It’s been a while since I tried to jot down the hurricane in my head. So, here I sit, lounging away after a long day of working-from-home, my cup of tea sitting on the table, a Tamil-movie-song playlist from the early 2000s streaming into my ears, and… life doesn’t seem too bad afterall. It has been a while, but I feel like myself today. The rock on my chest seems to have been lifted off and I can breathe again. Maybe it’ll fall right back and crush me to bits this time. But for now, I am okay. It’s only a matter of minutes until the anxiety seethes in, and I start panicking about everything and nothing at the same time. Soon, I’ll run myself down. But for now, I am okay, and for now, I want to cherish this.
Ideally, I should be focusing on what made me feel better, and try to work on it so it could be here to stay. I should be journaling — I can hear my therapist screaming “journal, child, journal!” in my head — and maybe leaving behind bread crumbs for my not-so-okay self to find. But I seem to have lost my connection with words. I am struggling to unravel all the emotions I am feeling and turn them into words. So, let’s take things in one after another, shall we?
I take a few deep breaths and I feel this flicker in my heart; a soft light struggling to glow brighter, but too afraid of being consumed. I wonder how beautiful it would be when the light is brighter, if the little flicker already feels so enthralling. I fear that it’d be blown out by the coldness surrounding it, but I am also afraid that the light would scorch me.
Breathe. Let’s focus on the music. Funnily enough, shuffle picks Suttum Vizhi — this song that swept me into a different time when I listened to it first last week, after years, at least half a decade — right at this moment. It’s not really the song that hit me, it was the memories attached to it. The year was 2006. Ghajini, a Tamil movie that was released the previous year, was still all my Tamil-speaking friends would talk about. I would love to say that the movie inspired me and took me on an emotional journey, but it didn’t. It was just a blockbuster with some catchy tunes. But it was a blockbuster that somehow managed to become a vessel for my memories. When I listened to Suttum Vizhil, I remember Azzzzz mumbling the song next to me during free periods; I remember the big eyes of my best friend, Bandu ❤, as she narrates some adventure from a tuition class, or a TV show about Amman that she watched recently, her eyes growing larger and larger as she speaks; I remember squinting into a piece of paper Uma just gave me, her round letters serenading the lyrics of a tamil song written in English letters, her eyes staring into thin air trying to translate the lyrics to English after I pestered her for the twentieth time asking what exactly does that word mean. I smile as the warmth wraps around me like a blanket on a rainy day.
The memories make me feel that there is a ground beneath my feet, as opposed to the constant feeling of floating on a thin cloud that might dissolve any time now. As much as I love the idea of seeing those friends again- friends with whom I haven’t had a proper conversation in over a decade- and going back to the comfort of their companionship, I understand that our walls have risen too high to climb over. And, that’s okay, we all have our lives, I tell myself. We all seem happy in our own ways. Even though I long for them and those times, it’s not them that I crave; it is myself. When I navigate those memories as they stand exhibit before me, it is myself that I find myself stopping in front of. As I stand staring into her young eyes, her dishevelled hair floating outside what used to be plaits, her undone top collar button, her shirt sleeves bunched at her shoulders and her shirt hem that was under no pretense of being tucked in, I feel that flicker in my heart again. She was by no means perfect. She was still anxious, had no self-esteem and had a lot of self-pity. But she had hope; she knew she had to keep going because there was no other way; she would go through hundreds of scenarios in her head about how things could go wrong, but she still faced it head-on. The 27 year-old me is much more of a coward than the 13 year-old me, and my heart yearns to be that person again.
The older I grow, the scarier the world around me feels. And that fear freezes the air around that flickering flame. I want myself to remember that that 13 year-old girl didn’t fight her battles so hard, so that she could crumble 14 years later and hide under a coconut shell. If this was a time-travel story, and she saw me right now, she might have attempted to kill herself right then, not 13 years later. What’s the point of trying so hard to move forward if all you get to do is run in circles, she’d wonder. Maybe it’s a good thing that this is not a time-travel story, eh? Maybe it’s a good thing that she did her best then, so I could look at her and muster up some courage to do better now? Maybe that little flicker I feel is that rascal of a girl banging against her prison gate demanding to be let out?
