DOES NOBODY UNDERSTAND...

To

Anyone interested in making an entry into the world

“Does nobody understand?” 

These were the last words of author James Joyce. They were simple, they were deep and they were profound. You could twist them this way and that. But they were most certainly not pointing to a question. I refuse to believe that it was a mere question, that you could trivialise these words in that manner, no matter how you chose to interpret them. 

I see a different kind of affirmation here—a realisation.

It is hiding in plain sight, underneath the translucent words.

This is a strange world, you see, where we hand over the keys of our lives to someone else. So much so that everybody can peer in through the windows and decide on whom we should love, and how much. Everybody but ourselves, that is.

They choose for you “who” you must love. Can you love a woman the same as a man? Can you even love yourself the way you really want to? Who is to explain? Everyone but you will have an answer to that. 

By nature, human beings are strange creatures. We make our own laws and forget to believe in them. That is why there are neat little tags to identify emotions—an unusual homosexual homo sapien, a normal heterosexual male, a lesbian female, a confused bi-sexual etc. There are laws to legalize same-sex marriages because while others’ are made in heaven, these are not. A piece of paper decides whether your love is valid. And in a world where a piece of paper comes above love, you would do well not to become overambitious in your pursuit of this strange emotion.

It is all a charade, a desperate attempt to categorise what cannot be understood in entirety.

Don’t bother to love at all, if you think that your love is not of the right variety. Don’t bother to fall in love until you’ve understood the rules of the game. Be very sure that you are a man, or a woman as the case may be, first and foremost. If you’re not sure you cannot proceed. Once this hurdle is cleared, proceed to love the right person, namely, someone from the opposite sex.

There should have been a checklist for this.

Men can kill for the right kind of love. You can be killed if it’s the wrong kind.

But look at the irony of it all, won’t you. 

Who is they? Who made the rules, and now stops us from being ourselves? Who made the rules and who punishes the trespassers?

“Who is they?” is a very valid question. 

Because it is us. 

We are the traps and we are its victims too. We hurt ourselves until our laws of love become meaningless. The human race, as glorious as it stands, is very effective in pulling its own strings. 

Now if we were to go back to James Joyce and his last words, you would “understand”.

You would know that it is pointless to put his words in that order to ask a silly question, a mere trifle. It is more of a realisation that sometimes, indeed, “nobody” understands because they don’t want to. The onus is upon you to choose your battles carefully. In order to survive, you must learn the rules of the game of loving early on. Either that, or you prepare to die.

Unfortunately for you, the game begins at birth. 

Yours truly

THE BEFORE AND THE AFTER

To

The Girl in a picture

There was a picture of a girl standing on the beach with her back towards the onlookers, just staring at the vast sea. Only a trail of her footprints in the white sand behind her, as if at the very next moment someone would call her into the sea and she would vanish. Maybe she was waiting for the tide. Or maybe she was planning to drown herself. 

There was her, this girl unnamed, and there was the white sand. Only stark footprints and an ethereal silence permeating the rest of the picture.

Frozen time.

So simple, yet so powerful. 

It was a picture I drew with crayons years later, and taped it to my cupboard. It was supposed to be inspirational.

But everything about it and my life right now is similar, almost tantamount to nothing. It’s a powerful ‘nothingness’. It can make you do things if you let it. But it can also engulf you if you so wished it. Being a teen, being a ‘new’ adult, is not worth more than that picture. It’s the first half of this life on earth, when you don’t know where you’re going. Are you going to make it big? Do you have the courage to plunge into a sea of possibilities? Did you do all that you were supposed to, to carve out a “successful” individual?

There are questions but no answers. 

Only Time has the power to answer.

Time and time again I’ve looked at that picture. My grandmother loved it. It was she who requested me to draw it for her. She loved it because she was secure. She was not on the precipice at that age. She was not forced to stare into an abyss of ‘before and after’. She was not being reprimanded for not ‘using’ time anymore than she was for using it however she wanted. 

Of course, I agree to competition. I agree to passion, courage, the drive and everything considered essential to make one’s self successful in this day and age. I agree to ‘living’ a life. But I don’t agree to being judged for it. What if I am not that individual, the one who derives a pleasure from winning every single time? Who decides whether 21st century’s young adults ought to win every battle or not? What if I never win? 

I believe that Time will condemn all individuals when it does. 

But we tend to do its job beforehand.

Now I would like to wait for my sentence, to let Time decide. I want to wait for the tide. 

The only part which bothers me is having to stare into the abyss, to stand at the precipice, to ‘not know’ the before and after. What sweet torture it is to be a ‘young adult’ without knowing anything about adulthood, to be encircled by swarming possibilities like a pair of vultures overhead, and to be wondering about yourself all the time. 

A terrible bouquet of innumerable hopes and innumerable fears. Lots of fear.

So in the end, I always find myself being drawn to that picture.

In the end I’m just a girl unnamed, standing on the beach with her back towards the world, staring into a huge sea of nothingness. 

All I have behind me are footprints in the sand.

All I have in front of me are the shadows and possibilities of Time.

Yours truly