The things I couldn't write

Notes, laptop & tea

"The things I couldn't write"

For almost eight months, I couldn't write anything...Anything means nothing---- absolutely nothing.

The journey from the pen to the paper, from my hands to the keyboard, seemed endless, as if the road was lost, or maybe I lost it. I had no idea how or where to go -- stuck in the middle of nowhere. My hands ached, my head throbbed as though an invisible hand were tightening its grip around my skull, my feet felt heavy and tired, and my shoes had started giving blisters —I felt immobile, helpless, and trapped. Trapped in the quagmire of my own life....

I would hesitate to share, and even if I did, only in moments of absolute desperation or in bits. I feared, doubted and questioned myself...the answers felt like being locked somewhere in the middle of a bottomless ocean, and the keys were lost in oblivion.... a fragile sense of nothingness pervaded like a needle into my blood as it mingled with the muscles and bones and tissues and veins of my entire being...

And then those dreams---weird, messy, foggy---familiar faces floated in front of my eyes, but I couldn't find myself---they seemed vague, otherworldly, and at times rather consequential to my existence. I would try to decode them through my bare essentials, with no results whatsoever. I gave up, yet the dreams continued...in fragments, in minute atomic pieces for a long time...

loss and grief

The last year taught me a lot about grief. I held my loss as a very private, sacred space, something I carried silently within me... too intimate to be spoken about. But I forgot that grief is at once personal, universal and cyclic. I thought sharing it would strip it of its sanctity and that I should hold it tightly like a kid holds her toy, with a sense that it belonged only to me.

I was waiting for the right words, maybe the right time, to process it into writing, and this holding on 'in between' is so agonizing and stifling at the same time, hanging somewhere in the middle of a bridge on the verge of collapse, yet you fear to take a single step, lest you lose your balance...things I couldn't write about...

Dreams

"at times we lose our might

at a place

where we dreamed of

taking our flight,

in between those

pauses and madness and eclipses

we slowly understand

the true meaning of

resilience and surrender in glimpses..."

By Nandini Sengupta

@metaphors_of_life