I don’t think I can afford to live in California. This realization is closely tied to the fact that I also am skeptical about if it’s worth it to live in California.

Am I willing to do anything to stay here? Am I willing to pay too much money to live with strangers for a room and a bathroom knowing that I could be paying less somewhere else, if I only left the state?

I’m freaking out about things that are still a little too soon to be freaking out about.

Time for bed.

I’m behind on my writing - adjusting to a job like the one I have is difficult because while I’m learning a lot, the routine is suffocating me. What an idiotic thing to complain about, I know. I’m feeling overwhelmed about the fact that I have no plans for August, and am torn between desperately searching for a job, and running away to somewhere. I’m not really the running away kind, in the way that I’ve been daydreaming about, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s just because it’s always what I’ve told myself. I’m feeling stuck, and tired, so writing hasn’t been on top of my to-do list these days. My apologies.

In any case, behind on my writing means I didn’t get around to writing about Loving Day, which was last week. A belated Happy Loving Day to you all. The Washington Post featured a great article - “What Mildred Knew” - that is definitely worth reading if you haven’t yet.

The other day I got asked a question from one of my best friends, an Indian American living in Texas, a friend whose life is a stark contrast from my own.

“So have you just given up on finding an Indian guy?”

Where could I begin? I couldn’t explain to her, someone who grew up in a context where there were only two kinds of appropriate men to date (Indian-Hindu; White), that it wasn’t that I’d given up on anything, that I’d been struggling with the guilt of dating white men for over three years now. And I couldn’t find the right words to tell her that it had both nothing and everything to do with race.

I hadn’t sworn off white men exactly - more like men altogether - but I had definitely decided that the problems of my past relationships could have been attributed to ignorance about white supremacy, white privilege, and the loaded histories and contexts behind relationships between white men and women of color. The risk of being exoticized and fetishized, of feeling colonized as a body, as an individual, could be avoided if I avoided relationships, specifically relationships with white men.

Well I think we all know what happened then, so I won’t bother reflecting on that again (moving on is hard. but that’s an entirely separate, and probably password protected post for another day).

I went to a wedding on Saturday night, tagged along with some family to this big North Indian Bollywood-esque wedding. There were probably four hundred people there, all dressed up, and at the head of the reception hall, the bride and groom sat like awkward cake-toppers on a throne that resembled a prom-photo backdrop. I was the only young woman with short hair, and the only woman who wore black (which, at a Hindu wedding is perfectly acceptable, though apparently not as appropriate as Barbie pink or Vegas teal).

As one of the groomsmen prepared to make a toast, he turned to the groom and began: “Dude, I always thought you would do something stupid, like marry a Chinese girl, and have to learn to use chopsticks or something. But at the end of the day you did the family right, you did us all proud, by marrying within the community.”

I was seething. is that the right word? It was seething mixed with stinging tears mixed with having the wind knocked out of you. I was all of those things, but managed to maintain my own plastic expression as half the audience clapped ferociously over the notion of “doing the family right.”

My parents did not “do their families right”. They married out of communities. They married out of religions. They married out of region. My mother was a triple threat to my father’s community and vice versa. The women in my father’s community felt they had been done wrong, that my mother had “stolen away one of the good ones.” My mother’s parents were progressive enough at the time to be supportive of the marriage, but they both dealt with the consequences of their daughter’s choices from their families. And while they were legally allowed to get married in India, I don’t doubt that they paid in other ways for their “betrayal to their own kind.”

My friend has dated exclusively Indian men. She is a perfect candidate for the kind of narrative her community strives to fulfill - a beautiful, intelligent woman who is looking forward to a life in the suburbs with children and maybe a dog. She and her husband will play boardgames on the weekends with other North Indian couples, and their social life will revolve around Indian functions, poojas, and weddings.

This just isn’t the way I grew up. I feel no real connection to South Asian culture - my own parents never drove culture into me because they too couldn’t handle the other aspects that come with it - the moderate politics, the gender divided functions, the classism, and prejudices.

So I told her the truth in the best way I knew how. No, I hadn’t “given up” on Indian men - the ethnicity of my partner just doesn’t matter as much as his politics - his racial and gender politics, his ability to negotiate through the dynamics that are bound to arise in being with a woman of color. Meeting straight men like that isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel, it turns out. More like standing blindfolded in a lake trying to stab at fish with a fork. So I’m in a privileged position not to have to limit myself to “Indian Men,” I’m not going to. There is a part two to this, about my failure as a candidate for the seemingly prototypical Indian man, but that’s really another issue altogether…

Until next time.

Ok folks. It’s time to admit to you all and to myself that the reason why the posts have been written in scattered sentences is because they haven’t been REAL. They haven’t hurt as much as they ought to have. Time to delve into the relationship. There are two posts, and the second one is about white men, and how I’ve hated them and dated them.

But this one is about one boy in particular. And me.

It wasn’t really a relationship in that it had some real boundaries - the timing for one. The inevitable end, the expiration date, which I grew to hate, but also was the very thing that kept me from running away from the whole two month affair in the first place. I refer to it as an affair because at times it is how I felt about it - I snuck out at night, when the work was done, when my friends were away, when the meetings were over, when the library closed. I was struggling to keep my head above waters poisoned with guilt, with betrayal, with hypocrisy. After all, I was the girl who held steadfast to spitting on the people who fell for the “opposite attracts” slogan, who hated hearing about “those cute stories” - I associated partnership with those narratives. It was an affair because I didn’t want it to be public -  too complicated. I hated the thought of being eyed up and down by a group of women I didn’t know, a group of men I didn’t respect. Even more, I feared the reaction of the people who were close to me. I kept telling them, It’s just a fun little thing. It isn’t a big deal. We have nothing in common. What could I possibly grow attached to? Besides, we’re graduating.

The truth is, I went kicking and screaming down the slope of emotional attachment. I didn’t even think it was possible to care about this boy, until it happened. I found my seemingly steadfast barriers coming down, as I began developing more trust for someone that even now, I sometimes feel I barely knew. For the first time, I felt safe without feeling dependent, found myself not having to do the work for two people. He could read me well, he knew when there was something on my mind, and let me talk about it, and yell about it, and cry about it. I had baggage. He knew it. He waited while I tugged it along, and for the first time, I didn’t feel the need to apologize for it. This last part is important because it was a testament not to his patience, or maturity blah blah blah. No, it is a testament to the fact that I finally learned to stand my own ground, to yell ‘take it or leave it’, and to not let myself get into a situation where I felt trampled on. And I met someone, at a time when I least expected it, who I want to believe really understood that, and took it.

(Once someone asked me what remained so terrifying about relationships, with regards to my abusive past one. Besides the fact that I was verbally abused and emotionally wounded? I worry I’ll end up in it again. That I haven’t learned. That I’ll be tested, and I’ll fail. She said, “You aren’t 16 anymore. Forgive yourself. Forgive that girl. She was so young.”)

I miss the warmth, the comfort, the trust, the late nights. I miss the intimacy and the conversations. I don’t want to rebuild those things all over again with someone. It seems too hard. My inner cynic tells me “lightening doesn’t strike twice in the same place, so buck up woman.”

I haven’t forgotten about the reasons why it stopped being feasible, why it would have been impossible, why it couldn’t work. I haven’t forgotten about our differences, and I haven’t ignored the realities of our dynamics - the racial gendered and contextual ones that would probably have surfaced and spilled over our ability to negotiate through them. And trust me. I’ve thought about it. It would’ve been too hard, too impossible. The people around me remind me of those seemingly irreconcilable differences, remind me of my worth - he was too lucky; you were too good for him. It was about the timing more than anything else. What did you even have to talk about? All fine. I hear that. It’s probably all true.

But I think there was a little more to it. I really think there was. And I’m still dealing with the moments where I look back and wish our little affair had had a little more time, a little more space, a little more opportunity for continued feasibility.

There it is. Ouch.

There are a lot of things I want to be writing about, really. There are a lot of posts that float around in my head, about visiting the office today for my summer job and being assigned a cubicle and how I spent the remainder of my tour panicking in my head. There’s a post somewhere in the air about having graduated, about moving back home for a while, about the anxiety of nostalgia and of having to pick myself up and find another job in two months. There’s a post somewhere about finally committing to learning how to drive.

But the truth is, I’m in that headspace where all I want is for the posts to pass through my mind - writing them down is too hard, requires too much formulation. It always strikes me as interesting that although much of my blog has been dedicated to my personal feelings about things, I’m actually quite bad at dealing with feelings. It isn’t that I’m not emotional, I just always fear the emotional, and when it washes over me, be it through nostalgia or tears or anger, I dread it so so much.

Maybe over time, the processing of the larger things will happen on their own - or maybe they won’t need to be processed. Maybe time will just make those larger things seem more manageable.

In the few days I have left before I begin working full time (my first post-graduate Clark Kent job!), all I really truly want to do is write posts about heartbreak*. Because that’s the one thing I can’t seem to do enough processing about. I’ve mentioned it before but the reality is that I can’t seem to be patient about moving on - I always expect myself to do it so quickly. It’s not even been two weeks.

It happens a day at a time though, and part of the moving on means moving forward and trying not to let your mind take long vacations with nostalgia into the past. Trying not to romanticize the experience but also not coating everything with carefully-crafted cynicism. My attempts to not get caught in nostalgia have been fine during the day - but at night I’ve become the victim of those dreams that don’t feel like dreams. Last night I woke up in a panic because I thought my phone was ringing; thought it was one of those late night calls from a friend who wanted to hang out. I could feel that slightly giddy feeling in my sleep, of walking across campus to complain about classroom dynamics in a room filled with cigarette smoke and good music. I don’t miss college, that should go without saying, but I do miss the people, and sadly, I know I’ll miss the work at some point.

I’m awful at goodbyes which is why I just avoided them all this time around. I only said one, it was awful, in that overly emotional and vulnerable way, and I said it because it was the only uncertain relationship that remained after graduation.

I’m trying not to think about it.

It isn’t working.

Rest assured, readers (if there are still readers left after the recent stream of random inarticulate crap), I will soon get back to a stream of posts that actually make sense to people other than myself.

* I should clarify, that by heartbreak, I refer to the broken heart of a brown woman whose support network of nearest and dearest friends has now become spread all over the country, even out of the country. That support network was made up of the best of friends, the loudest of voices, the strongest of hearts, and yes, even a boy at one point. Just in case we all thought I meant heartbreak in the more conventional sense…