Drowning in a vat full of memories
The dream sometimes sneaks up on me when I’m least expecting it. It’s usually the one where I’ve lost my wallet and have no recourse to getting out of the situation that I’m in, but today I had chanced upon a sliver of a memory that was sticking out from under the wardrobe. I tugged at it and found myself falling into what I first thought was a rabbit hole, but turned out to be a vat. It was filled to the brim with memories and I sank like a stone in it.
At first they were like gentle bubbles floating around me. Soothing. Gentle. Happy. I spotted the tall, gorgeous, dark skinned Ambika, who had worked at our place. Her statuesque figure was at odds with her wild giggles. I was buoyed by them for some time as I kept drowning. Much to my amazement, I found that I could turn my neck a full 180 degrees. In the far corner of my peripheral vision I spotted Mrs P. She was so petite and delicate, I remember. She seemed to be doing something strange. I watched as she poured a can of diesel on herself and was scrambling around looking for a match. I screamed out to her but she couldn’t hear me. My voice was drowning in my thought bubbles. No…wait….she was crying. She was not her usual coy and demure self. Why?? What was that sound?
But I had floated on and down. It felt so calming. And quiet. Peaceful. Why were people afraid of old memories? They could be so therapeutic. And then I heard a voice. It was telling me, no, not possible, not by you. I recognized that voice. It had merged with my consciousness. Somewhere deep down I had always responded to it. But now I didn’t want to listen to it saying no, over and over again. It was time to break the hypnotic cadence of that ‘no’. Surely, there was a ‘yes’ hidden somewhere in that ‘no’.
In the midst of the ebb and flow I caught sight of Troy. His cackling laughter and eyes for me only had coloured my early twenties till I was ready to believe that I mattered a lot. In the space time continuum this belief would have been self sustaining if life had not come in the way. Maybe all this was not drowning, but just a steady progress into a parallel universe where the same things happened but the effect that was created did not really matter.
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