Journal Entry- 26th May 2021
It is 2.30 pm on a work day. I have over tens tabs opened on my laptop, four for Gantt charts, four for reports, a WhatsApp window, and a tab with an article on how do you prepare yourself for grief, before it comes to hit you. It is funny, all of this. I am preparing for a life that does not exist in this moment. I am preparing for a heartbreak that might never come, or might hit me before I imagine it to hit me. I know all my guards, all my timelines, all my strengths will fail me. It is this voice in my head that keeps telling me every second of my life that there is going to be an end to the start of something beautiful in my life. I know it is coming, and I know nothing will save me from it.
If you ask someone to not break your heart, does it change anything? Do they make an effort to not break your heart? I remember asking God to not break mine for the longest time, and yet he did. Be it losing a boy, a girl friend I cherished, or my dog Sandy. They say time heals everything, but it does not. In fact, time takes you into a spiral of living things over and over again. You take therapy, you talk to friends, you build a support system like you would build a Lego house, but all of it comes falling down with one trigger. I have rebelled, rioted, burnt everything down, and sometimes I find myself feeling hands all over me that I thought I had forgotten all about. Time does not heal you, and even healed scars still haunt you.
So this time, I am preparing myself for grief before it hits me. I am making notes of days when I will be devastated, planning work leaves to be a sobbing mess, making a grocery list of comfort foods, messaging up friends asking if they will be available for me. I am panning out my whole life on calendars in red, blue and green. I cannot stop the pain from hitting me, but I can be ready for it. But how ready can you get for a disaster that will bring down your whole world? Would you save the house, the heart, or the body that will feel crushed under the debris of emotions and expectations and hurt? Would you save a pack of cigarettes to get through? Would you perform to your best of ability at work and in relationships so when you’re crippled, they give you a leeway for how your past self was different, how this is “just a phase” and how you will come out of it?
When I write, I never have answers. I go to my poems and stories and letters and it is all questions. These days, I have been constantly wishing for a manual on life, a hand to guide me, a light to show me the end of this dark tunnel, or may be any pill that relieves you of the grief of existence. But there is none. There will never be any. I will be left to navigate my ways around dark forests and strange hallways and slimy tunnels. All alone. Because the thing about lego houses is that they break, just like the heart breaks. And when you mend it, it is never the same again. There is always a piece missing.
