Today they found some chocolate sticks in my bag. I bought it earlier because I was feeling lousy and sick, and thought I needed a sweet snack to keep myself going. This time, he asked me if he could take it. I said...its mine...because I really did feel like I sorta need it..and I said you can take one but I need the rest.  In hindsight I don't know why it was such a big deal...maybe automatic response to rightaway reject because they always try to take things they see. He left with it to help me put my bags on my table. I went back to the table and it wasn't there. They took all of it, I thought. Oh well, I thought...at least this time he asked. I thought back to the times he took my stuff without asking. And the times he seemed to take it lightly when I talked to him about it. At least he asked this time, I thought. That's progress .

It wasn't until layer when I was about to leave for the day that I saw it...The box of chocolate sticks, in my bag. They left it back there after all.

...

I've been thinking I should journal our journey together, me and him, Sasi. I first had him last year, 2013 in my remove class. He was so difficult, maybe my most.difficult student at first. Couldn't sit still. Ran around. Head of pack he led the others to disruption. Loud.

Maybe about four or five months into the year, he stole my blue tac and chewed on it. I had to ask him to spit it in my hand. I was out of my wits with him.

Once I talked to him at the balcony.  Then I realised his bm or English was poor....A lot of times it was that he couldn't understand or communicate with me more than anything. I asked him about his background. ..His father had died, about a month before. He was real then, I could see the sad in his eyes. It was then he became to me a human, not just an annoying kid.

I noticed how he liked drawing,  colouring. He became much better towards the end of the year.

Somewhere mid year I trusted him and he took my token gifts...silly little key chains that were meant for them anyway. I thought incredulously. ...why would you.steal something that we meant for you in the first place? Word got out and he got caned for it, and his friends.

I took them bowling,  then to read at my house. McDonald's for him for the first time. First time I saw his home. I thought. ...This is the epitome of the student we had joined to serve. Capable,  smart, with potential...but underprivileged.  Lacking opportunities.

He was one of the 8 in class who got the minimum 20 I set on the mid term paper...A difficult paper. I took them to KFC. ..frost. time for him. He asked for three pieces of chicken and only ate one. A few days later I asked him if he went home and ate the other two. He gave it to his mom. I knew it.

Sasikumar is the reason why I will stay texting next year.  I don't want our friendship to end.

Perhaps after the raging waves have subsided, and all the blinding passions have ceased; and all desires, and all ideals suspended in a vacuum to test for gravity: I will find myself on the other side, whole. Substantial. I will recognise myself as someone I had glimpsed, as a dream that I'd known as a child.

On ageing

Feeling 'Time', tangibly :

When you find in yourself bitterness - at someone else's happiness, at something in the past, at something you want but cannot have. Departure from innocence. A great divorce.

When you hear yourself warning a young girl, and you hear your voice as an echo of what older people used to say to you when you didn't understand, with all the 'myths' of danger you took for the bothersome worries of adults, and you see them looking at you how you used to look at them, with the childish innocence of pure things - a departure between ideas of pure love and ravaging sex.

When at first glance of teenagers you glimpse them through your own teenage eyes and feel within a flutter of curiosity that you used to feel for wanting to get to know your peers - and you realize these are children, you are a whole generation apart - your feelings and thoughts are worlds apart.

There is no reward.

Perhaps it isn't about a reward. Perhaps it is just about the sheer tenacity of showing up. Perhaps it is about drumming the same effort, day after day, in dogged pursuit. Perhaps it is about just showing up for your part of the work everyday and getting back up and doing it again the next day. Perhaps it is all about the daily push and trudging. Maybe in trudging there is courage to never give up, strength to keep showing up even when things seem to be falling apart.

We hung out around the wooden table, sitting on our plastic chairs, smoking and playing cards. This guy showed up, he looked a lot like Adam Duritz. He was with an older man and two women. He had an air of familiarity. He answered calls all business-like as he dealt the cards. He lit a joint which we shared, passing around the table. He started talking about some Nazi supremacy agenda conspiracy theory. I thought it sounded like nonsense and had the urge to leave. I left, retired to my room. The next day, the old wise one Rico confirmed it. He is clever, too clever for his own good and sometimes talks nonsense which people buy. I didn't buy it, something in my skin told me this is that much bullshit I needed to get away from. I was glad that once again, I made sense, even when I didnt.

But I must stop living as if it is for other people.

I must stop doing things just because I think others would approve, and start doing things regardless of what people think. I must stop shifting my life around fear - fear of what people think, fear of failure, fear of being vulnerable. Because, true - while this is how you have lived your whole life - while you have been wired to drop your eyes and your gifts at the gaze of others... your tomorrows are wide open. They have not yet been written. And if you do not set yourself free, you will die in fear.

This fear has caused your life to be a trap. It has caused you to be lonely. It has caused you to be inefficient, unproductive. It has caused you to enter depraved, desperate relationships. It has caused you to be self-destructive. It has caused you to shift your feet, head hanging low, under the weight of a big black cloud. It has caused you to be silent when you should have been speaking out. It has caused you to tie your arms down when you were moved to act. It has caused you to be deeply, deeply unhappy. Deeply unsettled. It has caused you to engineer everything you've had the urge to attempt to stay small, to stay below the radar; it has caused you to crumble and bolt the moment the opportunity for greater things appeared.

If you keep shifting your life around these lines of fear, you will die unfulfilled.

Re-set yourself. SPEAK. SING. WRITE. DANCE.

DARE. Make DARE your motto, not 'what if''. DARE, and fail, maybe, but the DARING is success in itself. It is Courage itself. It is what 'DOING' is made of. the DARE to fail. the DARE to move inch by inch, the DARE to come within reach, and breathe, of making something happen.

But life is decidedly a charmed thing. Nothing is solid, nothing is one. Everything shifts and layers.  It is a mish mash of neat blocks of ambition scattered with messes of dreams and fears and failures. Because people are decidedly complex. We exist in shifting shapes. I am the calm exterior before 30 children. I am the crumbling mess that refuses to come out of bed, wanting to shut the world off.  I am the kind mother. I am the angry lover who would join a game of hurting each other. I am a pure soul who wants to do good. I am the jealous cheater who would in one swipe, live in destruction of everything I am trying to build. Grappling, grappling on the edges.