FIRST DRAFT – By Adarsh Madhavan
When your sun gets stolen and your whole world darkens; when the one you loved left you broken; when your precious world slips, crashes and shatters, then what good are words that tell you not to break down, not to be wounded by the shards of pain and fate’s betrayal?
How do you pray, when you are hung on this rope called patience and the noose tightens around your neck, perhaps to forever heal you of all pain?
Warriors of yesteryear
As the vultures gather around the corpse of our promising yesterdays, waiting to devour this carcass, they forget that it still dreams of the blood that once flowed in its sturdy flesh; of the warriors that we were.
Can time heal a chronic wound, a fractured heart?
Breath of life
Strip us of your words that mouth clichés of emptiness. Eliminate the sentences, carved out of falsehood; discard the claims of loyalty, “oh you would be there for us, when we need you,” for you forget the times you weren’t, while we can’t.
We have lost. In this battle of life, we have loved and lost.Losing anything you love, wrings the breath of life.
Finish line
Days go by, we try, we hope, we believe in the afterlife and in second chances and we wait…
Despite losing, we stoically stumble past the finish line, which has long since blurred.
Orphaned by fate
We lost the ones firmly entrenched in our lives, family, friends; lost everything we had, everything we lovingly built; money, jobs, work, words, commitment, trust, names, dreams, wishes, hopes, everything… fate orphaned us and abandoned us on a dark and treacherous path leading nowhere.
How do we fend off on our own when we are cut down, blinded, tongue tied, limbless, and with amputated spirits?
What more punishments are there up your sleeve? A devious plan to flog our bleeding wounds? Accuse, torture and pour a poisonous concoction of guilt, shame and fear, down our parched throats?
Why whip a dead horse?
Experience won’t make you strong
Stop whispering the lies that experience makes you strong. Experience hell and it will debilitate and destroy you. It will handicap you. That’s how they shut us up, silence even our thoughts, and flung us out.
Held alive by a thread
Hurled out, you hide in the dark, whimpering that you want to end it all, yet, the time is unripe. You are held back by some unknown thread, thin, frayed, yet, somehow, still pulling your head out of the grave.
Believe in powers beyond the ordinary.
Your still beating heart avers that.
Hobbling back
How long will it beat? We don’t want to know as we rise from oblivion, from death, shaking off that burial-ground debris, the crematory ashes… Ash-laden, but refusing to give in, like a confused Aghori sadhu, refusing to eat the corpses of our failures.
We squirmed out bare, out of that hell hole we were trapped in. We crawled out, like zombies from deep, dark dungeons, scaring the living daylights of lifeless hearts; those that had given up on us easily and figured us dead. You never figured that what is cut down could grow back.
Curved can also stand
Ages ago we had stood, tall, stately, strong but then we were beaten, axed to the ground, and that is when we learnt to crawl. Then, we went on all fours, dragging the dead weight of our mistakes, and slowly, limped back to normal, never the same, never that straight solid line, but curved. Swaying, we still stood, learning that even the curved can stand.
Darkness to sunshine
But, as we ramble on about this pain, these wounds that don’t heal, we tell ourselves, silently, quietly, yeah, this too shall pass.
As we wipe away more than a tear from our blinded eyes, we tell ourselves, that, even if things were not as crazy; not as bad and ugly and painful, and were actually good and the sun and stars were shining, even that too, shall pass.
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