlines are dead. Ignition blown.

I’ve been comfortable. I’ve been bored with how familiar and American it all is. But alas, the small space that exists between comfort and terror, one must make a living in that gray area between, expanding that territory to the largest stretches of interest and fascination.

I’m thrilled, really, at how doable it all is, how much I can be myself. The self of me is welcomed here. I’m the right amount of spoiled for these people.

I was confused about the bucket showers with the lightbulb inside the bucket to heat up the water, the “geezer.” I was confused by the 4-year-old building that has somehow become so run-down in its 4 years of existence. The solid stone structure that was never fully finished. Sloppy paint jobs, crumbling cement, scratched walls that have gone un-scrubbed. I love it. It’s like, hey, we had the big plan for an interesting and extravagant structure, we made the solid structure, but let’s not clean up our equipment. Let’s not wipe it down and clean it completely. We did such a good job, we can walk away now and get lunch and leave our equipment lying out.

I’m thoroughly smitten with the pale pink facades, the symmetry and swirls and 70s deco, hot summer architecture.

“Finally being here.” Let’s not speak of it. I didn’t know how to talk to her and her friend completely that first night, but I was thoroughly impressed with them. And I didn’t feel the need to feel completely comfortable; it’s too early to feel completely comfortable. It’s not my place yet. I was pleased with the unease.

And that first night, when it came time to envision a sense of “home,” the first images to pop into my head were my previous hours on the airplane, being overfed and nurtured on Qatar Airways. Alone and sleeping, and smiled at by flight attendants from the comfort of my own private seat. Nothing was expected of me.

I’m a presence here now. The much-awaited American colleague. Yet nothing is really, really expected of me, and I’m treated with the curtesy of someone thoroughly valued. But overall, I love the pressure of what we should be here doing. Saving education.

She is great. She is perfect and she is chill and hardworking. And harsh and down for dirt. She has something to say about everything and I need that in a friend.

I am half the weight of pushing us to do great things. But what a task!

At the end of the day, do I really just think about myself? My writing? My sense of self?

I’m here now; I’m on someone else’s time frame and dime?

Yet shall we never live like that. May we never feed ourselves off of someone else’s pressures.

Long live the personal pressures and awareness, the precision that only you know about, that is the truest means to becoming stronger.

If you sit back for long enough in a meeting, and let other people make decisions, and get lazy about completely understanding what it is they are doing, and get lazy about relating your point, and get lazy about correcting what you think needs correcting, and say “let them handle it, let them have this.” Well. Your disconnect becomes greater than you ever imagined. You’re lost and cannot intersect in the conversation at all.

You’re jealous of the intern and her photography and interests that she pursues. She is the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen. And all of my talents that I thought I had, start to crumble on the sidelines of non-existence.

Upon moving to India, I looked back to who I was when I lived in Paris for 4 months, at the age of 19. I had some worry that, in India, I’d become that fomo idiot college girl, who only looked forward to pain de chocolats and football Saturdays in America. My thoughts spent on the boys I left behind.

Here in India, presently and currently, I mainly look forward to completing my potential. Our potential. And that’s beautiful as hell. But I cannot, CANNOT, take the lazy mentality approach in it right now. I cannot let other people handle things.