
#19
In My Life
Have you ever been out in autumn? Its beautiful that time of year,the sky is overflowing with colors, the people all try to show off skin but also keep rubbing their red freckled noses due to the pollen, you can almost hear a folk song in the background, see lights sparkle and go from distant view points only to realize its people’s eyes radiant and happy, and there are leaves, on the ground, on the trees, in free fall,in your hair,crumbling to nothing,all yellow and brown and green,making it hard for you to imagine the world without it brimming with so much color.
These leaves, in all their glory, they look something of a site to me. I was always fascinated with them, cast away like unwanted wannabes, playing muted chess,sitting right there on the ground. they recently started to remind me of myself.
Have you ever seen a leaf falling though, how one second its there and the next something inside of it breaks,in that one split distracted second shadowed by disfigured sunlight,forming patterns through the gap, it loses its hold on the world,without a scream,or yelp it just starts to fall. that is how it started for me, now for all the life in me I cant point to the exact second my grip on reality faded.maybe it was the time I started to eat too much chocolate or the time when a friend was a little too mean when I was vulnerable, hell, maybe it was a nightmare that I couldn’t make from reality because they are so damn real to me. It was something,when something in my glow-ey little brain shot circuited and I began to free fall without my bearings.
Don’t get me wrong,the fall,its majestic, the leaf flips over mid air,discovering new angles and ways to look at the ground and other leaves still clinging together,hanging with all their might, its defying gravity, at-least that’s what it thinks,its flying,free from all constraints,its roots that chained it in, but it doesn’t take time for the flight to turn into a fall.
Very soon, the concept of familiarity is foreign, the ground is too near, and somehow it starts bracing for the impact, for touching the ground with a thrust,for being hurt,maybe even for loosing its essence, I swear it shrivels upon itself mid fall there and then, somehow aging, not wanting to but it does, it ages only to realize how much more it would hurt,now that it’d seen so much,now that there is noway to go back, you can’t unthink stuff right. A part of me really saw the beauty in the fall, an out of body experience of sorts,I wanted to show the world how I could survive it,how it wasn’t something that happened to me rather something I chose to survive, It meant more to me then.
And then after I lose track of time,not knowing whether its been just a few seconds or an unseeming eternity,I touch the ground,and at first it doesn’t hurt that much,I think I’ve survived the fall,having successfully alienated myself from the world that now seems so far away,cloaked by a thin layer of muffled silence,breathing unsolicited air and checking for damage. It worked, I whisper,lightly enough to not jinx it, it somehow worked, I don’t answer to anyone, no one expects me to turn green when all I feel is brown and dirty, no one is looking at me like I don’t fit in,I’m free.
Days go by and then weeks, and with time I start to wilt,age,crumble into nothing,and just this once it hurts to think no one came to rescue me from my own downfall, it falls on me like sinking with a stone teetered to my neck,as to how alone being alone is. People trample over, and I become smaller, partly because of regret that even if unknowingly,I did this to myself,and partly because I think I don’t have it in me to fight anymore. If there is something I can tell you about a long fall, its that it can hurt exactly when you want it to,when you will it enough and if there is something I can tell you about familiarity, its that you don’t know it exists till you’ve lost it.
If you’re wondering what happens to the leaf at the end of autumn,it dies, no beauty survives the coming fall,as cold and unrelenting as it is. Now I know the story of a single leaf dying isn’t something worth grieving about but the thing you see is that, even if that one leaf dying doesn’t affect the major dynamics of the ecosystem,in the end it still lost,its loss should be worth a thought. Sometimes tragedies aren’t tragedies anymore because they get turned into statistics,nonetheless I lament them.
Maybe,you’ve never been out in autumn,maybe the falling leaves seem beautiful,painting the world whole, maybe the radiating eyes and the pollen allergies steal focus but somehow,every heroic fall from strength to weakness tells a story,asking for help,begging for forgiveness, threatening to spill over to reveal ugly truths and hidden secrets.
Maybe, just maybe,people say more than they say.
