A real rant-post. I Grow Old.

I've realised that I blog under duress, and never have I needed to do it more than now. I have a couple of relatives staying over for a week. Growing up as a potential latchkey kid, I was routinely deposited at various places after school - my grandparents' place, my mum's uncle's place, my father's office, my best friend's house, and so on. And from what I'm told I spent the better part of my after-school hours with these two people who moved to Trichy a year and a half ago. I was close to them, and I love them the way one loves people who have been patient and persevering in spite of one's faults and tantrums. They don't have children. They have been as children with me. Only, suddenly and horrifyingly, I can't seem to stand them anymore.

There are conversations that occur that choke me with the amount of nostalgia they carry with them - what I said when I was this young, the games that I played, the stories that were told to me, the way I reacted to them. The way I ran amok around the house and demanded this, and had to have that, and how we went to the zoo and to the park, and what I liked to eat then, and what I watched on television, and how I spoke to the walls if I was angry.

They carry an image of me that they're trying to hold on to, and perhaps they see some of it in me now; perhaps they don't. Perhaps the change is too terrifying, and maybe I was a more lovable person as a ten-year old kid, but they seem to want to hold onto that. They want to know why I am not at home too often nowadays, I hated going out earlier. They want to know why I chop vegetables so fast, I used to hurt myself so often with sharp objects. They want to know why I stay up so late and why I don't write poems anymore. My quietness unnerves them, I used to be such a talkative kid. My speech disturbs them, I was so quiet sometimes when I was dreaming in their balcony. And the convictions, the convictions are the worst. I don't seem to study and I don't seem to believe in God. I listen to a very emphatic speech about the impending disaster that my future will be if I don't mend myself, and I go to my mother to stitch myself up, and she tells me that they were staunch atheists till they turned forty and started fearing death.

The strangest thing is that none of this is conclusive. They grow more disillusioned, I grow more impatient. They love a person I no longer am, and I had memories of them as people who were lovable. There is nothing I can do, really. I'm feeling helpless and down, and it's all very sad, and I'm not a self-pity person at all. It's just that I have a head cold and assignments to boot.

Also, as a reader noted, I no longer like this blog, but I'm tired of changing. As a teenager I went through none of the stress and turmoil that psychology books talk about. Now that I won't be one anymore next year, I seem to over-react to everything. To paraphrase, I'm a chronological joke.

I have some pictures that I want to put up, though. Tomorrow.