Words elude me like never before. I say I am sorry but they still don't speak with me. This is an attempt in perseverance. I write much like a child who knows she has erred and who, in an awkward nervous fashion keeps standing at the doorway. I too stand there, with my head bowed and hands tied. I am not apologetic for not writing - not here or otherwise. But for that because of which I was not able to talk to myself. Writing would have required an honest reflection and for many days I had kept averting my gaze. But then words precede me, as always. I was 'dropped' and rightly so.
The part of me that writes had ceased to talk to the part of me that wants to write. If it has happened to you, you would know the agony it can cause. It was an injury upon a wound. Words, my precious palanquin bearers, took sides with the former. I choked at times, but I did not have the strength to face me here. For in here one has to be most naked. Brutally, beautifully - naked. And utter exposure needs unfaltering conviction.
I have realised what writing is to me. It's worship, it's prayer, it's the answer. It's the one most honest act I ever do. Something that's as much mine as my own child would be. Even more perhaps. And when I couldn't face myself in words - oh I felt dismembered - as if left abandoned at the outskirts of the same cobbled streets that were (are) home to me.
Often in the past I have thought about how it is the biggest sin - doing what one does not want to do. That there is to be dignity even in one's sins - this dignity toboggans from a 'want' - which is the expression of one's own volition. The 'will' fills the cognitive senses and lead us up to a decision, however dastardly it may be. It would be lesser an evil to skip morality, commit a wrong, if only one has/had a 'want'. But when you do something you did not even 'want' to do - you couldn't have caused a bigger ignominy and disrespect to the 'self'. If there is a bigger sin than sin, it is sinning without wanting to.
I whispered apologies to me a hundred times. But the writer wouldn't allow for unjustifiable mistakes. Not from me.
The courtroom of conscience has room enough for reason, excuses, even tomfoolery. It has many windows too for one to take flight and escape. But there are no doors from which one could walk out with dignity, unless one has justified oneself. Yet, how to justify something I did not want to do? My standards are engraved in stone, the bars are always high. I could find no justification. And so I struggled. I couldn't and wouldn't flee from the windows. And I could not walk out the doors too.
And so here I stand, staring at the floor in obeisance. Hoping.
