Saying goodbye

Background Music: Atonement from the Atonement Soundtrack

I am sitting here, in my room, trying to plough through my work and battling thousands of feelings leaking through the cracks in my sanity. That was when this song began playing and suddenly, the bottled emotions burst open and now I find myself sorting out the glass pieces and its contents spat across this floor.

Memories enter in drops and leave me in an ocean to drown.

My heart ached, my tear glands awakened from their dry slumber. Suddenly all my pain and grief was focussed on the loss in my life. Death. Of my grandmother. Sometimes, you never realise how much a person co-existed with your life until they leave you. When their ghost wanders around amongst the loneliness. When silence becomes suffocating. When the pain throbs through your thoughts. It's knowing that someone's missing that causes time to constrict. The past opens up, like a black hole, drawing me inwards. The laughs, now echoes. The hugs, now a vacuum, the smiles, now frozen in photographs.

I miss you. More than words can ever express.

The Edge

Background Music: Maestoso by Frederic Chopin

Funny isn't it, how a substantial part of our lies balance on the edge of the cliff of trust and happiness. I usually peep over and look down at the fall, the dive into suspicion and paranoia; at the hungry waters, licking away the base of the cliff and devouring every sense of faith.

So, I keep standing there, at the edge of my cliff, contemplating my fate. Will I stand here forever, loving you, holding you in the tight grip of my hug, or let you wander away as I wait; wait until my heart has gone cold? Should I dive into the ocean, the beckoning dance of the hypnotic blue and the giggling white waves? Its mysterious darkness where I may find silence and peace. How it calls to me, deceiving me, luring me with its coy finger, tightening the veins around my neck, and constricting my breath. Yet the wind behind my back taps on my shoulder, climbs up my spine, pulling me away, reminding me of the need to believe, to trust in my world. It tugs at my heart, circles me in earnest and sets my thoughts aflight -- hopes, dreams, love, joy. I don't trust either, both have a tug of war, and I am the rope in the middle.

And I still stand. On the edge. One leg brushing the emptiness of the world below me, where my life escapes, one leg rooted to the earth, where my life blooms. I'll be there. You will find me there. Standing. Watching. Musing.

Memories

Background Music: How to Save a Life

I have always believed in the significance of those around me, moulding my life and carving the finer folds and layers of my skin. Somehow, everyone seems to have contributed to my papier mache model -- plastering paper, washing with glue, and flooding with paint. And occasionally, some paper peels away (thanks to the innocent imperfections of all my creators) and links with a whole new world, like a child's fingers groping the uncertainties of every moment. This is the moment of self-realisation, when stability tears away to reveal the honest simplicities within.

The fear of external influences lingered within me. I was afraid that I was becoming someone I was not, juggling masks and forcing them on my weary face forever. But this uncomfortable thought was replaced by a the reassurance of finding a part of myself in the journey. They all unleashed a dimension in me that lay buried in the silent depths of my turbulent surface.

Thank you. This is to everyone. For the smiles, the tears, the photographs, the bruises, the confidence, the embarrassment. For making me smile involuntarily at my past, despite falls and giggles as we hike through our hills and valleys.

Laws of Motion

In physics, or any science for that matter, you usually get two answers, or two explanations. One is 'in theory' and the other 'in practice'. Take our pillar of wisdom, dear Mr. Newton and his laws of motions. An object will continue to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force. Famously, the object would keep persevering forward, till even the milestone called 'eternity' has been passed long ago. As many philosophers so optimistically claim, our human spirit is undying, forever racing ahead, nothing to slow us down. Then why does a ball which you roll across the floor crawl to a stop after a while? There comes the spouse of the laws of motion! Friction. Hand in hand with life, it seems to be determined to stop us all, to draw a line to our desires, to leave the faultlines of disillusionment on our skin.

Similarly, the fibres of my existence is torn between the branches of these two very opposite directions of what you dream of doing and what you do. Paths which lead away from each other but seem to sleep under the same category called life. The result? Choices. Tears. And a small flame coughs up and dies within you. Although most of the time, my emotions lie underground, forgotten and hidden, they resurface when the ground is churned, and the poppies grow out amidst all the destruction. I will grow. I will find happiness.

Searching...looking...dragging burdens the entire time and finding the smiles of yesterday.

The piano keys to the locked doors

Background Music: Nocturne in C-sharp minor by Frederic Chopin

The soft sounds are like whispers in my ear. It seems to thrust itself into the muffled noises our lives have reduced to. A quiet tinkle, so subtle like that of a dew drop falling from a leaf, yet so powerful as those rain storms that whips up your blood and allows every cell, every ion in your body to turn towards the thunder and lightning. The music seems to release a part of me that I thought was locked up forever.

I love the piano. In that simple statement, my life hangs. The notes seem to slice through the cerebral custard of our brains and speaks of simplicity and subtility in such a grand and complex way. When I see others play, it is as though the music seems to be flowing out of their heart, through their fingertips onto a black and white surface.

Hear it again. Pick up the old, forgotten CDs and let it speak for itself, not through lyrics, but through the hammering of steel strings, disintegrating my voluntary silence and leaving fragments of raw emotion, dangerous and vulnerable.