Shorts 6 / Old Classwork 1

The third cue-word in this post was given by my English teacher in Class 10, as classwork, to practice for the composition portion of our ICSE examinations. Written in limited time by a much younger me, it qualifies both as a short and as the first part of my new series, Old Classwork. Being an assignment, the piece carries a title different from the cue-word itself, as we used to be required to supply. Though it contains certain word choices I would not make today, I have presented it here unchanged.

The second cue-word is mine.

The first cue-word was suggested by:

Ritwik, the all-knowing, all-encompassing, philosophically massive presence that pervaded the atmosphere of the CMI campus for over half a decade. A few of his myriad mysterious strengths lie in coding, gaming and dispersing gyaan. His chief weakness is being an extremely annoying brother. He wears ugly glasses on his ugly head. Disclaimer: this bio totally carries may carry extreme personal bias.

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Torture

It is a constant battle of tactical revelation. If I tell people too less, I miss out on the understanding that I unavoidably require to survive. If I tell people too much, they tend to guess what is wrong, and when; and then, it is worse then ever, because I've spread my darkness to other souls, and the guilt consumes everything else that I could or could not feel. All my life, too many that should not have been trusted (and, were not -- how strange) have convinced me that I am a source of inconvenience and trouble, a cancerous and depressing burden. Now, when light is offered, I can never tell how much is too much to ask without offering nothing in return.

Nice people. Gratitude. Friendship. Sympathy. Wonderful concepts, these, and also awful sources of torment and confusion. I am convinced that I cannot escape, and burden be I or not, a burden I sure do carry. My greatest fear is that the burden will have its way, and that is, on most days, worse than the idea of making some other lives a bit darker. If I forget all honour, what stops me from crying in front of others? Am I selfish? Am I a thief of happiness? Am I cheating the trade, gaming the system, swindling people out of light that is theirs? I shall never know, because my burden sits on my eyelids and my brain. It's on my throat, my limbs, my tongue, and it hurts. 

I don't tell you, but it hurts.

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Rewind

Right at this moment, all over your face and eyelashes, there are tiny mites living, crawling and having sex. All around you, electromagnetic waves are carrying speech, sound and words -- making memories, breaking hearts, and saving the world. Hence, the small and the seemingly insignificant appear quite important to you, if you think about it.

These days, I feel small and insignificant in the hierarchy of who you consider worthy of your company, love and approval. To you, perhaps, this moment is what decides if you will wish for a time machine, and to have never ever even met me. At the least, when you know, tell me before you go.

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Window

Pane of Pain, Pane of Joy

Could you imagine a foreboding castle, in an impenetrable fortress, rising before a stormy skyline with its imposing towers -- but without a single window?

Could you find a happy home, full of love and laughter, lacking only in that quaint little opening in the wall -- decorated with dainty curtains with frills and fringes galore -- could you?

Could you imagine how Rapunzel's story would turn out without a window in her tower, how journeys would have been if trains and cars had no windows, how school would be if the classrooms had no windows?

Sad thoughts, those. Sad, because conversations with the neighbours through the kitchen window keeps the homemaker entertained; because schoolchildren spread their innocent joy and cheer to the world when they yell and wave through the school bus's windows; because bereaved mothers, jilted lovers and betrayed friends weep beside the window, wistfully staring into the middle distance.

The window is a perfect little outlet for that yearning in all of us to be one with the world outside; despite our attachment to the safety of closed doors, we can communicate with the outside world -- feeling its vibrations of feeling and bursts of colour -- when we open a window.

The window is also an opportunity -- an opportunity to feed the birds, smile at strangers, be inspired to write poetry -- and for the neighbourhood's lovable five-year-old Robin Hood, an opportunity to steal a little something for his best friend, the son of his housekeeper.

The quintessential charm of a window increases manifold, and the window metamorphoses into a jolly theatre, when it is no longer stationary. Who can deny the charm of watching cows grazing in the fields, women drawing well-water, and people of all ages working in the farms, in the green little villages flanking the railway tracks?

The everyday person does not have the courage to brave all dangers and live in the open, but people like you and me will always have our windows. Families will always dine on mother's excellent cooking, the old man living alone will always play the piano, the ex-serviceman will always polish his weapon, while the stranger passing through the street looks at them through their windows.

As night falls, the lullabies sung to kids will always involve the bright white lights in the sky, playing hide-and-seek with the child from behind the window drapes.

Miserable is the man who lacks a friendly window.

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More cue-words are always welcome.

Shorts 5

While crowdsourcing feels good, at times one has to satisfy one's needs to write on a particular topic. To stay true to the idea of crowdsourced cues, however, I vowed that one of the three next shorts have to be from a cue-word. Hence, the first cue-word is sourced, and the other two are mine.

Customarily, I hereby introduce the contributor of the first cue-word:

Aalok, an allegedly materialistic man with a flair for the dramatic and drily humorous, is my batchmate in CMI and an early friend. A TEDx speaker and national level debater, the Rajkot man loves languages human and formal. He knows his money and literature as well as he does his Automata Theory; and a conversation with him leaves an impression of unconventional intelligence. He is an adviser at the Latex platform Overleaf and, of late, he blogs at VaakChaturyam.

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Eventually

As of now, the hills are farther than they seem. The sky is blurry and purple -- not blue like in your picture. The filthy water below is cracked with moss and trails of ducks, and eventually the sun will light it burning hot.

Eventually, the reworked land will claim its nature; and, one hopes, you will claim yours. Nature, though, is subjective. My nature, for example, is in these very words I write, and the flow of logic that binds me to these bricks.

Eventually, I hope, you will be freer than I am.

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Crystal

You look like a human being, but one that has a trace of elfin blood somewhere in their ancestry. It gives you this pallor, this sense of distance from the sun of this world. Your eyes shine with a light from a mind that is far, far away, roaming in dimensions inaccessible to everyone who crosses your path. Your frame is slight and lost, almost as if it is only half in this plane of reality, and half somewhere else. When you sit in deep concentration, at times, I could swear you fade and glimmer away further into that other plane of existence. And, if I look closely, I think I see this fire that is too far to feel its warmth, and yet close enough to grow blinding as I squint at its distant flames. You eat and walk and read and laugh and play like a human being, but on the less rational of my days, I could swear that you were something else.

Is it on purpose that you act like a mere shadow to an invisible, more complete, self? Is it on purpose that you build this aura of mystique, this unreachability, this half-and-half of intrigue and hopelessness around you that is kind of hot with the general public?

That is what they want, when they want to touch you. They want to see if you are real, see if you can feel anything, see if you can reflect their humanity with acceptable precision. They want to reach through your skin, through what looks like a translucent curtain to a different universe, and touch your corporeal self. They want to know what you will never confirm (perhaps even to yourself!) -- if you, my mad magical friend, are, after all, just human.

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Storm

You never know why she is the way she is, and it isn't worth your time to find out. Hence, she is mad.

You never understand what he says, and it is beneath you to ask him again. Hence, he is proud.

You haven't the slightest idea about someone's history or their inner turmoil, and yet you dismiss every first impression as a storm not worth weathering.

Fighters of your own battles, writers of your own stories, wranglers of your own beasts -- I am one of you, so listen when I say this: my storm is my own, and hence is special; yet, being mine does not make it worth more understanding than another's. If I have braved the tempest, so shall I help another soul, hold another hand, guide another trembling shoulder away from darkness and desperation. In regarding another's struggle equal to my own, I shall bring glory to what, until now, was only a string of skirmishes between me and fate. If you must keep faith in only what is yours, I implore you to do so while believing that someone else might disagree, and that their story is as true as yours, that their storm is as rife as yours, that it twists within them in the most troubled hours, just like yours does.

The storm, my friend, comes to every soul in the middle of their own personal night; and sometimes, the light of one less encumbered can make all the difference. If your day is another's night, O warrior mine, share your light.

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Shorts 4

After a spell of being extremely partial to verse, I have, with the necessary discomfort of familiar change, returned to prose for a while, via another edition of the primarily crowdsourced cue-word based Shorts series. I went through the topics suggested by readers, and have written on two of them  -- these make the first and the third pieces in this post. The second piece in this post is, again, a cue-word I picked myself (Valor and Mystic may or may not follow).

Now, as per tradition, I introduce the contributors of, respectively, the first and third cue-words:

• Aditya, an undergraduate student in CMI, a year my junior. A nondescript man from the nondescript town of Akola, Maharashtra, not much is known of this newcomer except for his unhealthy obsessions with certain (at least three) seniors. In the sphere of mundane details, one can confirm that he enjoys sports (like Volleyball!), likes certain foods (Domino's, Choco Pie, Milano, Amul Kool), and indulges in the mental and pseudo-physical challenges of, respectively, AoPS and Counterstrike.
• Shriyank, of For Shark and Nushki fame, an important friend (and unpaid basketball coach) from my Hem Sheela days. An intelligent man who fought convention to study Humanities, Shriyank was my partner and/or opponent in many a debate, elocution, and schoolyard skirmish -- a tradition we now continue in keyboard wars. Shriyank has a keen taste in culture, literature, rhetoric and humour. He now enjoys growing success in MUNs, and in other Humanities things that the puny Mathematical mind struggles to comprehend.

The third piece is not short in the strictest sense, but I hope that the extra shortness of the first two will compensate.

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Almost

Your wins are no match for Providence. You would think that a step in the right direction would be worth something, but no. You would think that pretending to be strong, over and over and over again, would finally make you invincible, but no!

There were some who were supposed to live, over and over and over again, and inspire the disciples of metal and grease -- and yet, there they were, left laughing at how ironic the circumstances were. To think that death would come in the form of known loves, to think that the end would be in metal and grease, to think that that is how Paul would go...!

[To Paul Walker, 12/9/1973 - 30/11/2013]

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Instinct

In the stillness of night, O Master, the world is your picnic ground. The shade is your safe space; the wind is your blanket; and the beating of insects' wings, your music. The path of time that moves is hidden from you in the dark, and the marshland misted from your vision by the silver waters of kings. Far beyond present company, O Master, sacred ground is trodden in your name, and you know it -- and knowing it, you smile, all of ten years, you little angel, you...!

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Tampon

The time was evening, and the market streets of the small industrial town bustled under lamplight and feet. One pair of these belonged to our hero, who now shuffled along the alleyways purposefully. The streetlights occasionally illuminated his face and costume -- those of an office-goer in his late twenties, raised mundane (conservative?) and middle-class but hurled, gingerly but willingly, into liberalism and its oddities, which included his present task.

Thirty years ago, and perhaps even today to lesser (he felt) men, this task would be daunting and repulsive. He remembered his first time -- how he felt embarrassed and (this one the neo-liberal hated to admit) emasculated. But our hero had learnt that love conquers all, and fighting any residual inhibitions he had was now a labour of love.

This time, however, the task had altered just enough to be intriguing. Unlike the more old-fashioned subject (calling people objects is medieval, J.B.!) of his daily affection, this other devotee of the purple all-nighters was in the middle of attempting what she called The T-Switch -- a paradigm shift worthy of the strong independent woman that this little shit claimed to be. This infernal youngster, more than ten years junior to the girlfriend and him, had decided that she would throw off her apprehension, protest against superstition about virginity, avail herself of comfort in sport and uninhibited swimming... and all in all make both a personal journey and a political statement in her pants, once a month. Only this afternoon, this destroyer of his peace had arrived, and promptly informed the older sister of her monthly troubles (don't call them that, J.B., there's no shame in saying period!). Accordingly, the well-memorized thirty-character string was put on the way-back-home shopping list, only to be promptly removed and replaced by a whole new kind of product -- available, the older female somehow knew, at just one store in the vicinity, (conveniently?) closer to his return route than hers.

Hence our hero now strode, some ninety steps out of his usual way, past numerous shops lined with rainbows of pads, to that one store that stocked the needs of the slightly up-and-coming, in an attempt to woo the growing mall crowd back to the markets -- Hershey's syrup, Oreo cookies, mayonnaise and, in a shelf placed half-hidden in a corner (unlike the pads displayed in full view) five lonely, nondescript packs of tampons, all the same J&J-owned brand.

Now, as a man who bought pads, our hero was used to it all -- the usual vulgar provocations that his female friends knew all too well, plus off-handed comments due to his gender -- all about his perversion, the character of the woman who sent him out, and his speculated relationship with her. Yet, he thought as he walked home with 20 Regulars and 10 Supers, it had never been so much like a drug deal before. Moments after the shopkeeper had handed a pad pack in a brown bag to a woman beside him, our protagonist had walked up with practised ease and detachment, and discreetly pointed to the tampon shelf. To his surprise, the shopkeeper, all while speaking to other customers, had pushed a bag over to him and signalled him to help himself, and then to place the money on the counter and leave -- they had never exchanged a word!

For some reason, J.B., tampons are more scandalous than pads in a country that is slowly coming to terms with the naturalness of menstruation. Yes, somehow, he felt more judgement in buying them, a bigger accusation of perversion, a greater sense of dirt and wrong -- and the more he thought of it, the more he agreed with the young blot that her Switch was, if she wanted it to be, a very viable political statement. After all, you see J.B., they go inside -- and the worst thing a woman can do is put something inside. Inside, thought our hero as he walked home -- the inside we all came from, the inside to be constantly claimed by men and yet deemed tainted by the same men; the inside that allegedly changed so much under penetration that it was imperative to compare tampons and penises... he believed the brat now, actually. It was totally possible, in this country, for an 'educated' boy to have left her over tampons; believing, via an almost criminal amount of ignorance (our hero felt), that it diminished his masculinity and her 'purity' when 'his woman' puts something else up there. It was also possible, actually, for a mother to have slapped a daughter over wanting to try tampons, fearing she was 'knowing certain things' -- though this second one, he was relieved, was a story of her friend, and had not happened to the precious little sister... of his girlfriend, technically.

In his head, though, the young feminist's J.B. (gangsta for Jamaibabu... how did she come up with this stuff?), had dropped the '-in-law' a long time ago. Next time, he thought to himself, he'd ask for the tampons, in words. That'd be fun to watch, and he'd have a story for the blighted little bleeder...

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Shorts 3

This edition of Shorts contains two cue words from readers and one of my own. More cues for writing about are, as always, invited.

The third cue is the one I gave myself. The contributors behind the first two, in order of appearance, are:

• Bishal, an undergraduate student at CMI, a year my senior. He is also a rare male among my fellow Carmelites -- an alumnus of one of the few co-educational Carmel schools in the country. His focus of study lies in Mathematics, and he edits an online English-Assamese Science/Maths magazine called Gonit Sora. In leisure, Bishal is spotted obsessing over superheroes, movies, the occasional anime, and beautiful women.
• Arijit, the Head Boy of Hem Sheela in the term succeeding Nihal's and mine. A Xaverian and student of Commerce, Arijit has a keen taste for oratory and politics, especially political satire. He enjoys non-fiction literature, and is a steady source of world news for anyone who cares to ask. When not sending John Oliver videos and Onion articles to anyone who is online, Arijit is known to drool over Bengali, Punjabi and Mughal cuisine.

To all my readers, as always, I request feedback about my attempts.

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Petrichor

There is beauty to the nameless. Also, there is freedom in the lack of warmth and care and love. Sometimes, I think that to be free means to be cold and icy forever. The day you didn't listen to your mother who was worried that you would get a cold -- were you not free? Did you not live that day? Did you not sail boats, did you not hide your tears in the rain, did you not let the water seep through your smile and into your guilty gullet -- rainwater should not be drunk... acid rain... death...? Who cares? Wouldn't you die, if it meant you felt? Would you not leave, if it meant you loved? Would you not cry for a year to feel pure joy for but a day? Are standards so important that we must restrict the beautiful and define the transcendental?

I know three languages, and I could name you in only one -- and so you were home, heart, freedom, memory, soul. But then they had to go and find your English name. They had to define you in the language of slavery and classism and officialdom. They had to internationalise you, make you universal, viral across the internet as another 'relatable' post. And the moment they did that, you were no longer mine.

Yes, the word we use is perfect music -- but did we have to define what we meant, petrichor? Did we have to become public property, shared information, dictionary entry, spelling-bee question? Tell me, petrichor, were we not better without a name?

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Rahul Gandhi

Isn't he cuddly?

He is fair (them Italian genes, daadi-gasm!), light-eyed, dimply and a subtle demagogue -- perfect for Prime Minister. So why did he lose?

The answer lies in what we look for in our teddy bears -- do we want a runty teddy that makes squishy noises, or a big furry one that makes gurgly ones? We want our teddies like we want our demagogues -- unashamed in what they do, which is hug and befriend everyone, in every country, at all times. We don't mind if a teddy is a bit old and torn and scary, we still like the bigger teddy. We like confident teddies who are not timid to shoo away the green-white monster under our beds. We like teddies who can coo to the dollies and gollies of other lands and bring us many, many sweets (while calling them by their first names) -- and, most importantly, we want a teddy that is ours. We want our teddy unbeholden to their own Bearclans, and we want them to have bellies big enough to hide two-thirds of HoneyLand's cubs underneath. We want them to save moo-moos and hide Barbies away from bad things -- and RaGa Bear can't do any of this! He can only smile at ladybears and tell us that things will be okay! The janta no longer maafs their teddies for being squishy! We want gurgle, we want muscle, we want prickle, we want Mudi!

Sorry RaGa, but Mudi Bear is our chief. Isn't he bearfect? *glomp*

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Stone

Moulded beautifully in flow after flow, in a place where no man dares venture, there lives a solitary wall of stone. Millions of years ago it was soft tissue, throbbing with life, until weight and heat and time turned it hard, dark and, most importantly, potent. As a mass of living cells, the stone would never have lit the fires that it now could. It would never have conjured warmth and spark and war from nothing, like it did now. In losing the flow of life through its body, the stone gained the veneration that is due to the powerful.
As flesh that it was, it lived. As stone that it is, it is loved.

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Shorts 2

As I requested in the previous post, my LoudSpeak Listeners have come up with more cue-words for me to write about. Admittedly, not all of these are very short, but compared to the 1500+ words of rants I come up with when left to myself, I'd say they were microscopic.

The pioneering cue-word contributors of this series are:

• Sonakshi, a Physics research scholar from my college (CMI) who also happily turned out to have been associated with an activity from my far past -- The Statesman Voices. When not Physics-ing, Sonakshi paints and takes wonderful photographs, mostly natural compositions within the CMI campus. Since my first semester at CMI, she has been one of the regular supporters of my literary adventures.
• Nihal, a recurring character in this blog, who I believe needs no introduction to regular readers. To newcomers: Nihal volunteered with the Students' Council of HSMS when I was already a member, in Class 11. In Class 12, Nihal and I earned the top posts in the Council, those of Head Boy and Head Girl respectively. Let's just say he wasn't as bad as I thought he was. Across time and space, though no longer colleagues, we remain great friends.
• Ashmita-di, who I am yet to meet in real life. I know her through her mother who, as a teacher in HSMS, was instrumental to my short student life there. Ma'am introduced me to her daughter because she thought the interaction might be fruitful -- and so it was (only to me, I'm afraid) since Ashmita-di patiently reads everything I post and leaves me advice.

The following are my attempts at expanding their cue-words, in the order in which they are named.

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Pencil Box

Sometime in high school, I realised that if I wanted, my mother would buy me that fancy quadruple-decker that came with sharpener and eraser-case, and also magnet, compass, pinball, vacuum cleaner, AK-47. When changing schools in Class 11, she asked me to get a good pencil box for the new school, and I knew that financially, it was no big deal to ask for a properly swanky version of the utility (as long as I didn't ask too often). Yet the swanky pencil box never happened, for there was a snag -- I was way too attached to my (t)rusted free gift from Horlicks. For ages, I carried it through school years and board exams. I leaked ink into it until the stains wouldn't go, I hoarded pencil shavings and spent refills in it during my phase of making art with them; its lid was always the makeshift water holder when we 'legally bunked' class to paint charts for school events. My teachers and fellow students made fun of me for carrying it around and not getting a new one, leaving no holds barred including jabs at my socio-economic status -- and I wondered how I would have felt if I really couldn't afford a new pencil box, and how their behaviour contradicted everything we were taught in school about judging people by how fancy their things were.

Eventually, though carried to college and kept as a box for sketch pens and post-its, the old Horlicks box, now discoloured beyond recognition from the old blue-orange-silver and sports pictures, was finally too beaten up to hold its own against the most basic of travel bumps -- and, guilty of spilling all my stationery into my bag about twenty times (and being too small to hold new grown-up things like a stapler and binder clips which I'd never owned separately from my mother's stash before), the Horlicks box was replaced by a double-decker procured by Maa from Navalur -- a neutral-coloured one with an easily removable (as I promptly did) silly sticker. The new one now accompanies me on every academic trip, and is proudly set beside my pillow in ISI Kolkata, basking in glory that I know to be superficial. The old one sits somewhere in my cupboard in CMI, waiting for me to return to it, as we both know I always will.

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Debt

debt. noun.

noun: debt; plural noun: debts.

• a sum of money that is owed or due. "Nihal paid off his debts to me for last week's Diet Chewda and juice". synonyms: bill, account, money owed, amount due.
• (in -- debt) the state of owing money. "Nihal bought me ice-cream, so now I am in his debt for ten rupees." synonyms: owing money, in arrears, overdrawn. antonyms: in credit.
• a feeling of gratitude for a service or favour. "I would like to acknowledge my debt to my friend and former colleague Nihal Singh, for being a steadfast sounding board in tumultuous times, for pushing himself to learn a new job, and succeeding spectacularly in cutting in half the phenomenal workload I had come to expect would be mine as Head Girl of HSMS. While a Head Boy did exist, sorry, buddy, but I underestimated you grossly. I underestimated you as a colleague and as a friend, despite having seen the lengths you go to when you put your mind to something (the poor Samsung Champ still weeps at times) -- jokes apart, while life in CMI and its ups and downs may put you out of my mind at times, you are remembered every time I rally a group of people to get something done, because the best times spent doing that job were as a team, with you. Lives do grow larger, with new knowledge and adventure, new achievements and pitfalls -- for that is in the nature of lives; and try as we may, friendships sometimes spread themselves a bit thin over life's ever-expanding canvas. Yet, a daub here and there via the occasional reunion is enough to prevent it from ripping altogether, given that we hold dear the insurmountable debt that comes with being comrades-in-arms and partners-in-crime, a debt that transcends all repayment, all definition, all clarification. As J.K. Rowling aptly writes (of the lead trio in Harry Potter): 'There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.' While I'd not go so far as to compare our adversaries in Council work with mountain trolls, I dare say that the daily grind and frustration of the rather thankless work we had was another of those friendship-cementing things Rowling mentions." synonyms: obligation, liability, gratitude, appreciation, thanks. "I learned much by working with you, and grew much in having you as my friend -- and so you have my lasting gratitude. As I do every year from time to sentimental time, I now wish you good luck for your life in the years to come -- and since there will be no better chance (I have probably exhausted my creative appreciation skills for the week), I wish you a happy birthday in advance. Thanks for everything, buddy! (Fist-bump)"

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Apathy

There are those that are blinded by light, and those that are afraid of the dark, and then there are those whose eyes are forever closed to external stimuli -- not the physical eye, perhaps; no, there seems to be no difficulty in paying the rickshaw-puller, answering emails, fixing a meal, making the bed... and at some point paying the rickshaw-puller again -- but the eye that can find light in souls brighter than one's own, the eye that can selfishly pick out the dark souls to shun for the fear of losing one's own brightness, is glossed over in disuse.
These curiously afflicted ones are creatures of the twilight -- they have minds like empty fields, where unfounded machinations grow. They create emotion for sport and necessity (for they have forgotten how to feel them), to store and use in perfect wisdom. Warmth and touch and ice and flowers are all products of the machine that churns out existence, cog grinding on dreary cog, gliding on the vast knowledge of all that is to be felt in order to be human, in order to make others feel just enough to let you live. There is routine, rules, destinations, deadlines -- and so all can see -- but deep beneath the surface of the creature's mind, unseen to all the world, a perverse glory begins to fester. The creature that is stoic to the world swells inside, the glory of knowing all rising until the superficial joy of understanding the known no longer excites. The shoulders stay squared, the chin stays up, the eyes stay bright and the smile shines like there's no tomorrow -- for so the machine crafts the creature's skin, for so the machine knows the creature has to be -- and so the creature lives, quietly swelling with the glory of impervious nothingness.
At times, of course, there are breaches -- holes that break containment and let in frivolities like seeing, believing, liking, loving, dissecting, debating, understanding -- they are quickly filled in with wisdom, of course, for they are no match for the machine and all the things it knows.

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Much thanks to the cue-word providers, and I hope I have done justice to your ideas. As always, more ideas are invited.

Shorts

This post is based on the idea of abstractly expanding from a single word or a short phase taken as cue. It is part writing practice, part slice-of-life commentary. For the first post of what I hope becomes a series, my cue words are 'hope', 'love' and 'hurt'. More cue words are invited from readers.

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Hope

I hoped that these were the voices. I hoped that it meant nothing. I was sure that, on thinking rationally, I'd change my mind. But no: this was real, this was starkly true. This was happening. It wasn't the voices, it was me; and, try as I might, I wasn't about to change my mind.

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Love

There are some people who do not always love the same. They love in bits and pieces, because they know bits and pieces so much better than they know the whole and the healthy. Their love is post-apocalyptic -- it comes in urgent bursts and goes in apathy; it is true when it is the need of the hour, and a sleeping giant otherwise.

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Hurt

My body hurts, my mind hurts, everything I ever knew hurts. I'm not telling anyone about this and it hurts, it hurts that I'm not allowed to hurt, that if I hurt I'm going to be made fun of, that the ideas of what it means to be strong are so strong and so wrong that the strong are right and those who hurt are wrong. Wrong, because they are of no use. Wrong, because the world will not notice them gone. Wrong, because when you go to sleep, tired, your heroes stand guard -- and these heroes are never wrong, never hurt -- they are, always and forever, strong.

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