Suffocate/Breathe.
The world, as we know it, is chaotic, for it never rests; perpetually agitated, one might say.
For a world so turbulent where one struggles to scrounge for a moment of peace, it’s easier to breathe when the world around you is slumbering and escaping into cloudland.
The world then, is now yours: free to run, to be who you want to be; free of judgement, with an unceasing flow of imagination.
While the day bustles with activity and adds something new to each day, a change; the night time becomes my gateway for an escape because only that’s when time runs still. The stillness is what makes it comforting; for it has always remained a constant for as long as I can remember, with unwavering loyalty of a staunch supporter.
The blanket of comfort that the hush of the night brings is snatched away by the uncertainty and change that the rays of the sun bring each morning.
This change; drastic or minor, brings a wave of vagueness along with it, and at times, it’s difficult to get through it. It’s difficult to get through days when the changes are too much to take. It’s difficult to accustom oneself to it, for change does not come easy to me, and often becomes suffocating. Every passing hour, minute and second of the day is a reminder of how different things were a day before, a week before, a month before and a year before, and this train of thought leaves me overwhelmed more than I would like to profess.
We’ve often heard ‘change is the only constant’, and the irony here couldn’t be more obvious.
So, at the end of each day, when the dusk brings stillness, I find myself in the balcony, and it becomes easier to convince myself that this night is the same as the one when things were okay; that nothing has changed. That this is the very night before the pandemic or the one before my friend and I parted ways.
You see, momentary lapses are common mistakes that one makes while giving into the temptation to feel alright; to feel that things are constant, and to wrap that around for comfort.
It’s the temporary calm we search for in the darkness of the night; for when the day suffocates you, the night makes it easier to breathe.
~Ananya Sharma.
FY.Bsc. Economics