It’s time.
Every show of wellness is a facade no one tells you about, except mutter after decades of lifetime, grumble about the 'work ethic' while drawing lines on wet sand.
This is how I stumbled upon yet another reminder to leave:
A morning filled with skipping the regulars on shuffle, after the day's work is done in going out and getting a life, the city trudged on - onwards? - merely on. People outside, ones who speak like us but are unlike our cloyed minds, grow up 'sorted'. Minds cast in this city's clay need to be broken - broken into? - broken. The city takes its time to wake up from regimes of slumber, so it plasters signboards advertising the presence of caring minds who bother, for a change. A declaration for 'psychological welfare' pasted on barricades. Back when I was in the four walls of a convent and my biggest fear was leaving my pencil-box safe and secure in my desk over the weekend - unarmed for forced artistic emergency that was drawing class - it took the slow mania induced by still Science streams and the withering of what once was a blossoming adolescent romance to come to the realization that my first birth was a dead growth. A constantly quivering dread, clenching, clutching (the best way to imitate some self-respecting form of rhythm is alliteration) until one was forced to find meaning with their legs splayed, eyes shut, every day of scrutiny making you feel of alternatives.
Today my student asked me what 'splat' sounded like. I was reminded of a comic book bubble, neon yellow and pink. I said it was the sound of a soft something falling from a height. Then I said it’s the sound overripe fruits make when they hit the ground from a tree they were hanging from. That sound. Of rotten cores. That’s all. Falling and crashing and it’s not just a metaphor, that is just how we describe now. And I expect you to say, "same." I did not tell him that was the mute sound I clutched in my mouth when I saw the board for psychological welfare. It really didn’t hit me then but the antidepressants freeze motion and it was when I looked into the craters of the metro station that I realized, had this been the beginning of three years ago, I’d have crossed the yellow line already, splat. We made it in the end, but I don’t think the two cities I plant unsure feet in have. Because when I announced my brave decision to turn to therapy, my aunt probably saw a pattern and then gave me a rare hug from the side.
"It’s the first time I heard you took medicine for that. Why do you?"
Classic tantrums were thrown for catharsis. But it had all the immediacy of an overripe fruit realising it was time. I didn’t think she was ready. I don’t think I am ready, myself. I didn’t think these nerves had the ability to read signboards without a lump in the throat. But when they asked me if I was psychologically well in stoic blue lettering, other cheek turned to me, I felt nothing. Was that me being ready? Then the city smiled, said I’m completely fine, and handed me my tourist visa with a resounding splat across my face.
