I’m back. Back in the city I grew up in.

The city that turned me into a woman.

The city that I left, not too long ago, in search of a better life, with suitcases stuffed to the brim with clothes that were too big for me and dreams that were bigger still.

The city that I then ran back to, tired, beaten and worn, with barely any fight left in me. It’s hard not to feel like a failure when you’re back in the same place you once declared, “This is it, this is the point where I’m going to change my life.”

If those dime-a-dozen loquacious LinkedIn influencers with half a million connections had rubbed off on me, I’d say this isn’t the end, just another beginning. “Rejection is just Redirection,” they’d parrot, with their veneer white smiles glitching out the pixels on my laptop screen.

As aggravating as I have come to find them, I must marvel at their ability to push out 300-odd characters using the 4-1-1 rule, the 80/20 ratio, the hashtag cluster hierarchy and other soulless digital decrees that seem to value optimisation over authenticity. I scroll past a post with the headline, “To fail is to be human. Here’s how AI can help turn cold leads into offers,” and I feel my lungs tighten the same way they did when I realised the first boy I ever loved was a cryptogeek.

Well, Tyler the Creator once said, “If it’s hard to breathe, open a window,” and as I sit in the balcony of my aunt’s house in the middle of a plantation, in a far-flung corner of the backwoods of Bangalore, I regard his words with a grave solemness. I’ve missed the smell of Luru – the sui generis blend of petrichor, vehicle exhaust and the faintest hint of Indie Mint.

It is only my second day back, but I feel better about my life already. Which is surprising, given everything I’ve had to deal with in the last 48 hours. I lost my phone, and subsequently, access to my bank accounts. Truly amazing where the mind of a twenty-something woman will go once faced with total financial shutdown. Also, I’ve been feeling nauseous all week, and the flight only made the impulse to throw up even worse. Again, amazing where the mind of a twenty-something woman will go when she wakes up to hurl three nights in a row.

I digress.

Comedic tragedy aside, I finally feel tethered again. For the longest time, I felt like I was floating aimlessly in open water, trying to fool myself into believing I had some sense of direction when it was taking everything in me to keep afloat as the waves knocked into me. Sitting in a mostly-empty cafe in Yelahanka, sipping on a bright blue citrus lemonade, was the most present I’d been since March. I didn’t realise I’d been watching myself live through horrifically life-changing events for months, instead of actually letting myself experience them. Maybe that’s self-preservation – my brain protecting me from feeling things that I’m not capable of handling – but I’m not very fond of psychologists at the moment, so I’m gonna nip that thought right in the bud.

This cafe was nothing to brag about – imitation limestone walls, mosaic tiled flooring and plastic blue tableware. But with a menu that had an Indo-Chinese section right next to a list of wood-fired pizzas, I could tell this was not ye olde run of the mill homage to Greek dockside eateries. Nah, this was where I was gonna spend the rest of my day. I slunk into a booth by the brick pizza oven, connected all my devices to the ingeniously named “Free WiFi 2.4 GHz”, and kicked off my Converse, my eyes settling on my first drink of the afternoon.

Six hours later, I’d downed a disastrously dilute frozen mocha, stained my lips and teeth with a blue virgin mojito, and eaten my way to the loosest notch of my belt. Note to self – if a place has chicken and egg fried rice for less than 200 rupees, the rice will be doing most of the heavy lifting. That being said, I just about licked the bowl clean. I wish I could say I’d had similar levels of success on the long list of tasks I had set out to do that day, but all I’d done was set up two meetings with people I had absolutely no business demanding face time with, submitted a shoddily put together content plan for a sketchy asset management company, and cancelled my Indian SIM card with no plans of reactivating it.

It was at this point that I became aware of the fact that I was being watched. Looking over the corner of my laptop screen, I met the unblinking stare of a gaggle of girls. They couldn’t have been older than ten, which I brilliantly deduced from the cake on their table with candles that read “1-0”, and were all dressed in pink. No adult in sight, I assumed their chaperone had better things to do than supervise half a dozen children at a cafe where the biggest threat was death-by-paper straw. So, with nobody telling them to mind their P’s and Q’s, these girls could bore holes into the back of my laptop all they wanted.

I suddenly felt the vinyl of the seat under my thighs cling painfully to my skin. Something about being witnessed in the act of trying to piece my life back together made me want to run away. I had to get out of there. I had to leave. This feeling, the need to run, to escape, was all too familiar.

It’s exactly how I’d felt the night before my flight to India. Curled up in my duvet, I lay awake with wet eyes and a dry mouth. My mind was playing all my biggest fears that had come to fruition in a sadistic, never-ending loop. I couldn’t hear my own heartbeat over the drone of “You failed, better give up while you still can.” That night, India was a lifesaver thrown to me, and all I had to do was tread water until I could leave for the airport.

But I was wrong. That feeling was still there. Still festering inside me, demanding to be noticed. And I’d just been pushing myself further away from it in hopes that it would leave me alone.

All I could think of as I waved down a waiter for the cheque was how self-awareness was the worst fucking thing to come out of a decade of therapy.

I wish it took more than a stream-of-consciousness blog post to make me confront my self-destructive behaviour. This post was supposed to be a review, just a few words expanding on the notes I’d scribbled in my journal at BlueBrick Cafe. So to conclude this, here are my thoughts:

Food: Could have been a little more generous with the protein, and maybe it’s because I’m biased, but the lack of a Caesar Salad docked a couple of points.
Beverages: Presentation? Fire. Temperature? Ice cold. Flavour? Left something to be desired. Also, as someone who is indifferent to a mocha at best, I probably shouldn’t have ordered one.
Ambience: Free wifi, comfy seats, open-air seating with a closed-off party area. It was a really pleasant place to work at, and the playlist of lo-fi covers of pop songs softly playing in the background made me feel like an NPC in the best way.
Overall thoughts: I racked up a bill of ₹640. Ultimately, this spot is pretty great if you want somewhere you can sit undisturbed and get some work done. Aside from the odd IT guy and coy college couple, there weren’t a lot of patrons around. With a few friends and a board game or two, I could see this place quickly becoming one of my favourite spots to spend an afternoon.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️✨