My one-year-old baby sister cannot sleep without her security blanket. I found her crying, falling off a chair, eyelids giving up calling out to the blankey.
I felt jealous. An attachment like this is so hard to manage/maintain in a world so hard and pokey. I remember it, its texture, and its taste, but I forget how it works.
Mummy’s leaving for the hospital, against which I measure all atrocities, crushed my childlike bold love. And like it is for most of us, the breaking of my first relationship left a subtle but persistent itch over that scar. After putting in all, if S and I did not work, like mum and I hadn’t, I was sure nothing does. So I started building mechanisms to save myself from the pain I deemed inevitable, my brain built walls to close itself off from the hurt of the world, ‘no attachment no hurt’ its new teeshirt read.
When I fell in love again, my mind closed its eyes, denied me the feeling, pushed me out and away from anyone who loved me, but more harshly anyone who I loved. Spirit willed; flesh weak, my body suffered. Heart palpitated, chest hurt, stomach crunched, and stayed like that. I had shut down a generous portion of my head. Operating on the part that helped walk, eat, sleep, and sing, I drank wine and walked the streets in a discarded saree. The mind could not the thing fix that it could not, for its denial, see.
So next time, I protected myself more and only loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own. And in all this, my heart missed out. It misses still leaning, trusting, and loving so much that it saturates the being. It misses feeling the hurt it ought to feel, a hurt so dense only loss of love could have caused it. To know this hurt, but to love still, I miss. Like the joy of jumping into a 12 ft deep pool as a 2-year-old who doesn’t know to swim, of jumping into a Testha, that can only be felt the first time you do it. I miss the uninhibitedness of the affair. On good days this missing out is a mere inconvenience compared to the devastation I remember, but on bad ones I find myself envious of people, reckless in missing, pleading to myself “lay em down, sword and shield, lay them”.