why i prefer my favourite writers good and dead

because then they are less likely to do stupid things that ruin their work. relationships with beloved books are as delirious as they are dogged. you know you'll love them 40 years from now, but it's in the same way that you know you'll love her gorgeous tantrums ten years from now. in the heat of the moment, we say things like forever and always. that's the only excuse really for invoking tiresome eternity: you're hot enough that you can make it work.

what you don't need after you've carefully bound a leaf in book and memory for years and years, till it's only a heart-shaped network of veins, is to find out that it's just a very cunning, synthetic imitation of a leaf. it never breathed, it's never even tasted sap. like plunging your face into a bouquet of plastic lillies. ugh about covers it.

garrison keillor did it for me. i fell more and more in love with every sad, nostalgic, and unfailingly gory tale. but turns out the man is only human. and a dumb little uptight one, at that.

he could still redeem himself, though, if he dropped dead right now.

anticlimate

december makes feelings of gladness and redundancy. christmas is lovely, hyderabad is lovely around christmas. but then i haven't much to do really. so the whole month feels like that half hour before the year turns. that doomed yet cheerful anticipation. of waiting for something that will last exactly zero seconds and draw out into exactly one word and lots of images you don't have room for.

no wonder we feel kind of stupid when the moment is here. all that stretching, tensing, squinting, and many false starts later: just one curly strip of smoke shaved off a tick-tock-tick. like a hand flung from a carousel, fingertips grazing something cool and green and lost.