Acknowledging One of the Many Thorns in My Heart (Pt.1)
The first time I felt something with a faint semblance to utter, bewildered cluelessness, was when I was given half an embrace by the first person I had ever really fallen for and also allowed myself to be tripped by, who also happened to belong to scores of other people by virtue of being quite the social-butterfly.
It was right before our team of more than twenty were to go on stage for a competition. Happened in a flash, all of it, and time quite literally stopped enough for me to remember it clearly stopping. We weren't on good terms though, the person and I; in fact, we rarely ever were. But of all the people at the backstage that were on infinitely better terms with that person, fate gave them to me for a split-second. And, nearly four years since, I remember, very clearly, that hand that refused to even as much as acknowledge my existence before, on my shoulder.
The entire troupe burst into a frenzy — everyone wanted to feel acknowledged by them, suddenly. But the person touched no one with even a ten-foot pole. Meanwhile, I had disappeared into oblivion to practice my lines one last time, continuously smacking away all the questions that were violently bubbling up in my mind. And even though I would love to take all the credit for myself, my performance that night would have not been as spectacular as it was, if that one fateful minute had not gone by the way it did. I will never quite know what it all meant at all, let alone why on God’s holy Earth it happened, but my heart was made full right before I was supposed to overflow on stage, and in pouring it all out in my every gesture, I had paid that accidental, momentary benefactor back by all means.
Even after everything that could be ruined, got ruined for us over and over again, I will still wonder why… why, of all the people they could hold and all the negligence they could spew at me, they chose me to comfort and be comforted, if only for a minute. I will still wonder why of all the seats in the room designated, and despite the laws of probability, they sat beside me on the last day of having to associate their name with the university we were in. Why, in spite of all the hurt they mass-produced with both their action and inaction, they somehow always showed me that there was something always hanging heavy in the air between us, that was quite opposite to despisement actually. And why, despite their showing me, there was still a chasm too wide to even dream of bridging.
I never spoke of those years for what they truly were, to anyone. Those years put me through many more storms and waves in the ocean of what was truly, in all aspects, the most paradoxical human connection I have yet experienced, and probably the only one of its kind: some for the better, most for the worse. Maybe in doing so all this while, I might have rather managed to keep that moment as raw, and that confounding mix of emotions as fresh, as I exactly remember. Having said that, it is quite unlikely that any future associations will come even a light year close to the living, breathing, perpetually evolving contradiction I hurtled through. And having said that, I truly, sincerely wish that none do.
To know, and to also not know: that is, and will always be, the coffin that was buried deep into the Earth’s bosom but never sealed shut, and thus manages to always be only an inch close to hurtling into someplace it doesn't belong to anymore. There are countless possibilities that have always enticed me, tried to lure me into the endless maze of ‘What If’s. But I hope, one merciful day in the future hence, I will finally never be haunted by any of it again. I hope, that one merciful day hence, I will not be haunted by any of it at all. May that coffin, by all means go to hell. Amen.
