An October Eve

It was just another October afternoon.... wasn't it...?

I had just finished the first half yearly exam, online again. Stretching in the chair as I left the meet, I was reminded again how the pre-pandemic me would be absolutely terrified at my current academic condition...

I opened my socials, scrolling through the same posts, the ever increasing unread messages looming in tiny corner of the screen, a mild, short lived escapade from the next exam. The class group had at least a week's worth of messages piled up, which I had been carefully avoiding lest the last minute exam doubts and discussions echo my increasing helplessness and inferiority complex...

I giggled and winced, scrolling through the hundreds of chats, starring a few which I would reply to later on. And then I reached the recent chats...

"This isnt a prank or a joke. I think everyone needs to hear this. Several of you know..."

5 minutes...? Perhaps 10...? I just went through the conversations... apparently from a couple of hours before our test that day... my vision rolled over the words, processing the meaning but triggering absolutely no emotional response... 6 hours of a storm of emotions in a few hundred chats... the news mingled with everyone's shared academic frustrations, lashing out at everything...

I just read... then went back and re read, as if this time being the first that I actually emotionally processed it all...

Barbed wires closing in upon my throat by the end the 1st message, knuckles white from clutching the pop socket of the phone... it was perhaps then that the crying began... looking back now, I can't come across another time when I've cried so freely... so consumed by the situations, by everything... it wasn't loud, yet all I could be aware of were the internal piercing ripples as I cried...

I had texted and called a friend, in the very short "denial" stage of the grief. She was on the way to see them off, for a last time, as she had later explained. For a last time I saw the chat, yet didn't dare to open it... I knew I'd go on living with the wish that I had not gone into a gray-double-tick-zoning-phase for the last few months...

19 unreads...

I switched off the phone, lying down flat in the balcony, locking myself out. The sky ever so cruelly beautiful, a shade saturate with loss.

I remember thinking about the neighbors, whether they were present and staring. But I was so so so done with all interactions. The only presence that mattered were the winds, cool and gentle and enveloping, carrying my thoughts far far from me... 

Our memories were short, mostly shared virtually over the past two years. Our interactions, her face, text snippets from our conversations, stray threads of her existence that I had sub consciously stitched into myself, it all flew past like manga panels, a film roll of memories... I recalled our shared love for the winds, the sheer feeling in an anemophilic soul, and the winds confirmed presence of my fellow anemophile. She was at one with it all, right now, right here, forever, and everywhere... She had achieved an eternity I could no longer decipher like her poems, but just feel through the shifting winds... 

I lay still for quite a while I guess, time was a blurry concept for the following few days. Before finally getting up and going in, before finally grounding back to reality, I remember seeing the sky and tree tops from a perspective I hadn't seen in a long time. The city lights below, out of view; the star-less sky and rustling leaves whispering softly in the breath of winds... 

(Author's Note: Looking back at it right now as I write this, it's haunting just how similar the situations are. The same exam coming up in less than 48 hours, roughly the same hour when I saw her status update for the last time. Peers still consumed with the same academic anxiety and frustrations. The backdrop of the world perhaps tinted a shade darker with the hue of war. I still can't help but wonder just how much I don't know about the lives I've known and loved and hold so close to my being, how much they haven't been able to express, how much I haven't been able to reach out, how much I wish I could hold them tight in a hug that dissolves, even if momentarily, the hidden tangled mess of thoughts... Just hold on ok...? I still need you, now and forever...)