Fairy tales will be just that...

Fairy tales will be just that… fairy tales. A stretched bit of imagination, a dream, a wish, a fantasy which life will never concede to you. Each of us grows up with a fairy tale concocting a sweet desire in our little heads. Some of us learn early in life- the difference between reality and the dream. Most of us, though we know that reality and dreams have palatial houses on opposite horizons, still choose to rely on that eternal feeling called Hope; a fleeting feeling that leaves a lasting impression- gives us a crutch that won’t take us far and leads us to a point on the cliff where both hanging and falling are just as fatal.

There is one such fairy tale with me too. A fairy tale that conjured dreams; those dreams spiraled into desires; the desires built dreamland in my brain… a dreamland that I wanted oh-so-badly as a reality; a dreamland that made me cling to the last shreds of hope and do everything in and out of the book to live that dream… only to know that the fatal fall makes life a survival… a survival struggle not worth fighting.

But, I am born a fighter and that’s half the battle. So true to instinct, I fought, I fight and waged this terrible war inside of me – a war that had defeat smeared all over it even before I decided to step on the battleground. After years of thrashing about, resisting the situation, I finally realized the truth in the statement ‘whatever you resist will persist’. Today, I am bogged down by the war, over powered by the situation and the dream has been broken; reality is staring at me and I can do nothing but fight back the tears and accept the situation. Like it or hate, but know that this is how it is and facing it would be the sign of a real fighter…

The broken dream weighs down heavily. A fable that told the saga of youth, of dreams unwoven, of radiant hopes, of roads less tread; a fairytale dream that will remain just that… a fairytale.

A strange emptiness

A sense of loss for someone I barely knew; a sense that something has left me… gone far away, never to return; a very strange sense of vacuum - so often did my eyes well up, but not a tear drop rolled down; so many fleeting memories flashed by- things I never remembered, never even probably registered suddenly presented themselves before me.

The last 2 days brought before me- in such close proximity, an event of life that I never really thought about, sometimes even joked about and more often than not thought I was prepared for… but then, no one can ever really be prepared for it… it is an event that walks in on tip toe and goes away with a bang. I am left with a strange sense of emptiness- a void- called Death.

They say death is a thing of grandeur; it suddenly brings to life a host of relationships that you never you shared with the one gone-by. I so totally agree. For someone who has seen death at workplace so often, I thought I could sail through this one… after all, I have seen blast victims, flyover collapse and dead bodies strewn around me, thought it always disturbed me, left me unnerved, I guess work pressure was so high that I never really had the time to grieve. Of course, images of the blast sites haunt me until date…

But, then I had never seen death of someone ‘my own’, ‘related’ etc… and when Saturday brought me the news, though I kind of expected it, something in me suddenly went still. After I saw him lying there, lifeless, limp, still and when they took him away and I knew I could never see him again, something changed… a realization that between the first in-breath and the last out-breath, this phenomenon called life, deserves to be lived to its fullest. Each breath to be utilized to its optimum and each word and action to bring more relief on this planet, we call home.