TIME IS THE ONLY TRUTH…

TIME IS THE ONLY TRUTH…

I am taking the liberty of using a public platform to share something very personal. To answer the ‘why’ – I believe it might be personal, but it is commonplace too. We all have lost someone close. We all know the sorrow of a loss, some of us closely, some not so closely. We all think there is lots of time left. We all find pride in the non-essential ways of the world. We all are different and yet the same.

For instances in the piece you don’t agree to, please feel free to write to me…for instances that make any sense, please feel free to write it to yourself…to your heart…because you need it while the time is running out…Hating the life you might have gotten is easy, loving difficult…Love life while you can! 

*Also, I don't promise this piece to be a real soul-lifting experience, so please don't read it while you are low...all I can promise is a soul-stirring experience...self-reflection more often than not, helps!

The first time, ‘time’ and the passage of it really scared me was when they said – “There is nothing that can be done. He only has up to 14 months”. I perhaps can’t register till today that he is no more and that’s majorly why even my close friends don’t know about it. I had pulled myself back into the artificial world I had created for myself, into work, into roaming aimlessly and just sitting with a book without flipping a page. He feels around…after all people still know me by the name he gave me, people still love my writings that he kept improving  through strong criticism. It just doesn’t feel like I will never be able to talk to him ever again...ever discuss the trifle issues I had, never be able to write for him, never be able to argue endlessly, never be able to hate him for being as adamant as me, never be able to love him for standing by me the few crucial times he did,  never be able to get irritated every time he playfully licked my nose, never be able to convince him endlessly that I didn’t have a boyfriend, never be able to have someone believe in my abilities despite my consecutive failures, never be able to see that level of modernity  in any other relative, never be able to be so close to the other generation, never be able to be scared to touch those souvenirs he brought from exotic places he travelled to, never be able to easily assume that my anger will be understood because he was the angriest anyone could get, never be able to enjoy the fact that although we disagreed so much, there was so much I had inherited from him, never be able to wear those ear-rings without clinching about the fact that the hands that gave it to me don’t exist anymore, they were burnt in belief that they will meet the five elements…I experienced the loss of my grandparents…but nothing took so long to hit and nothing hit so hard.


He did nothing wrong, never drank, never smoked, never did anything out of the ‘bad boys’ book’, didn’t even choose sports as his career despite being awesome at it because his parents didn’t want him to….still there was nothing they could do for him…the guy who was my “handsome hunk”, the sexiest old man that could be, a man who had a most subtle sense of fashion, who loved his blue shirt beyond measure, who kept his uniform speckles white, who was gonna be captain next, who loved his hair way more than anything; had a swollen face, a shrunken body ready to get paralyzed any second, a voice that was good enough to only mumble, a head that had lost most of ‘the’ hair due to life-sucking-so-called-medicines chemotherapeutic drugs and a heart that could not sustain that fatal heart attack – AND THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO TO SAVE HIM. If there is anything I hate the most, it’s cancer. It just doesn't make sense for a disease to exist without a cure, a problem without a solution, it’s just not balanced in this world, and it’s not fair. There must be something we can do. I had my grandfather eaten away by it and I have a very brave friend who fights it every day. It is probably the worst thing to happen to someone and the amount of courage it takes to fight it is on a scale that any worldly way cannot measure it. The eventual helplessness that you feel while you see something alive getting deteriorated as time shows its colors is beyond any explanation by mere words. Every time I talked to him, I very well knew it could be the last time; last time he talked to me, was when he couldn't really speak, he used to be so funny…he could make people laugh, hysterically, he loved talking, for hours…and then he couldn't…I kept running away from talking to him, I didn't wish him his birthday that was just 5 days before he decided to rest in peace, I was running away from seeing him in such a different light, I was running away from the scary truth…but, it happened nevertheless.

Perhaps that was not the worst part; time scared me even more after this happened. I couldn't stand the air of that house knowing that he breathed one of his last there. It started suffocating me the moment I saw his kids who are too little to even know what has fallen upon them, I couldn't stand to see his wife without vermillion and bangles that never left her in ten years of marriage, his mother to have seen his child dead in front of her own eyes. It just was so abnormal to behave so normally, as if nothing had happened. His clothes were being washed to be kept in the wardrobe forever. His watch was lying in a corner of the wash-room knowing that there will be no time in future it will be worn on the same wrist, his slippers were lying at the same shoe rack. His room has his signs everywhere. The family was searching for a picture of his to be used for the final ceremonies. I had agreed to find one, then too without believing that it was really happening. Going through numerous pictures, he was coming live from, was not a good idea, I realized. Going through emails was even worse. He was more than an uncle to me. A brain tumor was not enough to kill the man he was. I hate the ‘was’ in the last sentence. I just don’t want to be in face of the truth. I simply have not been able to gather courage to go back to the place ever since.

I remember one of my favourite author's statement, "The thing with pain is that it demands to be felt"....how true!

What positively scares humans are things they believe are out of their control; what’s ironic is that there is nothing, however small, in their control, because the datum that decides everything, ‘time’ is beyond their control. They said this is what makes life so eventful; something that even Gods envy. They said unpredictability of life was something that makes life beautiful. I believed them…but somehow the highs and lows have exhausted me. Somehow I don’t think I am ready for times to ever change again. I am fine with what I have right now…somehow I feel I hadn’t seen enough of life when I wrote the last piece about change being inevitable and yet beautiful. It’s just inevitable…I wish it was beautiful too. I have many happy memories with him, but they will take time to resurface…His loss has again sent me to the dungeons that are invisible to everyone else. I am tired again, very tired of worrying about the passing time, of what the future holds. I am again scared of time, of losing someone important, of things not working out the way I want them to, of what my career will be like with the kind of indecisive nature I carry, of which stranger I will end up marrying, of never experiencing love the way I believe it to be, of seeing my mom’s hairs starting to grey suddenly, of seeing my dad’s knee hurting every time he sits for long, of leaving them alone at a time they need me the most, scared of not talking to them enough, of sleeping way too much during the day…scared of losing the whole lifetime running behind a job that I keep claiming to be challenging and behind getting a hike, a salary that is proportional to my efforts!...all this in fear of saving enough, of having enough so that if something unexpected happened, it will be alright. To be honest, it’s never gonna be alright and it’s never gonna be enough. Still we all run…in the hope that one day things will be alright, someday it will be enough…and then comes the day life gets tired of us…it becomes too late to realize how important living in the present was. We all say it…we all know it and yet we spend precious moments in front of a living person on gadgets, don’t take our parents’ calls, keep thinking of calling friends for moths, never take a leap of faith, never really value smiles-on ourselves or others, never soothe ourselves with nature, never take time out for ourselves or those who matter, never take a moment never stop, never just be….always believe that there is a lot of time for  everything…perhaps these are really not controllable actions...unlike the common belief…and then the time runs out without a single alarm….life is rendered meaningless…everyone dies with the same regrets and yet no one learns…no one keeps a cue of the fact that in the end things don't matter, people do- because they don't return once they leave....the cycle of life continues exactly how the devil desires!