Anguish

When you see a photo of yourself, you start wondering is that me? Is that really me? When that particular shot was taken, that pinch of salt smile, that clenched eyebrows and glow in the eyes, that alertness in your face right at the moment of the click, all of it -- was it me? If it was me am I still me? Right now? Each picture gives away a bit of your self. Not always the best part though. I feel a part of me gets captured in the photo and can never come out. It surrounds itself in the oblivion of  a non-existent world, a world in which I can never go back to. A world that encapsulates the tragedy and merriment of a single moment only, sometimes a fraction of a moment. And then, whoosh! It’s gone. Gone forever.

If our pictures could make a collage of our life, what would it be for me, I wonder. Would it be the negativity, utter and shameless violence, the non-committal atrocities, or the soft and sweet melodies, the songs and the memories and the muffled tone of my mom’s lullabies putting me to sleep? Or would it rather be composed with  strong, resourceful, enterprising, never-laid-back kind-of-thick-skin pseudo “manly” demeanour many so called acquaintances of mine want to label me with? I don’t know.

Passing thirty years of my life on the face of this planet, I sometimes feel, my sheer romanticism about dying within 25 was not a very bad idea indeed. By 25 I have had seen everything. Birth, death, love, hatred, relationships, breakdown, gossip, joy, achievement, jealousy, self destruction, success, passion, craving, banality, meaninglessness, irresponsibility, cruelty, absolute submission, power race, politics of sexuality --- wooooh! The list is far from complete, yet I have seen and experienced them as a part of my very happening, urban-privileged and predominantly feminine life.

I was happy in a way, not the way you demonstrate it as a state of being rather in a situation where I hopped on and off from happiness. There were ecstatic moments and I was confident that should I need to choose someday, I would always choose ecstatic happiness for a short period over living a mundane life and being average happy like majority of the human population do. My adolescent fantasy about happiness even pushed me to the state where I could give up my most valuable possession for being ecstatic and to explode with happiness, and in an amazing bit of serendipity, would be content finding that joy and would not worry at all about the sorrow or the agony if there was any at all, to follow.

Thirty years gone, I astonishingly see, I am still in that state, willing to give up everything for a moment of happiness, for a splash of ecstasy, however, reality has set in. Reality, to me is a nasty word, almost as nasty as the ill-smelling hooligans whom I avoid consciously in train or open spaces with blurry racial ignorance, or nasty as a saucepan I would never ever leave on my sink as it would continue to pinch me like a bee-sting until I clean it and put it back to the shelf. But my reality, apart from everyone else’s, has shown me how very average my life is. How meaningless it is.

I was not heading for a sudden epiphany into realizing how my perception of happiness has changed and how I have settled for an average life.

I was  rather pissed.

Knowing that you believe in something and then finding life has something completely opposite in store for you is: pathetic.

I don’t like the life I am leading right now but worse is the fact that I have transitioned into someone who stopped practicing or trying. Maybe the tacit hope I possessed was wrong, but what the heck! Right or wrong has never been the yardstick of being happy. And it never will be. All that matters is someone has lost the enormous potential even without exploring it.

 

I am deeply anguished to be that someone today.