The cursor was blinking on her screen. The blog post begged to be completed. It had been more than a fortnight that she’d begun penning down her thoughts. They were there in her head; a nameless voice inside her, dictating words that aptly expressed her emotions. But the words got trapped within the boundaries of the head. The flow from the brain through the keyboard to the document was blocked. She read the few lines she’d managed to type; the sight filled her with rage and disbelief. It seemed as if she’d lost the power to transcribe her thoughts. “The only talent that I thought I had, has also rusted,’’ she thought aloud. Talking to herself had become a habit. She sometimes wondered if these were symptoms of her going insane, sometimes she consoled herself thinking that great people often had conversations with themselves.
Life had never seemed so mundane. Her life was no less than a farce. She switched of the laptop and looked at the time. It was five past two. She’d been burning the midnight oil, literally, yet she could see no evident progress in her blog. Writing, a one-time passion, had been mercilessly reduced to a vocab-enhancing exercise. “I wish,” she said to herself, “that the postcards of life never became blurred.” She tucked herself into her quilt, the warmth of which scarcely managed to soothe her.
She dreaded waking up every morning, not knowing what to expect from the long day that lay ahead. The trend hadn’t been great for over half a year now. A day well started would end in the most depressing manner. She’d leant to hold back her tears. But sometimes, the emotions broke out of their barriers; times, when she would weep uncontrollably, her body being rocked by her sobs. She had a lot of people who would gladly cushion her from the storms of life, but strangely, she did not feel the urge to seek comfort from them. She had become indifferent, cold, numb, selfish to a certain extent. She did not like the change in her, but then she thought, change is inevitable.
Although her character had assumed different shades, the memories refused to let her go. They haunted her; they would come gushing down on her at random moments. A word said in a meeting would remind her of someone, a conversation between two random people in the train would take her down memory lane. A photo, a moment would cause déjà vu. “There’s no escaping it.” She was talking to herself again, this time in the bus. She’d gotten used to the embarrassment of people staring at her post her monologues. “Dumb asses,” she said, this time being careful to blurt it out loud. She’d already faced wrath from a lot of people close to her heart.
The moments of recollection of thoughts would take her into a state of tranquility; they would make her question herself, the answers hard to come by. Everytime she’d be lost in the flurry of thoughts, she’d be rudely awakened by the mechanical pace of the city that she lived in. Work gave her relief, but these instances were momentary; the memories were inside her, the love the longing, the hope, all packed in her heart and mind. They were omnipresent, and however hard she tried to ignore them, suppress them, they always found their way out. She’d learnt the art of putting on a mask, and camouflaging the storm that raged within her. She’d learnt to live with the memories, for they had been interwoven with her identity. Yes, there was no escaping them!
