Flowers are Pressed for Time
Adulting and the fiction of autobiographies
This post is a day too late. But it was my birthday weekend, so I hope you will forgive me. As we get older, discipline is expected to arrive of its own accord, but alas. Anyway, here we are, and this post contains my reflections on nudging myself towards a more complex, deeper adulthood, and finding the courage to shape and own my story in all its nuance.
I spent an afternoon today pressing the flowers I had received as bouquets for my 26th birthday. It took that long because I had to learn how to press them while retaining their colour, and got very deep into YouTube in the process. Once and if successfully pressed, some of these flowers will end up on the cover of my 2022 journal, and some others in one of the recycled dry fruit boxes from rich wedding invitations which now contain postcards, greeting cards, ID cards, boarding passes, fridge magnets, handwritten notes, and other unrecognizable paraphernalia from the phases and cities of my 26 years. COVID gave us all new found distinctions between plans, possibilities, and actual events. It increased the gap between things thought about and things happening. I have always been what I call a broad planner- I don’t plan moments but I do plan days, sometimes months. I used to have a faint sense of time moving, steadily occupying more space like water soaking the end of a chiffon dupatta, slowly. That sense of time and space is now gone. This is not good news. It does not mean that I am living in the moment, one day at a time. It means that my past orientation is captive to inertia, and the future refuses to usher itself in. Turning 25 and then 26 during a pandemic has not yet registered, which is why concrete evidence caught in other people’s wedding dry fruit packs is a helpful repository of time passing.
The instinct which would have given birth to the concept of pressing flowers is bittersweet- the desire to catch the story in its prime, arrest the progress of a moment while it is beautiful because it all goes downhill from there. While working on my bouquets today, I separated out the spoiled leaves and wilting flowers before the chosen ones went into the book press, filtering the preserve from the present. It is this same instinct which keeps my boxes populated- a memory selected with a bias for beauty. As birthdays and boxes give way to more collectibles, I find myself thinking a lot about the stories we tell about ourselves, and to ourselves, the first drafts of older selves deposited with forgotten friends. As a first class student, drama free teenager, and a quiet, young person with no discernible drinking problems, I have never put a lot of effort into being ‘liked’. That should simply have happened, no? I have found friends on most corners, sliding into conversations, plans, cities, and groups like paprika powder. Who could possibly have a problem with that? Through school, college, university, and cities, I have invested my words into building a grand narrative to repeat endlessly, comfortably, and make it poetic enough to everyone’s liking. A flower with no need to press.
For me, growing up has meant realising that this will never be true. It has meant trying to accept that there are pockets and versions of you with other people which will be passed around, crumpled and folded, and that narrative control is an illusion. I have not been successful in accepting this yet. I can spend a very long time imagining conversations about me, without me. It is hard for me to accept that sometimes, people just slide out of each other’s ability, and everyone finds their own story to tell. There are no moral high grounds to fall from or into. Autobiographies have audiences too, and audiences have power. I have also not succeeded in accepting the vulnerability that comes with leaving a story midway. After having spent years finding comfort in beginnings, plots, characters, and farewells; sudden entrances and departures disrupt my narrative vision and its integrity. What do the other characters do with the space you leave vacant? What to do when closure must be found with two more Acts to go? Do you continue inhabiting a story you no longer like? I do not have the answers yet, but I am moving towards more complex plots and characters, and shaky spotlights. I am creating more space on the stage for unplanned exits and entrances, borrowed characters, and the chaos of a carnival. Because the only thing I do know for sure is that you must tell your story regardless of its inconsistencies. You must open the curtain.
It remains to be seen how the pressed flowers will turn out after a couple of days, but I will be picking the neatest, brightest, and most yielding ones for my memory box. I hope that will be all of them, considering I did watch the top 5 tutorials on YouTube. They will not be as bright as spring in the garden, but they will be something- a mark of an ordinary afternoon spent on YouTube and in between ordinary bouquets from people who have loved me this year. Then again, the truth is often ordinary- like a lamp left on in an abandoned building by a careless caretaker, mistaken for moonlight.
Updates from Khwaabghar
We had a lovely winter picnic at Khwaabghar where we talked about many things, like vulnerability, losing control of your story, being a public figure, sharing your writing with the world, Dal Makhani, Feminism, and much else. We ended with a question inspired by a trope in the ‘Clear Writing Community’/listeners of The Seen and The Unseen- We all contain multitudes. The question- what are two things that you believe in/ agree to which are inherently contradictory to each other?
Shoutout to The Sneaky Artist, Nishant Jain for making it to Khwaabghar, and capturing this beauty! Check out his work for some inspiration, and let the community grow!
Loved this.
Thankyou for hosting us!
Happy birthday belatedly!
I like the way you write, easily flitting through layers.