Today’s journey to the museum brought back so many memories. Dear and bitter ones. I was surprised at the tears that threatened to betray all my pretensions I had lived till then. It was difficult to hold them back. It was difficult to let go. And I was surprised because it has been so many years since everything happened. I had gotten over everything and moved on in my life. Or so I thought, until today. Today, as I revisited all those long corridors and all those paintings and sculptures, a Pandora of memories, distant, forgotten and locked up, suddenly opened up and made me realise that within the mechanic, machine like me, there still lived, somewhere deep buried, that girl, who I had tried to forget- to reject. The one that I had refused to accept as being a part of me.
I was good at pretensions. For the past few years of my life, I had successfully deceived everyone (and in the process, myself too) of my emotions. After everything that happened, I said that I did not care. I did not care about anything anymore because after that day, I decided that I will not let in anyone. I will not get attached to anyone or let anyone get emotionally close to me. It was all crap. Relationships. Emotions. Family. All a big load of crap. No one care about anything but themselves. And relationships that helped them realise their self importance and the ones that give priority to them over everything else in the world were all that mattered. Relationships are always about you. It is never about us. Or the other person. It is always about you and your fucking ego feeling good!
And so, I had decided that from that day onwards, I will not be bothered about relationships. Or other people. I did not want people in my life to be there every time around me, trying their best to make me feel good about everything. I did not care enough about people to make them feel good about themselves. Fuck. Why should I? And it is not like they were going to suffer because I am not around. We are so needy and dependent that somehow we always manage to find someone or the other who will in turn make us feel good about ourselves. Such lowly, loathsome, dependent creatures are we! So much to boast about being the most highly evolved, advanced animals walking the earth! Scornful!
And in my indifference, I took pride. I felt that I have moved on from being that needy. I felt that I had grown stronger since I had realised my weakness. I felt like some kind of a saint. I mean, isn’t that what all saints strive to achieve? Complete abstinence. Complete rejection of the material world in which we are all so needy and where other people control our lives? I had been proud of myself for all that it took for me was to decide that I will not care! I did not need to pray to any nonexistent superpower who in my opinion is nothing but a sadist! I did not have to bring myself under the mercy of some cosmic supernatural that no one has ever seen and that everyone is supposedly scared of! All I had to do was to stop caring! I moved away from everything that made us weak. Everything that made us vulnerable. I just moved on.
Or so I’d thought until today. But today, in that museum, when all those memories came back to me, I realised that I never could stop caring. It was a part of me. A part of who I am. It is who I was. The tears that I had to fight back brought back in me the realisation that I was human. That I was still capable of feeling all those emotions I thought I had left behind. That all those memories still lived in me. And worse, I still cared. I still cried. The tears made me angry. And I wanted to cry even more because I felt angry. Because I could do nothing about it. Because I was reminded, once again, of how weak I was.
I also felt like laughing.
Such ignorance we all live in! Such pretence.
We so continuously love in that mirage. Of being satisfied and happy. We convince ourselves that we are so fucking satisfied with everything in this world, our lives, our jobs, our families.
Sigh. Such pretentions. Laughter.
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