My dear friends,
We are okay, though we have become eyewitnesses to things surreal—not unreal. Safety is not the issue; it really never was. All the hullabaloo would suggest otherwise, but I assure you that what is being made out to be… well… it just isn’t so. But what is apparent to all—crystal—is that one’s misery is another’s mirth. That has always been the case. For some, it has been clear since day one; for others, it is only now dawning; and then there are those who have suffered the brunt of it.
This is a place many have called home, from those dipped in scintillating gold to those drenched in sweat unrolled. Labeled consumerist, soulless… a place of concrete, waves of heat, and artifice. Yet, it is home.
It is ironic that those very doomsayers—those armchair warriors who gluttonously feed on a cocktail of noise, an intoxicating concoction of truth, half-truths, and untruths imperiously told—were the ones seeking that very light to snare. It is hard for them to admit, for admission is as ugly as truth. We all live in homes made of shards of glass, but admission is hard!
True, the glare is much… but behind that glare is also a world built by those who believed in the dream, who made the dream, and on whose shoulders millions stood to live it.
Resilience is not the absence of loss, it is not being immune to loss and neither is it an alternative to it!
It is midnight now. A strange calm settles in… knotted in despair, knotted in grief, woven with a perplexing uneasiness. It is something new, yet something aged in time. It is strange how life moves on… debilitatingly, wretchedly. Not numb, but frivolous. Like sheep ready to be gleaned.
Sitting in front of a blanched screen, I am engulfed in the eerie quiet that follows a sudden, yet now seemingly perpetual alarm, signaling one to wait with bated breath. Sitting ducks who cannot even duck.
There on the bed lies the little babe, once so unafraid and unfazed by the boogeyman, now fearful of the lightening skies. Fever-struck and fear-hit, the little one finally sleeps soundly; his breath cuts in like the tightness of gauze over a scalding burn—an attempt to soothe until the skies light up and the mighty heart braces and reverberates.
My back is to the very window that once relished the sights and sounds of fireworks. Eyes once full of anticipation are now filled not with fear, but dread—dread and uneasiness at the unending, upending dreams. The eyes search for a ray of hope in the hazy skies, but all one finds from one end to the other are mere plumes of loss and smoke.
S
PS: If wishes were horses…. then looking at the world over, I would say ‘people should not be afraid of governments, governments should be afraid of people!’
