Puddle Vision

Do you ever get the feeling that something big is going on and you have absolutely no idea? That, not only are you, not in on it, but you also have the suspicion that you are the only one who doesn’t know?

Ok, before we write this moment off as a paranoid delusion, I think we need to consider the possibility that it is a healthy form of paranoia; normal, even. A defense mechanism of sorts that we’ve developed over the years to save us from wandering around aimlessly and getting hurt.

Sometimes, we have moments when we lose touch with what’s going on and the world has a way of drawing us back to reality back to our senses by throwing this feeling into our gut. Telling us, ‘Hey, something feels funny. Look around idiot, before something bad happens to your face.’

Let me try to explain.

Think back to one of those days – when you haven’t left your apartment in about 24 hours, no ones called your phone, the internet is so dead, and you haven’t used your voice in so long the next time you speak someone will surely ask you if you just woke up. Ok, so it’s one of THOSE days, and you step out and lo and behold the world seems to be completely deserted and you don’t run into a single human being for at least a good 2 minutes. In those 2 minutes, you are likely to experience some strange thoughts. Something along the lines of, ‘Am I extremely late? Is something going on that I should know about?’ And likely, as you reach the 2 minute mark – ‘Am I the last person alive?’

Is this an exaggeration, or are there other people out there who get this feeling. This conspiracy feeling. The kind that makes you question, like this quote– ‘Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?’

One of those life moments where you’ve been obliviously preoccupied, really just don’t know what’s going on, and something stops you, and tells you to take a look around and figure out what’s what. To break out of your thoughts and to take a look at the present. For whatever reason, to stop you from stepping off the sidewalk and twisting your ankle, or to shake you into getting a grip on reality, or to give you a fresh perspective.

A defense mechanism, to protect us from what we do to ourselves – overthink.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe this really is some form of a paranoid delusional tendency that is a consequence of the one time in grade 4 when I came to school an hour late because my family totally and completely forgot about daylight savings time. Talk about not knowing what was going on. The entire world was in another time zone and I was wandering around living in the past.

Bollywood Induced Delusions

I’ve always had an overly active imagination. And so, when the concept of Prince Charming first presented itself to me while hearing the Cinderella story back when I barely had the sense to know what an imagination was, I internalized it.

Over the years, the image of the perfect man took on a decidedly Indian spin, and the suave, blonde haired prince on a white horse was replaced with Shah Rukh Khan from DDLJ strumming his guitar.

The whole fairy tale thing really grew to become an aspect of my faith in happy endings. I had come to believe that we all have our own fairy tale, that we’re all the stars of our own Bollywood romance.

Not that I believed all this quite literally, but I was holding on to the hope that someday I would find the right guy; the kind of guy that would, if it came down to it – overcome all sorts of ridiculous challenges, one of which may likely involve some sort of fight on a moving train and somewhere along the way a song and dance routine in Sweden.

Jokes aside. Just like the stories, just like the movies, I deeply believed, there would be a happy ending to that part of my story.

And then somewhere along the way, disenchantment started to sneak in, bringing its ugly friend - doubt. As I became jaded time and again by the serious gap between what I thought Mr.Right was suppose to be and what it was turning out Mr.Rightnow really was. The average desi man I came across was falling short of the image I had. He seemed to be the product of an overly active imagination, he wasn’t in my life and he did not seem to be the other half of anyone else’s relationship.

So now here we are. It’s time to reassess the situation. Does the heroine simply close the diary and let go of the adventurous plans she had always had. Or, does she hold on to the dreams, hold on to the faith that one of these days some manifestation of that dream will come to life.

This is real life. This isn’t the movies. Our timing is all off, there is no laugh track to our jokes, there isn’t just one villain there are plenty, and there sure as hell aren’t 5 saris to wear every hour.

So where does that leave us? Do we just smother the great expectations? Do we give up on expectations all together? Or do we settle for whatever comes along, accepting that this must be it; that the writers don’t have some amazing twist planned for us in the upcoming scene.

I found this quote recently, by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love:

‘It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt — this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.’

I’m an extremely confused individual. Not only do I not know what to think about the things that I do think about. I don’t even know if I should be thinking about the things that I do think about.

But in all the soulsearching, in all the metaphors, I think that I’m going to hold on to the faith. Maybe I’m not really looking for ‘Prince Charming’, but I’m looking for the kind of happiness that would leave any audience thinking, ‘Damn that was so good, I would watch it again.’ Even if that audience is just me.