What Makes Me...

 

Life in middle age spins into the past and weaves the future.

I carry the aromas of many people and have transformed into an individual entity. I can no longer separate myself from those whom I met, hugged, and cherished. There is a strange craving to go back to the same classroom where I once was among the tiny girls and was one of them myself.

Fundamental realities were once just casual incidents. Death, life, and resurrection never scared me; rather, the scolding of elders was a serious matter.

The philosophy of life is incomprehensible a couple of years before your teenage. You cannot sense the touch.

You do not yet have language for discomfort that arrives disguised as familiarity. You cannot always tell where the boundary lies between care and violation, between what is given and what is taken. And so much of what unsettles you remains unspoken—not because it disappears, but because you do not yet know how to hold it in words.

Some things are absorbed instead. They settle quietly, like sediment at the bottom of a river. Years pass. The body grows older, takes on roles, responsibilities, motherhood perhaps, a kind of practiced composure. And yet something remains untranslatable inside-an echo that returns without invitation.

Sometimes it arrives as a voice remembered from long ago, asking threateningly, “You won’t tell your mother, will you?” And even now, the answer is shaped by the same silence that once followed it. Not courage, not clarity-only the weight of what could not be spoken.

What has this passing of time given me? Rifts. Deep gaps that cannot be leapt over. We cannot go back and say to ourselves, “Hi, little girl. Life is going to be nasty.” She is playing somewhere in the past, in the subconscious, where dreams meet reality. I am not romanticizing childhood, am I?

During the time when the heart makes itself an attic and we bury many memories in it, I had built my own imaginarium. Imagining myself at the prow of a ship, stretching my arms loosely into the air, with a masculine embrace—hands around my waist—right behind me, was one of the most vivid imaginations of my youth. It is no longer embarrassing to confess that I once wrapped a dupatta around my body and thought of myself as some kind of Disney princess—bare shoulders, medium-length hair, flushed face, chubby cheeks—oh, my ripe youth.

“My heart will go on and on…”

I would cry over imaginary sad scenarios where I would have to be parted from my lover, and that second-hand, cheap “princess” dress remains my most embarrassing confession.

That girl, shaped by whimsical and forbidden longings, now searches for herself in the eyes of her better half. They both have lost each other in a dignified silence.

Blushing. Rejoicing at the glance of a lover. Immature imagination. Tearing oneself down over the thought of separation. Someone should go back and make her understand the false delusions and just ask a simple question:

…..what’s this passion for?.....

The moment my body would leave its bones to decomposition, what will become of me?

I would recollect my memories, the audacity of my words. I would definitely not let go of the moments I kept safe in the crowd and in tranquility. My memories would be borne by the soil in which my bones and flesh would surrender. What kind of fragrance would it then produce? I can sense its floral vibes. It will have the aura of every flower, be it jasmine, daisy, lily, or rose. For I carry the universal within me, and the dissolution of a complete world would leave many fragrances behind. The air would carry me, and I would be a refined element of nature. I will be a free atom, ready to mate, replicate, coming again towards life, living everything all over again, and saving those memories for distillation to try to make a scent that has many stories in it.