Chatting with the 70 year old minibus driver, buying tangerines and starapples, breathing..

"Enjoying my old age"
The bus is empty , oldish and I stumble into the front seat. Pain all over the body from the stress and poor mental health. There is a KFC bag on the dashboard and a drink. Most of me wants to sit down and dwell in the dark clouds and wait on the bus to move off. I had messed up in the caregiving and the patient had to go to hospital unnecessarily. The moon is about and I am trying to work with the moon. The tiny part of me though..

"So, this KFC fuh whoever sit down in dis seat?"

Driver laughs. Straggly gray hair , glasses kind of half way down his nose, cap.

"Nah , this is mine. You know when you are elderly and people feel they have to buy something for you. "

"Man you lucky!"

"I am enjoying my old age.. you see these glasses, I can drive without them... I am 70.."
The man has a nice tone of voice, nice smiling tone of voice. "this i use for pain' he shows me the bottle of shilling oil. And when I get headache.. he has a card of paracetmol in the door of the car.

"We talk about when he used to drive a fast car.."I used to tek a beer and drive fast with it.. "..
what happened ot it
"My wife tell me to get rid of it because it gun kill me.. so I had to sell it.."

The man talked more of the race car days. Nice talk, no regrets of selling the car to stay alive for his wife. 


Tangerines and star apples

I am stumbling to the ice cream place. I want to drown my sorrows in ice cream. I see the stand with the pile of golden tangerines and purple almost black star apple. In my head I am thinking of the ice cream and that the cost of a pile of tangerines is the same as a scoop of the ice cream. I am feeling guilty. I walk past the stand, and then come back. I buy them. The man and woman give me a look like they are not sure about me. I am not sure about myself either. 

Vidya vidya..
Vidya vidya.. I hear as I cross the road and I turn back and my hand finds itself in the hand of a woman leaning out of the driver seat of a van. I barely see her face. We half embrace and share the hey how you doing.. great to see you. She is nicely dressed.

I don't recognise her, but my mind is too muddled to do the thing where I have been explaining to people that in the anxiety about the present, I have forgotten nice smiling faces from the past.

Earlier in the day another conversation .. Mr Vidya. the woman said smiling in an nice way and I chatted with her a bit even though my mind was working on other things and I could not find the mental energy to locate her.


I hear my name more than once coming through the fog and I turn and see two women I like. I stop and chat with them..nice short chat. I come home and realise that one of the women had emailed me earlier to say the moon time like it been bothering her too.

Another woman I know who is nice to talk to walks with me a bit and we talk about work , a work I had given up on and which I had said I would try to do , and was about to give up on again, and then while talking with her I felt like I could do it..

The postwoman who sometimes brings the letters inside shouts 'Mr Kissoon, mr Kissoon.. ' and I chat with her and she tells me about the blessings I will get and I don't want to get into a cynical conversation about about the heavy price for those blessings..


 Breathing...
Place is cooling down. My body is stiff, aching. I am feeling tired. Evening is coming. Failure after failure keeps going through my head. I sip this dandelion tea. I get up to eat a tangerine.  Stomach is no longer empty so yoga routine is out of the question.

I type the email to withdraw from a work offer. I hate having to type it but the work would require emotional intelligence beyond my capacity. I am glad I saw the light in the muddle of my mind.

I realise that there are some stretches I could do. Some of the pain might go away. And I realise that I have to breathe deeply, in and out.   The sources of the pain do not go away.  I think about the calls of my name during the day.. in this fog, kind of like a dream, wondering what they were about..


Mind settles.. the part of me that talked with the bus driver when the rest of me wanted to disappear then starts to go through the day.. compose this blog. 

The fatigue and exhaustion change into tiredness, the breathing brings the focus on the body, all of this in the ironically named 'corpse' pose.