When we were born we all were handed over buckets, buckets
of joy, buckets of tears and an empty bucket too where you can fill in all that
you want to, the happiest of you, the brilliance and the beauty, the chuckle
and the memory, the deepest and the scariest of who you could be. While the
other buckets are necessities, this special one is an elixir. Just remember
that. Now half way through your journey, what do you do when you realize that
the Joy bucket, the bucket which kept you going has gone dry?
I have had sleepless nights, nights when I have stared
through the ceiling fan not knowing which direction to go when its morning. I
have had moments when all I could believe that there’s no sun. I have started
loving stars precisely because the darkness never left. It had happened few
years back and it has happened again and I know it will happen again.
That night too, I stared through the ceiling fan trying to
understand which way to run. I had seen through a future which was not mine, and
the crashing of it hurt me. Hurt the hell out of me. Not because something did
not work, no. The future I was rooting for had holes through which rain poured
and I knew it. From the beginning of time, I did not like the mindless pouring of
rain, but I tried, I pushed through, I rummaged through the smoked glass and I
started reveling in it. I enjoyed feeling the cold drops washing my identity. I
started rooting harder while the tiny little drops slowly morphed into thunder
and a storm built around me. A bottomless emotion, the one you feel when the
whole world is dancing in madness and you experience a sudden peace. The irony
of it is you don’t realize that you are not looking at the storm. You are the storm;
you are the eye of the storm. I danced through the madness in silent reverie
while the wind blew past me. I wasn't hurt because I did not realize being the
eye of the storm; I was hurt because the rain stopped pouring.
"It won’t work". It was as simple as this that
someone could tell me and there came crashing my rhythm. I shifted my center
and hit the walls of my tempest. I fell over and turned into a violent
whirlpool. I started going higher, higher and higher as the wind tossed and
turned me. It was time my madness consumed me, time to tear apart the eye of
the storm into a million pieces.
Next morning I see two people standing in front of my door,
tears welled up in their eyes as soon as they saw me. Were they crying over my
broken relationship? I don’t think so, they were looking at midnight’s destruction
and they could not fathom the fury of this devastation. All that had happened
till now, the scattered pieces of my bad memories started to feel as a breeze
in wake of the present. This was different; this was supposed to be light
at the end of tunnel. But the light never reached me.
My mother of 55 told me to gather myself and ask one last
time to the man in concern if he would want to try a little harder, hoping that
he would not want to let someone go so easily, that he might not want me to
fade in oblivion. But the answer remained a no. A million shreds of me
splattered across my wish wall, showing me what my eyes did not want to.
Moments I have shared feelings, emotions, smiles, tears, and the entire clock
of 120 days flash by flash as if I am on a carousel which won’t ever stop. A
carousel of happy memories in negatives.
So how do you feel when you are trapped in your own
wonderland? Does it still remain your wonderland? Let me tell you how it goes
once you are in it. You run, you run directionless trying to figure a way out.
You check every single pathway, you knock on every door, and you thump the
earth you are standing at, you also scream to the sky staring at you. And then,
when you realize there's nowhere to go. You stop and let madness consume the
whole of you one last time. It’s like the pagan bird diving into the holy fire
of death to attain redemption.
That storm had died. My silent reverie had collapsed. That
bottomless emotion of falling into an abyss could successfully drown me. Do you
still feel the rain pouring through? Yes, you do. Do you still enjoy the cold
drops of water washing your identity? No, you don’t. It’s just you and your wonderland
with the bucket of Joy gone dry.
I know they say, but believe me when I do, closed doors don’t
lead to open doors. It’s a lie. So all you do is stop running and stand for a
while, breathe, catch your pulse, throw away that illusion known as the bucket
of joy, take the empty one and search for a hammer. Start breaking your walls
around. Start breaking your wonderland with a hope that the world outside is
still rooting for another utopia, where it doesn't rain, where there’s
sunshine, where there’s hope and where there’s a park bench.
Where you can sit and gaze at your empty bucket, flick through what is in there, one by one, peacefully, the happiest of you, the brilliance and the beauty, the
chuckle and the memory, the deepest and the scariest of who you could be. Lay
down each one of them around you, carefully, piece by piece, like shields and
swords, engulfing you in a glass house of life’s best and worst memories...
Till you wait for the rain to begin. Till you wait for
another storm. The Blitzkrieg.
