Shadows of After hours

When you ruminate over grief that tortures you, the grief only grows stronger. Grief is grey, a shade of agony that like a leech sucks the last breath out of your lurching heart, leaving you stranded in an island of murky nightmares.

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I reached the hotel room at around 10pm. What reigned supreme was not the fear of being alone in a godforsaken stinking hotel room or the physical pain akin to labor pain that was killing me but the disgust of being held hostage in a room that looked like a brothel of sorts.

My body squirmed at the thought of lying on the bed wrapped in a dirty razai, that smelled of an obnoxious mix of body fluids of many that seem to have spent pleasure nights in there .Guilt at the thought of peeping into the privacy of intimate lives of strangers, who presume that their carnal secrets are safe, troubled me endlessly. An irritating disgust, like that of watching someone puke choked my throat and the only desire that tugged at my heart was to run far away from the whore house.

It is that precise moment of imagination, grief, like sticky slippery fungi spread across a rocky river, kept at pushing me off my sanity. Strangely, and out of nowhere, I recollect my grandpa’s death. I did not cry when I got the news, I didn’t for many days to follow. And then a few months later, on a sunny madras evening when the warm salty sea water pulled my feet deep into the wet sand, the resolve to brave, collapsed. An angry dysphoria ensued and stayed on for long, as I had come to realize that the mellow bond I shared with this peculiar man has been irretrievably lost to the brutality of death.

Grief has been like that. Visiting uninvited. Unwarranted. Striking at unexpected moments, and flooding my heart with a wild vengeance. A vengeance that compels me to forsake all wisdom of life gained over the years, forcing me out of a rational acceptance of pain as a part of the whole. I break down like an old man that cries at his wife’s grave, regretting intensely the untimely realization of how much she meant to him.

Odd that grief is both idle and active, paradoxically, at the same time. Every moment of night spent in that room, time hung heavy on me. A lazy lull and nothingness crowded my being, suffocating me like a pillow thrust on the nose. Grief mourned with a majestic vanity, proud of devouring all my joyousness I have ever known. Triumphant at causing a pain so sharp, it sand an elegy to the possibility of peaceful sleep.

I mourn over many things. Some silly, some pertinent. Some silly yet pertinent. I mourn over losing that ear ring a lover had gifted me, for not apologizing to a friend I insulted, for not burying my cat after its death, for not learning to swim, for raising my hand to slap my mom, for not attempting to learn mathematics, for forgetting how to use macros. I mourn for myself, for people that matter and people that don’t. I mourn over dawns when I find life purposeless and dusks when I wish I weren’t alive. I mourn over my ageing life and its impending death. I search for reasons to mourn more and deep.

True, Grief is not like anger; it lacks its flamboyant grandeur. It is sober in its expression but furious in its intensity and capacity to agonize.

It is like asthma, I explain to a friend later. An uneasy choke, a moment close to breathlessness, a feeling of being throttled. It takes your hand and leads you through endless corridors of rotten memories; of friendships forgotten, loves forsaken, innocence pawned, ridicule endured, thresholds crossed and not crossed, dreams rubbished, relationships unsaved. Of missed buses. Missed kisses. Of sudden deaths. Of new lives, unasked for.

Grief was all around me, like bloodstains on the road after a gruesome accident, reminding me of life’s possible rude suddenness and soliciting from me courage insurmountable to see death in its face. Grief was all around me, like people mourning in a funeral, each describing a figment of memory that person has left behind, passionately. Almost as if that could save them from the pain of loss. “I met him just the day before, he wanted to go to the church this Sunday with me, he loved Darjeeling tea, he had 100cds of illayaraja song collection, he always walked on the left side of the road and brushed immediately after waking up. He was a great man; we all love him very much. Amen.”

I picked up the phone to dissect this thought of what grief was doing to me, with a friend who would understand. But I quit. I knew that no one could carry the weight of my burden, am all alone in the struggle and its only fair it is so. Understanding grief in words is possibly the start I had made towards experiencing it completely, and experiencing it fully is possibly the first step toward dealing with all incorrigible challenges of life and living.

But this entire story about seeing despair in its eye is only on hindsight, it is only what I write. The night that it was, it saw no sleep. It saw no respite. It ended before it could begin. It had begun without an end. It was just there. For no rhyme or reason. Like just about many other such nights.