And the beast Me – it runs away.
Where to?
To nothingness. There is no valley of escape.
I meet myself everywhere. Most of all in the night.
But one always runs further…
— Wolfgang Borchert
And over time, my days have started flowing unobtrusively into one another, indistinguishable, distended. Time should move. And time does move, but it doesn’t seem to have any sense of direction. There is a gradual realization that life is slowly manifesting symptoms of thinning out. The parallel life inside the mind, the one on a constant journey in reverse. Growing old only to look back on the past, tiny things accumulated along the way for future nostalgia.
And at the end of the day, what do we recall? Small details like the button on grandma’s favorite dress, remembering it’s ornateness. Sammie smiling with his two front teeth missing, remembering his goofy face then. A journey in reverse. Maybe one day, we’ll all make the long journey back to the sea, that vast unknown terrain, back before it mounts like a flood and swallows us, back before the ground beneath our feet gets disgusted and walks away from us. A frightening journey too. Fear of the sea is fear of an intense desire to go and explore it’s bottomless depth.
An aberration. The recurring nightmares and racing thoughts and visions. Rewriting memories. So many memories about things that never really happened. And some things that really did happen, they fell inside the lacuna, roaming like refugees there. That is that – my precious, personal pain. An afterthought. Life wears itself out in the interpretation of everything. I am exhausted. Maybe again, tomorrow.
But for now, talk to me in pictures, before I smell our ignorance in your hyperboles.
Words and Photos by Ruati Chhangte. All Rights Reserved.
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Thanks for your blog, nice to read. Do not stop.