Writer : Sanjana Jijo
Loneliness is a disobedient child.
That precisely is what makes it survive.
Its successful survival owes to the idiom that only a crying child gets the milk bottle first.
Trying to wash off the dye stain, taint of loneliness,
by seeking refuge in someone else,
will make you internally displaced from yourself, refugee forever.
This camel will not settle for just an inch of the peaceful tent of your mind,
It will only be satisfied when it owns the entire tent of your mind;
resting heavily-a suffocation ;while it gets all cozy inside.
Created from the recesses in the mind that the light is fearful of,
An absence of something that a person both knows about but does not—beyond volition as it is,
It’s difficult to access, to describe this space of perceived flaws, failures, sins and insecurity.
That lethargic abscess that’s created from everything that is hard-pressed,
pressure exerted from every direction, everything confined—,a box.
Above and below,
There is nowhere left, nowhere that’s right, to go.
That weighted heat warps you into a diamond,
but no one tells you how lonely a diamond is.
That you pay a price for strength. For impenetrability. So hard it is, nothing gets in.
Trapped within its facets, doomed to staring at mirror images of itself—looming , glaring, from each vertex.
Loneliness is invisible, and so insidious. Like a radioactive dye.
How can you protect yourself against something you contributed to creating and yet don’t know about?
Something you have given birth to, though the seed was not yours. How could you use contraception against this conception when you were unaware yet willing.
You’re willing because at least you’ll have company again, feel something again.
Even if it’s soul-sucking as the vacuum it emerged from.
Even if it’s an undesirable companion, it’s still company.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
At least there’s something to feel again, than that void of nothing.
It whispers back its sinister secret, a retort, then.
“Feeling nothing doesn’t mean there’s nothing to feel, darling”.
But not like this, not this fatal degree, you didn’t ask for this!
Within the womb of you, that pestilential seed sprouts sinks its placenta deep, pushed against its constraining walls, trying to spread like a metastasizing tumor—writhing, twisting….
Now you can feel the heartache, the pinched nerves, as the pressure seizes and constrains you.
From within, your awry barometer and lost compass come muted bells of alarm-a quiet white flag raised, a cry for help.
Your equilibrium has capsized like a ship sunk by chewing rats nibbling through the wooden hull.
The same rats the ship once housed in caring symbiosis, thinking they would manage the other household pests in return for the shelter have overthrown the ship’s control room.
They’ve taken the reigns, be prepared,
their teeth bared.
Something isn’t right .
this lack of homeostasis is a big fright,
how can one’s worst enemies be from the same house?
Is betrayal composed of care turned cold, love turned sour, stability made unstable, predictability made unpredictable, faith made unfaithful?
Is it too late to put up a fight?
