To the woman who held my whole world without me ever expressing!
The particular cruelty in the way grief arrives is weird — it doesn’t come as a single wound but as a million ordinary moments that somehow suddenly have no where to land.The food that sits uneaten because the one who used to make me little bites is no more, the eyes that don’t sleep because the side that held me to sleep is no more, the midnight hours of my birthdays when she showed up with her excited face and balloons are dull and void now.
I never knew how to love you loudly. My feelings remained buried somewhere beneath language, beneath expression, buried under my whole life not knowing how to fill up those small gaps and cross the distances between people who love me the most. And yet you understood, you always did, in the sleepless nights you had just so I could sleep, in the fights and scoldings I was given because you never wanted me to choose the wrong path.
We were becoming something, you and I. Not just mother and daughter but something deep, something richer– a bond, a friendship that was still unfolding until the night my world stopped. That is perhaps something that hollows me the most. Not just that you left, but that you are gone in the middle of our becoming.
Mama g! yesterday I opened my old phone and found a voice note.
A call recording– a recording that shattered me inside out. You were scolding me first for traveling alone and not telling you about it, because you were scared of my safety, because you were the only one who cared, who called me every day to ask me if I was doing all right in the hostel. And then— the moment I told you that I’m coming home– everything in your voices shifted, the scolding turned into excitement and all that worry dissolved into something so simple and so devastating that I just can not recover from hearing it.
“han beta aa jao wesy bhi mjhy apki yad aa rhi thi”
That was you, simple and expressive. So pure with your emotions, only if could be a little different. I just didn’t know what to say and I only replied with hmm and yes and small replies that filled the silence without filling it at all. Only if I knew, only if I knew that I would search every corner of my memory and find so little, not any photographs, not any recordings except this one, so little proof of all the ordinary days we took for granted.
But I am glad I have that call. I have your voice, impatient and then soft. I have the sound of you missing me, you wanting to meet me. And I am learning, slowly yet painfully, that this is not the evidence of my failure , it is the evidence of my love. You were not hurt by my silence ( at least what I want to believe, but I can’t). You were happy that I was on my way back, back to you. I was enough for you just the thought of me, me coming back was enough.
I am sorry for not being what I promised you, for shattering your trust in me. I have watched my ambitions dissolve like salt in water, felt my potential slip through fingers too numb to hold anything steady. The unwritten exams. The unlived mornings. The version of me you once believed in- I’ve searched for her in the scars of grief, the rubble of the last year and a half, but all I could find was a girl so tired to hold onto anything, a girl who is losing even her outlines leading to the loss of her existence.
But I want to get to know the lesson your absence has taught me, even if it breaks me to a million little shards making everyone bleed that tries to pick them up. I want to be able to collect myself on my own because I have seen you do so. You’ve always been there, you showed up, even when I was hesitant to ask you were there.
I carry the weight of that night like a stone I can’t put down. I have replayed it in my mind in a very torturous way, with what can’t be changed, can’t be undone, can’t be unseen. I have learnt about a feeling, that you do not choose, GRIEF, something that arrives and simply alters everything it touches. I have been living inside that pit, struggling to breathe, struggling to become something, struggling to believe that the girl you once loved is somewhere inside the wreckage of who I am now.
I could never get myself to say I love you enough. I didn’t even say it nearly enough. But I am saying it now, into the vast and atrocious silence you left behind, with a tiny bit of hope that it’ll reach you- that love, just like all real things, does not require a body to travel. That it’ll find its way.
I got scolded because of your worry, I got missed because of your love. And I am still, even up-till now, just trying to find my way back home. Only if I could.
Wait for me; I’m still finding the way, even if I’m lost.
With every unsaid word finally spoken.
Regards,
Your daughter who loved you more then her throat ever allowed—
