my romantic tryst with cancer

The weather is a willing muse, and the warm drizzle that touched my face on my slow walk home, felt like a treasured hand I'd always known, and always missed, stroking my face, gently, sometimes in little gusts, teasing, yet present. What is love? Is it the touch of skin on your skin as you close your eyes and sink your being into the scent and salt and hair and texture, or is it what you feel after that hand no longer rests on your face? Does love need another? Do I love you because I miss you? Or is it [love] a question, and do we delude ourselves imagining it to be an answer... The rain's been my companion at times like these, on such warm, dark and lovely nights. Ephemeral, yet tactile, fleeting yet committed. If it all ended tonight, I wouldn't mind. I heard the trees rustle, playing with the rain. They breathe, and I did. Long, deep breaths. Life is about holding your head up high- not to be brave, but to be alive. It is about feeling what you feel. I wondere

He stands on the railway platform where we've stopped en route to Toronto, his dirty blonde hair blowing on his thinning head. A child not yet two propped in the crook of one arm, and another, a year older perhaps, holding onto his free hand. His bare legs move restlessly in his sandals, telling strangers more than he might care to share. As the clock ticks, his face fills with worry. The children, who came in excitement to meet someone, have now directed that enthusiasm to the train. He scans the horizon several times over. It's only been minutes, but the sky seems to have darkened. The train begins to move on. They just stand there. Mother had decided she wasn't coming back home after all.

Tonight was seminal in many ways. Ordinary by most measures- we had a drink, took a walk, went to a club, danced a bit, left, walked home, said goodnight, retreated to our respective lives- but I feel more visible then ever. We were at Rangeela , an annual South-Asian fundraiser, elegantly nested (and somewhat marginalised) at the early cusp of Toronto's Pride celebrations. These were my people, or rather people like me. I didn't feel different, even though I never think I do, or so I tell myself. I recognised the music, the language, the vibe. There is always a place you call "home" when you use the word, and I realised tonight how much more my identity finds its feet when it feels comfortable in its own skin. I realised in being visible, how invisible I can be otherwise. My community, also has a colour, and acknowledging it is a start. Songs were played that reminded me of first blushes in my early days at University. I danced in a way that everyone else kind

I'm floating tonight... I just got back from an evening that I'll always remember. There are two authors I cherish, who weave words into the most unimaginably beautiful fabrics, who garden the universe with planets rich with stories, who make life become art, and their art becomes love... Jeanette Winterson is one of these two. Her books have been companions in the best and worst of times. She's a philosopher, and poet, and in my opinion a sculptor of thought too. She spoke of how important poetry is to make us human. She spoke of her life, and her past, and how precious the present is. "Love is art" she said, and you have to love the inside as much as the outside. There are only three endings in her opinion, "revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness", and if we all could accept and make peace with that eventuality, we could live the present with so much more feeling, beauty and meaning. My words do not do justice to hers... I got to speak with her afterwa

I'm in London, Ontario. I've just come back to my room after a long walk with colleagues of mine from this course I'm at. I feel alive when I'm here, even though this City is somewhat dead. The conversations, the discussions, the utopian luxury to even have them, unpeel the patina that seals me from myself, a flake at a time. I write this tonight in an effort to remember this feeling when I return, and relive it in how I live each day. It's not an aspiration, but a reality that I cannot deny for much longer. Change is inevitable, and I've got to think of how and when it happens now, and why... I stopped to smell the peonies in front of the campus on my way in. They were intoxicating in the darkness of the evening.

What is held in the heart is never lost....

I'm finally going through the unread emails in my inbox, all 629 of them, some dating back to 2005; and I find these lines from Renu as she was plugging away at her thesis in 2008... And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, And perhaps without knowing it You will live along, someday into the answers. - Rainer Maria Rilke