Motions

I stare at the keyboard, willing myself to write, challenging myself to see if words can still flow. I tell myself that I used to be able to write for myself and that those words meant liberation, from feelings bottled up, from nagging thoughts still vague,. But then stop again. And the silent night becomes silent again.

I blackmail me to write. Change my tack. Move from challenge to threat. That if I do not write now, I will never write again. That if I do not form my words, I lose forever the person I used to be, that someone who found herself through words.

But where are those words? Are they gone with the people that used to be my life? Have they taken away me, leaving behind a person I can barely talk to-someone hollow, mechanical and unsatisfied at the end of every day?

I live around people. Everyday I smile at them. I crib to them. I hear them. But I rarely ever speak to them, listen to them. I rarely ever have anyone speaking to me, listening to me. Everyone goes through the motions. Life is about living at the moment, and trust me it is not the most engaging way to live.

Growing up, what did I expect? I look back and think of all the things, all the people and all the images I wanted to be.... and I realise that all I wanted was this angst to leave me forever. But it continues, even if I have changed to become yet another mindless being, thinking and feeling mindless little things.

What is it that I am looking for?

Leaving....

One seemingly impossible thing is leaving. Leaving to move on be it a job, a relationship even a passion. Even if they provide you no joy. If only hope did not spring eternal and people did not have that miserable light called hope to cling onto, would they have left for a happier life?

When did life become so difficult? The words of a fictional woman comes to mind- "She asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications"

So she died...

Hina Fathima died. She had 35 per cent full thickness burns, which means the acid had seared her body, right down to the bones. No one survives this kind of burns. They dont even with 20 per cent full thickness burns. She did not either. We wrote about it, we cringed at the torture and we forgot about this yet another woman who died because she could not leave a murderous husband.

Death of a girl

A woman was made to drink acid mixed with alcohol. When she tried to wrench herself from the husband's grip, he disrobed her and poured acid on her. All of 22 years, she has suffered '80 percent burns' and will probably lose her eyes because her husband burnt them with his cigarette. She had wanted to leave him but she always went back, because her parents asked her to and perhaps she thought things would change, in that eternal hope that women (and men) always nurture....

Would a world ever exist where women are filled with the strength to seek out a life not killed everyday by undeserved pain and misery...

In an effort

So I am here again to a space I had abandoned. For words had stopped. And the ones written were too personal to have been shared with anyone.

But on a vacant night, when noises from within and without do not envelop me, the urge to write for myself but yet share it gnaws at me persistently. I looked for women and their words to fill me up, but my search was unfocussed and in vain.

This is yet another attempt to define a space for me, a space where no one can know me except through what I say. Not through my gestures or my person. Leaving me with ownership and freedom of my being, my words and my message.