Life with Yatri

I’ve yearned for everything I have ever known.

People, places, feelings, food, music, laughter. I’ve longed for moments I’ve lived – laughing with my best friends under the stars, our stomachs hurting and tears in our eyes, sipping coffee late on a Sunday morning in silence under a blue sky, looking out at the midnight sky on a window seat after the most perfect few hours meeting a dear friend, trying to memorise every minute of it to last me a year or longer.

I’m often caught yearning for comfort: my mother’s perfume, loud sneezes from my father, my brother playing football in his dreams while deeply asleep at three in the night, the slow sounds of my partner making poha and coffee on a Sunday morning, how I felt when I wore lipstick for the first time, how I felt when I was the happiest and saddest I’ve ever been.

A constant ache for everything that I was and wasn’t, have been and could have been, became and couldn’t become.

Some souls feel every minor thing in this world a little too much. I am one of them.

What can I say, I yearn for the yearning.

While humming “Dooriyon ki chadaron pe yaadein taankiye” all afternoon, I had a sudden realisation that I am never completely present in a moment, never fully there because I live partially in memory, partially in hope. One foot in the past, one dreaming of the future.