I heard myself laugh today

 Yes, I did.

I heard myself laugh today. Not in the way where my friends and I devour our sadness and dark humour seems to be the only way out. Not the alcohol induced smiles or those reassurance smiles that we pass to ourselves in the mirror with red eyes after a good sobbing. I laughed because I was able to scare my sister in the dark. 

It had been so long to realise that it was so long that I had laughed so loud, and truly. Though we keep missing parts of us and what we could have been.. it does seem so strange to try to remember the last time you laughed this loud. 

One of those is a memory of the reading room in the department, us watching 'I feel Pretty' movie. Wherein the lead actress in a scene makes a comment on the make-up product to be offered without an applicator. She says something about how that makes it hard for some women doing tasks and in a hurry, making them look like 'braveheart'. And we had not understood the reference, and we googled. And we laughed together when we saw the posters of braveheart and understood the reference. And then acknowledged how good it feels to watch movies together as well. 

I have been told and while I was able to read, I had read that it gets messy, and it maybe is supposed to be so. Not that we are bad people, that this keeps happening. I mean, it's so hard to believe this for oneself, but when I hear my friends say things like this about themselves, I feel so sad that they thought so. They are so kind and amazing, and because someone cannot see it, cannot be that to them, and failed them, it is not their fault. It never was. Is it easier to love others than oneself? Merlyn once sent a page from a famous author on how self love precedes all love, and that is the only way to go about it, in that sense she was trying to tell me that it is perhaps, that we are all narcissists at some level, and maybe that's okay.

Maybe, even the feeling of running away from yourself, stepping out and forcing your organs (heart to begin with) of your body, are all escape routes in a stunted space of our being. Among the many thoughts that keep ruining you, maybe the power to numb out them altogether is desirable. I wanted to be independent, confident, comfortable being alone, not scared of the dark, and able to be myself.. since time that I remember about. Maybe, just in the initial ones of this time, I was free and singing like a lark, busy in me, and perhaps, that was the prettiest version of my life..

I had started writing here on one such August in 2016. Five years. It is five years.. but that's one of the things that one should not give a damn about. People who keep reminding you that you need to be in the present, not think of future, who say things and then slowly you feel sad because everything seems turning to a lie, people who save your full name despite being close (again a thing people should not care).. they are perhaps freer and better. Maybe, not being so mature is a huge problem. Because, that there is not much you do, things just happen. And they happen to screw you, over and again. Everytime, it makes you try to reset to be able to breathe, and you still fail. Probably, that's how life is for lesser beings like me maybe.

To the absurdity and those damned!

With whatever remains.

- R 

10/08/2021

02:53 am