First time I met them was the day I was hurt. I had put my fingers into the drawer and shut it.
Second time I met them was the day I went to school the first time.
Third time I met them was the day I gave my lunch to a poor lady with a kid.
Fourth time I met them was when dad wasn’t home.
Then on, there have been so many meetings. Some sweet, some hard, some choking and some really sad. But they have always been the same. They seem to be so light within but take so much weight of me. I don’t really wish to meet them but I can’t help having them when they come. And after they have gone, I take a deep breath and i feel light.
Now I don’t meet them that often. They feel I have grown up and changed. My emotions don’t overpower me and I am insensitive now. But the thing is I have stopped meeting them myself. I feel I have had enough and until unless I am too heavy inside I would not call upon them. I know they’ll be with me forever, as long as I breathe. And I know when I will need them. I know there are so many dark moments to face. Don’t want to mention them but try guessing from the fact that I am the elder son of my parents and there is a moment when it pains the most being the eldest son. I am sure I’ll need them that day. They’ll be with me even after that day. They might just turn out to be the salt in my food.
The most wonderful thing about them is their sheer presence and meaning and purpose. They are never explained nor is their existence questioned. It’s beyond imagination how they can be instrumental in shaping your emotions both joy and sad. They are God’s creation, a magic in itself and indispensable in life. If you have never met them, never experienced them, never felt them, you pinch yourself and check if you are alive. Am sure you won’t pinch. At times, you wish you get into situations where you happily long for them to be in front of your eyes. At times, you want them to disappear from someone else’s eyes and vanish into thin air. And at times you desperately want them to come to you, relax you and go away before their memories haunt you in solitude.
Crocodiles fake them, onions bring them, rains hide them and Clapton writes about them. . . .
They come in drops, heavy at the bottom. They come in streams, dry at one end. They come in pairs with a trail that creates an invisible scar. They are not controlled, they are involuntary.
And today I stand a foot away from the bed of my ailing grandpa and stare into his emotionless eyes and as if his eyes just pulled ‘them’ out of my big moist eyes, there they flow uninhibited, unfazed and unattended to.
My "tears" they are. Tears of grief and of desperation, of disbelief and heartbreak. They come cascading down in pairs from every edge of my eyes through the contours of my face in a stochastic pattern like two asymptotes on the curve of my lifeless face.
They stop after they have washed my eyes of all the sorrows to give me a sight, a clear one to think beyond the cause, beyond congested boundaries of misery and helplessness. My sleeve soaks them up and my eyes are dry again but the blemish that’s on my heart is not one to soak or vanish. But, yes. Tears do lighten them and all that is left is a memory of those tears, those cries and those minutes of breathlessness.
And you breathe in some air, smile faintly with lips joint together and wait for them to come and touch you again.
