The Heart of a Crowd

There are moments when you yearn to be just one amid many.  

You pine for the blur of faces whooshing around you, the accidental brush of a hand on yours. To breathe in the air that has been cast-off by the surrounding throng; the intimacy, you crave it.

There is comfort to be taken in isolation, yes, but the loss of individuality holds a certain charm as well.

You want to forget- just for a while- to simply live and breathe, to step out and endure. 

And so, you stand here pulsing in the heart of this crowd, and tell yourself that your bubble does not exist.

It is a relief then, this lie.

To let yourself be swept away by the ocean, by the mass of obscure grey shapes, your only duty to contribute to the beauty of the ensemble.

Within this crowd, you can tell yourself: perhaps for all your worries about a distinctive existence, you are nothing more than a single artery of a heart, pumping and throbbing on impulses from your milieu.

Here, your own decisions will reflect off the millions of facets of this glass sphere. Your behaviour can be formulaic, without blame and without pressure. 

Here, you are merely a fish among a shoal, and the ocean does not move merely because your fins have grazed it.

Trapped within the jostle of elbows and shoulders, you are truly free. 

Within this crowd, you are no one, and your insignificance has never been sweeter. 

 

Photo by Carl Findahl on Unsplash

 

Hat Tip to Mike from From the Front Porch for his input on the piece

 

 

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The One After

The clock struck midnight and she was gone.

There was no spark of light, no crackle in the air, not a single silver shoe left behind.

She had simply vanished- vanished, not dead- when just the second before, she had lived. Her arms had hung limply at her side, breath held in, eyes fixed firmly on the clock as it ticked, closer, closer.

11:57

11:58

11:59

Voila.

And I was there, in the very place that she’d relinquished, breathing in the air that had whooshed out of her lungs, feeling the phantom touch of her, tingling.

Sparks of guilt and anger flaring up, uncalled for and unwelcome.

I felt like a snake slipped out of its skin; pristine in a way that is distinctly unpleasant, the knowledge of my own transience clouding the loss of my former skin.

You are reborn, renewed, they would say. Replaced is more like it.

She was gone, and I had never met her, never seen her. And yet, I knew her, like no else ever had.

She was a memory as faint as a song in a dream, a certain inexplicable sorrow accompanying it. If I pictured her, it would only be as a bright unravelling spool of colour that hung from the cusp of recollection, fleeing away into the wind at the slightest threat of capture, tangling in the smatter of stars ahead.

And she would never return now, her time here was over. Over. That grandiose thought, the utter finality of it, it scared me. I had taken her place. And I would follow.

The longest hand of the clock reached twelve, and I was a minute old.

I had just twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes left.

I wonder if the one after me would remember.

 

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

 

You close your eyes…

When you close your eyes, your world is not void.

It is in flashes of red, of gold, of scandalously bright pinks, flickering like stars on the backdrop of a bruised black.

You can stand in the budding light of a winter dawn, the chilly morning breeze whipping around you, and shades of pastel pinks and oranges bloom into being.

In the punishing glare of a mid-day sun, your world is a flaring red: it soaks you in delicious warmth, drowning you in an ocean of scarlet.

When the night shifts from dusk to twilight, the wilting glare of the fading sun shines a queer royal blue, embroidered with strands of sea-silver.

When you close your eyes, your world is magic.

The world outside is harsh, full of dull greys and insipid whites. But it doesn’t have to be so. The world beneath your eyelids is beautiful, and it’s yours.

So you don’t doubt, you don’t question.

You believe. Ignorance is key.

This place you see, of laughter and joy, of everlasting beauty and frivolous magic, is real. It has to be.

Because when you can’t trust yourself, what is there to live for?

You turn a blind eye, let yourself get caught up in the charade you create.

The truth is right before you, they say, but they’ll never understand.

You do not want to see. You do not want to know. You don’t ask. You don’t doubt.

You close your eyes, and believe.

 

 

Photo by Cédric Klei on Unsplash

Fall to Power

Whatever we did, we did for power.

Money. Love. Beauty. Respect. Family.

Power to control, to seduce, to create, to morph.

Science to control our surroundings, psychology to control ourselves. Society to control our world.

Everything you could have possibly yearned for, anything you could want, in the end, was merely a tireless quest for dominance.

It sounds vain, even as I think it. To reduce the entire of our lives, all our hopes, our dreams, our drive, as they would say, to one pathetic power-play.

But to be vain itself is a power, to have the power to be vain, to be selfish, to think only of oneself. A luxury. How we wasted it.

Don’t be like that, they would tell us. Serve. Adapt. Fulfil. 

Be selfless, sans the self, shrink yourself, smaller, smaller, until you no longer exist.

How can you want when you are not in being?

You are content, they told you. Happy. This is what happiness feels like.

How were we to know?

---

It’s why we fell in the end, I think to myself.

Because there was that ‘more’ lingering in the air, more power over the other person, loved more, respected more.

Big words like ‘unconditionally‘ and ‘forever‘ thrown about, disrupting the balance.

When we fought over the TV remote, the restaurants, who paid the bill, who fed the cat, who took out the trash. Hands flying, head shaking, dishevelled, letting loose, words spewing out of red lipstick, I remember, there was so much red towards the end.

How trivial, we thought, how mundane.

In the end, it was those little things that did it.

We laughed about it afterwards, of course, hands clutched together, eyes smiling, mingled sighs and half-hearted apologies.

But the more was still in the air, whispering, scheming.

They say that when you go deaf, it starts off as just a small humming in your ears. And then day after day, night after night, it slowly drowns out the world around you, until it’s all you can hear.

That was what it was like, this ‘more‘. It was like going deaf, deaf to what you have, right before you. More, more, more. 

When we pretended we didn’t care, hurting, hurting so much, battered, broken, tired, oh-so-tired. That was about power too.

Apathy. Ignorance. The less you care, the better. The less you know, the less you care. Close your eyes, go in blind, go in deaf, more, more, more.

We craved the imbalance and we paid for it. The scales finally tilted. We fell.

In the end, we fell, falling, falling, was that power?

Was I happy, then?

I can’t remember.

The fall was a grey blur, a single whoosh, a rush of blood to the head, passion, lust, rage, hunger, us gasping for breath, breathless.

It was breathtaking, as they would say.

That’s not always a good thing.

---

Photo by Yessica Villalobos on Unsplash

I was here.

Today is one of the bad days.

Today, I spend an hour over the page, spelling out my name onto paper, over and over and over again until it’s all I can see.

A curve here. A line there. A dot. Repeat.

A tear drops onto the ink and leaves a speckle of blue that wobbles when I exhale.

I feel my pulse steadily rising, my heart beating faster as I take another breath.

It’s all wrong.

It isn’t me.

The paper cackles as I crush it, mocking me.

 

---

I feel like a mirage, as if I’m made of smoke, fading into nothingness.

A cold squall of wind could hiss my way, and I’d be gone, only two sets of nails and thirty-four teeth swirling in a spiral down to the ground.

And then, just as quickly, they’ll turn to dust and ash, blown away in a gust of grey.

Maybe someone will look up as I billow past them, a look of distant incomprehension on their face.

Maybe another will mouth a perfect ‘O’ as my hand fleets right through their arm, grasping for a berth.

The moment will be forgotten as quickly as it came.

I’ll be forgotten.

I could have never existed.

---

On the desk I write on is etched three words and a date.

S.R. loves J.D. 2007.

If I close my eyes, I can look up and see two pale, shimmery shapes rise up from the letters, hands clutched together, eyes shining, a tender glance, a subtle kiss.

I love you. 

No one can refute that now. It’s evidence. Evidence that they existed, that they lived, that they loved.

I would like to have that, I think.

Decades later, I would like for a hand to run its fingers over my carving, sharpen the edges, perfect the letters. I would like to become a part of the wood, to live forever through it.

And if my name is on the page, if my name is scrawled on some distant pillar, I tell myself: I can’t disappear.

I was here.

See?

I told you.

I told you I was.

That’s my name, I was here.

I rip the page and start over.

The paper cackles as I crush it.

 

 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Castle in the air

There is a castle I live in, with glass walls that kiss the sky.

It holds clasped around it an air of mystique, of whispered secrets and hushed murmurs, cloaked around those four glass walls no one has seen within. There are no doors and windows. No way of entering at all. The glass is tinted, so that everything inside is merely a grey blur.

Inside: the grass is dead, the air stale.

Each day, I step outside, and I am remoulded, recast into different flesh, en vogue.

I step outside and my shadow is lighter, as though I have left a shade of it behind.

I step outside, and my world is anything I want it to be.

I can be one amidst a million again, a thread blending seamlessly into the cloth. Or I can be a single streak of silver against black.

---

I am a storyteller: telling fairytales of life inside the grey, never lying, nothing true.

Look at the tapestries, I entreat, flourishing the cobwebs that hang from the ceilings.

I am an enchantress: weaving threads of magic in place to fabricate my own reality.

Look at the grandeur, I urge. How the walls stroke the skies, crystal glistening in the moonlight, outshining the stars.

I am an architect: setting stone upon stone, carving a world into being.

Look at the glass walls, I whisper. For you shall see nothing beyond it.

I am anything I want to be.

Your eyes widen, in awe, in admiration. In wonder.

It a heady feeling, that sense of being put on a pedestal, as if the laws of gravity no longer apply to me.

As though I could fly as long as I don’t look down.

I can no longer stop, I have gone too high to fall.

I cannot bring myself to care.

I can fly.

Which is the dream now? Which is the lie?

Then one day, you arrive. You knock at the glass, hand rapping sharply on the walls with no doors. I do not respond. You should not be here.

You knock again.

Silence.

I hold my breath and then sigh, leaning against the walls.

Footsteps echo into silence. You are gone.

I am relieved. Relieved of the truth, of how close you came to seeing it.

But there is a twinge of something I cannot identify right there. Regret? Longing? It is not pleasant, whatever it is, and I dismiss it.

I have only a second’s warning when glass explodes into the air, cracks spiderwebbing along the walls.

You walk straight through: through the tinted glass, the façade of castles and fairy tales, tapestries and skyscrapers.

Lies.

You do not flinch.

Not when the glass shards pierce through your skin, blood dripping onto the dusty wooden floors.

Not when you take in the cobwebs, the damp, musty smell of neglect.

Lies.

I want to scream. To rant and rage. To throw a fit.

You are not supposed to be here.

I say nothing.

The balance has shifted. The power is in your hands.

I want to strike out like a cornered animal, glaring into your eyes, challenging you to make a single misstep, longing for you to just give me a reason to be angry. It simmers just underneath the surface, underneath this overwhelming shame, the guilt.

My pedestal has gone, and I am falling, falling. I look down.

I am Cinderella, without the –ella, only ashes.

Exposed. Vulnerable. It’s too much. Too soon.

Silence.

And then you make an obscene comment.

Laugh.

Offend.

The transition is smooth. Seamless. There is no hitch, no falter in your steps. No pity in your eyes.

The air is stale, the grass dead, but you are the same.

I am grateful.

---

There is a castle I live in, with glass walls that kiss the skies. There are no doors and windows, no way of entering at all. The glass is tinted, so that everything inside is merely a grey blur.

I pause for effect with all the grace of a serial-gossip about to reveal the biggest secret of her infamous career.

But there are ways, I whisper into your ears. Cracks in the glass.

I nod emphatically for emphasis.

Who knows? One day, she might let you in.

 

Unshackled

A chair, a table, a plant.

On the table, a fishbowl, in the corner of the room.

A splash of golden on grey.

It is an itch that refuses to be dismissed, like a picture placed slightly tilted in an otherwise perfect room.

My forehead leans on the glass box, my eyes pressed against the surface.

A goldfish darts past, a bolt of sunlight. It doesn’t spare me a single glance. I am ignored; as it is ignorant of my existence.

I wonder which one of us is the slighted one here.

The world beyond those four glass walls is incomprehensible to it, only a distant dream, the faintest litany. My world ends with this tank.

The only difference between us is the side of the wall we stand on.

Water and air.

Captivity.

---

Every once in a while, it buts its head against the glass, striking at its tank with its fins.

It swims around the tank, once.

Twice.

Another thump.

Repeat.

There’s something slightly off about the entire scene. About the way its body moves. Stiff. Almost brittle. The eyes are glassy, unfocused. As if it sees something here that I can’t see, living in a universe completely different from mine.

It swishes past me again, moving in those hurried, jerky movements I’ve grown so used to.

I imagine it wishes for freedom. For the glass to shatter and set it free. To see the world from the other side of those walls. My side.

I trace its path with my hand over the glass.

Another thump.

---

Then one day, it happens.

At first, the crack in the glass is small. Barely the length of a hairpin. I run my hand along the fracture, feeling the tiny welt scratching at the delicate skin.

The goldfish thumps on the glass.

I press the tip of my index finger on the fissure, slowly pushing in. The glass strains under my finger, cutting through the sensitive skin. A bead of red surfaces.

The fracture spider-webs across the tank, creeping along the surface.

One more prod.

A single crack echoes in the room, a muffled gunshot.

The tank shatters all at once, and there’s a mesmerizing beauty to it, to the way the glass seems to implode on itself as the water gushes out, pulsing. Shards of glass fly around me, flipping slowly end over end, the sunlight catching in each piece. A thousand tiny, beautiful rainbows.

The goldfish is swept out onto the floor, flopping as it struggles to breathe.

Blood drips onto the wet floor from my finger.

I watch as it thrashes on the wood, breathing out the last of its oxygen into the swirls of red.

There’s a certain irony to it.

My life-source mingling with its.

Our worlds have collided.

Hands claw at my throat, and my lungs seem to be surrounded by metal bands. I wheeze in, and my breath whistles, like blowing air into a clogged pipe.

The tank goes blurry. The table, the chair, the plant. Fading away.

Only the fish is left.

The fish and me.

The fish is me.

I was never meant to be unshackled.

 

Photo by Sadiq Nafee on Unsplash

 

 

 

Faceless

It all started as a game.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a people-watcher.

As a child, I would watch people for hours before even attempting to talk to them.

I’d scrutinize how you spoke. What you wore. When you laughed. What you liked. Whom you talked to.

I would watch and watch, try to figure out who you were. What you wanted.

And once I put together the pieces of your identity, I would form my own, making sure they clicked.

It was like a puzzle that only I could finish and it amused me to have that sort of power over you: to control exactly what you see.

But under all of that, I’d ensured that I was that girl:

The girl you want to speak to.

The girl you share all your secrets with.

The girl you like.

---

I flit from one person to the next, as graceful as a butterfly.

Always smiling. Always pleasing.

You come to me when you don’t have anyone else, and it’s my shoulder you cry on, it’s into my ears you whisper your darkest secrets.

I soothe. I comfort. I encourage. I motivate. I charm.

And when I’m finally alone, I laugh.

I laugh at the world, at how gullible you are, to think you know me, to trust me the way you do.

I laugh till I cry and then I cry till I can’t breathe.

The tears never end, it seems, they flow and flow relentlessly, leeching me of everything.

The real joke was on me, all along.

And I’d never realized.

---

I look in the mirror and don’t recognize the shadow that looks back into my eyes.

I don’t ‘like’ her.

In fact, I despise her.

I see myself wrapping my hands around her throat and squeezing until the light slowly fades from her eyes.

And then, I realize the girl is me.

The irony: I’d gained the affection of everyone else, only to realize that I couldn’t win me over too.

Alone, I’m a coward. I’m despicable. Spineless. A doormat. A hypocrite.

I morph myself to suit the people around me. My very identity is built on everyone else’s desires.

I’m no one without someone to please. Nothing without a task to complete.

And there is nothing left of ‘me’ now, of the person I could have been.

Before. Before all the masks.

 

---

When I look back, all I see is crushed dreams, and when I look forward, I see an eternity of nothingness.

But it’s what I see when I look within that truly scares me.

Underneath all my masks, I am faceless.

 

Photo by John Noonan on Unsplash

Body positivity: The latest trend in Shame.

We’ve all come a long way from where we started.

Gone are the days where you see people telling you ‘how you have to look like to be loved’ and that ‘you just starve yourself for a few more days so that you’ll fit into a dress size’.

Today, we’ve truly managed to create something that could have been beautiful: Acceptance. Empowerment. Confidence. Freedom.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve gotten caught up in our heads and gone down the wrong road. A single blunder has changed everything.

---

People have started asking: if you truly loved your body, why would you want it to change?

That wouldn’t make sense.

A fairly simple, innocent question, really.

But there’s something far more menacing at work here. Shame.

Shame has found itself yet another expression, hiding behind banners that cry out messages of self-love.

All of a sudden, it’s scandalous to say that you aren’t content with your body.

The minute it gets out, you’re trampled and suffocated with claims of how you’re a traitor to women all around the world, how you’re a disgrace to yourself.

Even worse are the unwanted counsel and advice on how you should ‘just’ love yourself and accept who you are.

So, I’ll say it now:

No, I’m not one of those people who work out for the love of sweat or for good health and strength. I work out to look good. 

No, I didn’t eat that salad for dinner because I absolutely loved it. I ate the salad because I wanted to drop a few pounds.

No, I’m not content with my body. I want to be more toned and I want to be, gasp, leaner. Maybe these thoughts aren’t acceptable, but I won’t lie to myself by saying things I don’t mean.

---

I’m tired of excusing myself and my actions to people.

It’s exhausting, the lying to yourself, lying to everyone around you, thinking of excuses, worrying about being convincing enough, being someone you aren’t.

I’m sick and tired of it.

I used to feel like I’m doing something wrong by thinking these thoughts, that there must be something wrong with me if I can’t accept myself the way I am.

And those feelings are as damaging as thinking that you are too fat to be pretty.

This isn’t a question of insecurity or self-hatred.

Yes, I do love myself. I love my body, I love my personality and I know that I deserve to be loved by someone else too.

But I’m not going to say that I love that extra layer of flab over my stomach or that I love those 10 pounds that I want to lose or that I love that I sometimes walk like a frog.

Because I don’t love all of that. They are a part of me and I simply don’t. And if you do, that’s great. I’ll admire and respect you for that. But I don’t.

It’s a personal thing.

I want to change it.

And that doesn’t make me any less lovable.

---

At the end of the day, I want to be able to whatever I want to do without the shame, without the lies, without the excuses.

Because isn’t that what all of this is about?

Body-positivity, feminism, self-love, self-care, all of it, on a basic level is about owning your actions and doing whatever it is that you want.

And if you’re going to shame me for doing what I want to do under this very aegis, then what is the point in all of this?

Shame has merely found another incarnation, an even crueller one at that. Because now, it’s covered up in this sickly sweet façade of self-love.

Before, people walked up to me and said that I needed to lose a few pounds so that I can be ‘healthy’. Now, people walk up to me and say that I need to stop wanting to lose weight so that I can be ‘body-positive’.

There is no difference. Either way, I’m judged and shamed for something I’m doing and then pressurized to do something I don’t want to do.

We’re at the exact same place and no one realizes it.

---

When will we ever find that balance? Will we ever reach that place where we stop shaming other people for their actions and judging them?

Because maybe this is just a part of human nature, maybe we’re intrinsically programmed to pull each other down.

I don’t know.

But what I do know is that I’m done.

I’m done being someone who I’m not.

I’m done acting like someone else just because of the latest trend going around.

The only trend that ever sticks around is shame and what I have learnt is that it simply isn’t worth it.

All that time you spent thinking of lies, delivering them, explaining yourself to people, explaining your actions to yourself: it’s not worth it.

From this moment, I am going to be unflinchingly honest with myself: whether it’s working out to look better or eating a salad to lose weight.

And I’m going to it without feeling bad or regretting it.

It’s a good life.

Who’s with me?