By Praniti Gulyani
July 19, 2021
I am a pause between moment and memory, or to be precise, I dwell in the pause between a moment and memory, standing with outstretched palms so that I can capture this thing of the present before it dissolves into the convenience of the past.
I do not know if it is good to be this way. My tendency to remember what must be forgotten and forget what must be remembered, twists my world into an extremely lopsided posture. But then, normalcy is truly subjective, and for me, this lopsided state is the sole epitome of normalcy.
I am seventeen years old, just about venturing into the angry alleys of adulthood. I have been told that I must harden my heart and embellish it in stony attire, else it may morph into a mucky marsh of emotion for the world to wade through. However, my heart does not listen. It trickles through the cracks and crevices in the stone and form pools, puddle ever so easily; at the mere drop of a hat. It is a stubborn, stubborn being and its headstrong nature calls for a good talking to. Like a protective mother who takes her child behind closed doors, to do all kinds of ‘scolding business’, I decide to take my heart to a place away from the hustle-bustle of city life to have a good, long conversation with it. It is almost as though my heart is an unruly, eighteen-year-old and I am a paranoid parent who is out to explain the nuances of this ‘cruel, cruel world’ to her stubborn child. As we – my heart and I – take a step out of the pleasantly aromatic boundaries of home, we decide to journey to the town park.
The world was teetering on the absolute tip of evening, and the slowly retreating twilight was a faintly weird but definite display of motherhood. It was almost as though the cool, magenta shades of sunset were calming the crackling fire of the day, like a soothing maternal embrace – like a mother who tenderly holds her angry child.
I feel my heart look at the sky and smile.
As the air is fragrant with the aroma of a maternal assurance, my eyes mist over and my heart: it melts, melts, melts.
As we move ahead, we see a colony of ants, curling and curving around a puddle of stars. The ants look like elegant, crystal beings with deep, purple drops of evening on their backs. They are a point of mutuality, a point of meeting between the sky and the earth, as the ants tilt – slowly, surely and allow the evening to melt with the moistness of the earth.
In this winding trail of infinitesimal life, a single ant pauses. It seems as though he is tired, exhausted and weary after a day of relentless and strenuous travel. He stops. The others stop as well. In this selfish world of mortals, the pause of another is seen as an incentive for the other – to run faster, faster than ever before. However, for these little bits of life – growth and the entire act of ‘living’ as a whole is a by-product of togetherness. My heart looks at this personification of unity and marvels at this strong thread of connection that not only prevails, but continues and prospers.
Seeing the paused trail, I feel the warmth of a soft smile on my face. Then, I feel my heart shift: as it melts, melts, melts.
We’re nearly there. The moon appears in the distance, crowning the helm of the sky. The sky isn’t completely black, it is still warm and alive with pink and crimson like the cheeks of a young teenager, and the sliver of the moon is a tiara placed on her gushing, lustrous locks by strong, fatherly hands. Fatherly hands . . .
After all, as they say, fatherhood is an abstraction which escalates the boundaries defined by the concrete. As nature inclines itself towards the protective aura of the paternal, my eyes are foggy with emotion and a newfound longing – for all the love I’d desired, for all the love I’d never got.
And, my heart: it crouches into a little girl, longing for a father’s hug: as it melts, melts, melts.
Finally, we reach our destination. My heart tugs, twirls and twists and looks at me. It has great, grey eyes that gleam with a resplendent shimmer. It smirks at me like a child who has outrun her mother in a game of tug. My heart has brows of cloud and limbs of raindrops. It seems to crinkle these brows at me, in a slight, subtle frown and without uttering a word – it seems to ask me if I have something to scold it about, or rather if I have anything to say – anything to say at all.
I don’t know whether to respond. And, most importantly, I don’t know how to respond.
A moment later, I feel as though a ray of sunshine has wrapped itself around my finger.
Moments later, I realize that my heart is holding my hand, its fingers feeling like soft sun against my tight, mortal skin.
And together, hand in hand, my heart and I, we witness moonrise.
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