I was in Udaipur this weekend, internet, and I got to come back by train. I don't get to travel by trains very often, my universe as I came to realise is fairly sterile. Air conditioned offices and cars and hotels and more offices and airplanes and malls and boutiques and an endless cycle of the same. The Indian Railway Experience is completely overwhelming. Especially for a claustrophobic person. Twelve hours of people right around you, over you and below you and in front of you. Twelve hours where you can feel the imprint of the skin of every person who's ever traveled in that sweaty piece of metal. I swear I could have cried. We're a nation of no space. Personal, physical and emotional. Space is a luxury with a quantifiable premium. We buy bigger cars and bigger houses surrounded by bigger lawns and put gates around our neighbourhoods to wrap ourselves with as much space as we can. We live with the people in our lives scattered all over, in different cities and countries and hemispheres. We can never have enough space. We leave and go looking for ourselves in places where we can be by ourselves, just to be able to think straight.
Internet, I'm highly claustrophobic and I've found someone who sometimes makes all the space I can lay my hands on meaningless and useless. I now find myself alone in my space, wishing I could have him so close that we're breathing each other in.
Love feels almost like a most agreeable defeat. Your armies at the doors of my kingdom. Your soldiers climbing the ramparts of my fort. Your spies among my court, your poison in my wine, your knife at my throat.