And with the name, with the thought, comes the fear, inevitably and unapologetically...
INTROSPECTION
“Is there no way out of the mind?”
- Sylvia Plath
The name
You try to get rid of that name in your head and it gets stuck in your throat. Stubborn, it stays there. Your efforts to swallow it into oblivion go in vain and your attempts to exhale it out of your existence seem futile. It gets hold of you, a firm footing within you. You feel it running through your veins. You begin to utter it, bit by bit, usually in silence. You utter it while walking, while travelling somewhere far, just before you sleep and the moment you wake up. You find it on the tip of your tongue. For long, it has found its home in you. You carry that name, you always do. Until one day, you decide to numb it, given to the circumstances.
The thought
You will always be on my mind, won’t you? I’ll wake up early in the morning and think that you are probably still sleeping; I’ll cross a road and wonder whether you have ever been on this road. It will rain and I would think if you love it as much as I do. If I go to eat at any place, the thought of you being over there will come to me and also about what would you have liked on the menu. The moment I’m extremely happy, the moment I am deeply saddened, the moment I need to tell something to someone, it is you, who come to my mind. The thought of you never leaves. Does it?
The fear
And with the name, with the thought, comes the fear, inevitably and unapologetically. Come to think of it and we know that it was always, always there. Wasn’t it? With its fingers gripping the heart, it drains the little melodies out of the heart and places broken pieces of melancholy inside, carefully so as to not let them escape. With its feet dipped in cold water in a winter night and a full moon, it sends paralyzing chills down the spine. More than often, the heart skips a beat because of this fear which lives in the conscience, spreading its web around the entire existence and sometimes lingers through the veins, just to remind that it is what is keeping us alive, for now. How immaculately the fear resides in us when it knows what we fear is not even ours. It’s just the name and numerous thoughts that we carry.
And in all this, among uttering the name to brushing off the thoughts which relentlessly come back to see the fear winning and taking its toll, I wonder, if ever you could know that it is you.
