Of Grief And Metaphors
The monotony of today, the days gone, and of the days to come have worn my mind out. The mundanity of these seven long mind numbing months now have me fishing out for rather particular memories that had been pushed in a frenzy into the abyss of my head.
The idea of sadness was always obscure to me, unexplored; until I saw my mother’s heart shatter into a million pieces from within, inch by inch, while she mourned the death of her sister; a damage beyond repair. My mere six year old self, unable to comprehend the image of maa, locked myself up in a room with my thoughts, and sat there till I was able to morph my grief into words and carefully structured metaphors. That’s when sadness greeted me as an old friend, inseparable ever since: a constant companion throughout the extent of my living.
The notion of being comfortable, underlined happiness for me from the day I learnt to differentiate between the tears of joy and those of sorrow. But something that I’d discerned a few years down the line, however, is that you don’t always find comfort in joy,but instead in the things around you that linger around for just a little longer, becoming a part of your abode; a comfort zone.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always resorted to sadness as a key ingredient to being able to write-more so than joy; isn’t it comfortable to write about a feeling you’ve already grown accustomed to?
Grief comes to me as naturally as painting did to Van Gogh. I find myself fluent in the language of sorrow, with metaphors about pain and tragedy at the tip of my tongue instead of poetry about sunshine and warmth, because how will you write about a feeling you don’t remember?
Everytime I tried to befriend happiness and welcome it with open arms, my heart quickly closed its doors on it, for it forbade this foreign feeling. It couldn’t afford to start over again.
Over the years, maa got better. Tonight, she even hummed to Jagjit Singh’s tunes while cooking again, filling the silences in the house, when I happened to glance at her. She put on a weak smile, and so did I, for I knew sadness became her friend too, because you can never fix the cracks of a broken glass.
-Ananya Sharma
FY, Div I