A Bitter Sorrow
Some days life felt harder than it should though she was not sure what it should’ve felt like, anymore. Some days she felt she had lost the war, the war that consisted of many battles, you know, that war, combatting between armed forces, sharing wisdom and insights for living in harmony with the laws that govern all human beings, so that one day she could become the master of her own life. Feels like that should be a no-brainer, like she should’ve been able to prepare for great undertakings. Sarah believed, living should not require any great skill.
It had been hard, really hard, like a hard fate, a hard rock, a knockout punch, a severe blow! What she really wanted to do, was to indulge in heavy drinking so she didn’t feel like she was drudging along all day or that she was engaged in manual labor toiling away to save her mortal existence. It was hard for her to accept that they couldn’t look past this. She wanted to live a free life, a life where she could let go of her ego and her own agendas and ambitions and let love seep in. All that psycho babble that her brain refused to process, lived, breathed and continued to manifest itself without her permission.
She wanted to believe in the power of positive thoughts. However, what she ended up doing was always attempting the absurd through her writings, thoughts and impulsive acts, appearing to lack any kind of motive. She used to come armed to the teeth with an optimistic and pragmatic attitude, but lately she had become shiftless and slothful, investing her energies in scornful self pity. She trusted in the belief that man is endowed with reason and capable of distinguishing good from evil. So why they had reasoned that it was cheaper to rent than to buy a house, she couldn’t recall. The capacity for rational thought or inference or discrimination had suddenly fallen to a whisper. They were renting, when they had their first. They were young, 21, free spirited and had a bouncing gait. They were not fledged, then, so to have their first in those circumstances was difficult, and required great mental and physical effort to comprehend and endure. They set about towing their unwieldy lives into some sort of structure, thereby forming uncorrectable habits. The most intractable issues subsumed them, making them into people they didn’t quite like. They greedily devoured their relationship as if it didn’t matter anymore. It was a heavy play and they tried in vain to give life to it but their strength failed them.
Sarah was a mother of average merit. She was an aspiring novelist. She had read, somewhere, maybe the New York Times, that the modal age at which American novelists reached their peak was 30. Her creative aspirations had always set the norm in the house. Sarah had this pipe dream about being a Pulitzer Prize winner. She hoped to amass all the data she could to write an autobiography, and then hoped to roll up a small fortune and live in an island. Maya thought that was a cockeyed idea, a preposterous attempt to live in a bubble that could burst at any moment.
Sarah always said, “Ultimately, it’s the writing that makes the writer.” She had been a stay at home mom after their second arrived. Their second born, Amiya, was born with a rare disease and died at age 5. That had left Sarah devastated, a wasted landscape, uninhabitable. It had destroyed their marriage as they felt smashed and defeated by destiny. It was a miracle they had survived at all. They had to, for the sake of Maya. They owed her that much. As a poignant gesture of faith, they moved to a different city in a different state, with the hope of erasing every difficult memory and all the pain. They strived to avoid the fundamental pain of loneliness but couldn’t escape its wrath.
Maya, their first, was grown now. She was 18. She dreamed of being a missionary and building churches, of being charitable and religious at the same time. She dreamed big, always, but her accessories were cheap, transitory and mostly uninspired. She took baths, not showers. She gave mismatched hugs that would make her lean more to one side and lived in an old house with a lonely cul de sac. That was her life. She had a mother and father who deeply loved her. But she wanted more. She had always wanted a sister. She could’ve been happy with a brother too, but had preferred a sister. She prayed everyday to every God she knew, the supernatural being conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the object of worship. As far as her universe was concerned, she had only two friends, her mother and her father. She was favorably disposed but people drained her, that is anyone other than her parents. She lacked knowledge of evil, lacked sophistication and worldliness. That made her an ordinary teen. But, she was nothing like her mother.
Sarah paused for a moment, time interval during which there was temporary inactivity. It was another fairly run-of-the-mill evening. She remembered her flesh and blood. She recalled her baby that remained a baby forever. She could see her teeth prominently glistening in the candlelight, the scented candle she had lit to diffuse the smell of the chicken she had cooked after two weeks. She sat in the dark, her heart shaped into alternating parallel grooves and ridges, rippled and corrugated. The dim yellow light from the street lamp seeped into the room through the half open blinds. She tried to escape her thoughts. The powerful thoughts that were strong enough to overwhelm her cogent existence, weakening every bone in her body. She didn’t feel hopeless but overly diluted, like a weak tea and washy coffee. The electricity seemed to not want to return. This was the third load shedding of the day, dreary and had the depressing character of a prison twilight. She suddenly realized she needed to pull herself together, if not for her daughter, then for the series of drab dinner parties that lay in the dingy forecast. She picked herself up from the floor, pieced the China cup that had shattered on the floor and decided to chose happiness for she knew happiness was a choice, not a result. She reminded herself that happiness won’t come to her, it could only come from her. With that, she swallowed her emotional sulfurous acidic anguish and went about her day. She washed her hands, cleared her mind and prepared to engage with the world. She decided that today would be different, today she would choose happiness.
