Paperweight

By Akshita Srivastava

‘Carrying cradles, carving crowns, could care less.’ There was a mystic mystery in her every breath. Pacing down the hallways, she seemed to be dreaming about a palm of loyalty last afternoon. She was reckless amidst a crowd that knew no mercy. Walking up to the vicinage of waking up, she stumbled the moment her vision was only accompanied by a single tearing teardrop that tore her towards her tarnishing dreams. 

White curtains are undraped as the woman who warns wanted to write instead. She began weaving with a weathering wrinkled writer's utensil, 

“Is justice, just this? I drew the world I hoped I grew in, but Alas! At last, I was coerced as I grew into it instead of in it. I just entered adulthood, but still with a tiny tinge of teenage trauma. The drawings I drew wanted me to get married off but as it grew into me, I was carried away with the only burden on the burning heart of bridal responsibility. Rushing through the rustled cups and trays as I put the facade of not being sad while being trapped in a facade of faces. Cut to short like my life, red roses led to red buses to red bruises to red rusted ruby ring remarks on my ring finger. I was an eyewitness of my red eyes but I possibly saw it only through thine eyes. See, society never sees but teaches the very lamentable hearing of radio composed of what they saw but never heard. I was never heard, each time, I was hurt. I wanted to be never birthed again and get baptised in my brutal teardrops accompanied by unread indisciplined books written by the less taken care of fellow abusive being. As the ink slows down, the ocean seeks a breath but it drowns like I do now and will forever. Sigh, sigh and sigh trapped inside my eye as the turmeric became my reason for burns instead of being a cure to my burns in this ironical married life. 

I crawled with a coarse croak as I cleaned my own blood set free in abundance every night with that so-called ‘palm of loyalty’. Made my ribs feel like a breaking cage as it absorbed all the rage. 

Finally, when they couldn't pour from an empty cup, then I bled myself so that I gave enough! My thoughts echoed in the walls of my mind for such walled people, as I whispered underneath my breath when I was told about an incurable disease, ‘ hurrying with your Harrington as I hesitate, hinting at my Huntington’s disease. Thoughts raised in me though incurable lying in the hospital would cure your non-existent hospitality that I craved each time I bled.’ He tried repealing our Heir while I was pleading it's unfair. I have recently by this cameo of treason been birthed into adulthood with neither the will to count my days nor to make the days count! 

Honestly, I would have begged you to stay still but now I have decided to switch to the next ink. 

I know that you won't be aware of these words in a distinct abundance of years, but when you do, all I want to say is that I am grateful you did. 

Each one of us goes through the journey when we experience the light of the world for the first time and contemplate that we have reached our destination but only to realise that it's the start of the journey. 

I know that I won't be able to witness any of the things I am about to mention, but writing them and knowing that some voice will say it, some ears are going to listen it, some eyes are going to see it and your heart is going to feel it makes me feel closer to my very own

resurrection. When you will be a few months old, you will kick your legs and hope that you could run away, but kicking the air would get you nowhere. So you'll kick harder in order to go nowhere, but with each kick, you will reach somewhere, which I hope is far away from nowhere near where I will be. 

You'd grow up a little and now that air you kicked would be replaced by the floor and now the harder you kick, the harder it'll retaliate. You will shed tears and not wear your own shoes, aiming for the larger ones and truthfully, you will receive one, but when you put those on, you would stumble on every step and then you will try to replace them with another pair and another only to realise that instead of trying to fit in someone's shoes it's better to walk barefoot. But it won't be easy, you will be hurt by things so belittle that they come under your feet yet pierce through your tears and become so invaluable that you'd look out for them at each step. 

Going through life, the one thing which you shall realise is that life is nothing but merely forgetting to flip the calendar pages, also at times peeking further ahead and the abundance of scarceness of scare while trying to look back, but someday when days and minutes won't define time rather the cracks you'd feel in your spine, your worry won't be characterised by how much you lost in a dime but instead where that mustered up courage lay when your heart aches for you to resign. Along the way, you will pick up rose thorns, some you'll be able to bear but some will poke in and out of your skin repeatedly until your body leaves them. In this moment only realise that leaving them saved you from leaving yourself which I must muster up the courage to say I could not and here I write again the words I won't read tomorrow. 

When for the first time you conceive the night sky, tell me what difference does it draw upon for the starry ones? Because for us scarred-crossed mothers, it feels like our dark screen of life got some pinpoints of glimmering happiness though the glimmer is dead long ago but I saw that dead glimmer in me too. 

One thing I'd desperately want you to learn is not only to read stars but scars and neither bleed stars nor speak scars you had read. 

At this age of turning into an adult, the stories and horrific tales which were imagined for stage play and what one would think, how can such an imbecile heart-wrenching story be curated, my child I am witnessing them as I write becoming real and the scriptwriters write their plays not with ink but with innocent blood pretending to be innocuous. I'd say a child should live in such an environment where they can only imagine brutality and cruelty instead of actually seeing them and only imagining what humanity and beauty is like. One day, you will grow older than me and one time while absorbing the moon into your eyes, you will suddenly hear the chirping of birds, this is where uncertainty meets its certainty, certainly. I cannot but if I could I would have wished that your life would nothing be like mine on your first birthday. 

Suddenly you'll be 22, and you'd realise these voices just won't stop inside your head and you won't understand how fragile that skull is! Mere melodies and vice voices penetrate but again, what strength does it fosters that those screams, muffled cries, your crooked tone of 'help', 'hear me out' and 'somebody' cannot even reach your lips. Brain is the most ironic thing one can have, it comprises thought and no thinking. I cannot express at all how much I crave to witness those little fingers and hands and for the first time to learn to hold a human hand and teach to hold them instead of getting hit from them. How I endlessly endear that this would not be my end and how I wish to trace myself in you and how for the first time a human eye wants to look up to me in mine and not make them sore.

I am unaware if I gave you my eyes, my ears, my face, my nose, my instincts, my nature but one thing's for certain: I have given you all my heart, and now it's forever yours, scarred it maybe but I have stitched every ache so that yours don't ache. 

You will meet other human beings along the way, and many will depart, they want truth, but the moment you will talk truth they will lead you to the suicide booth. 

So, you will try to talk untruth and then they will give you a tooth for a tooth. In times like these refrain, sit back and look out for a window, and through that window, look to the sky and it will tell you that it's similar to the phosphenes you see, the luminesce you see every time someone's eyes break into tears, the ripples as they glimmer and you will find it to be familiar because on the upfront they paint an inner sculpture of me. 

All these things are what I could experience, and I know that they are not a lot but they belong to me and my soul. So furthermore, write or speak to me about how life turns out in the 20s, is it filled with prestige and opportunities or your dreams still scream to become reality? Either way I think to be able to go through them is indeed a way to watch life happen or waiting to happen instead of getting ended at 19. Also, when you reach your thirties then how many ceilings have you come across, and how early do you have to adjust to them? Wasn't each night with an unfamiliar ceiling made you feel like your worst enemy. Unlike me, how many ceilings does it take before the sky becomes your ceiling? 

It slipped my mind but just to mention, a day will come when they will tell you to love your enemy and then you will try your hardest to love yourself only to realise that you can never love yourself enough. It happens child, we all in the first place consider ourselves as our enemy and then shower love, but that love shower feels like a thorn of a wildflower deep within you, so unapologetically you will cease to cater to yourself and yet again proving the ambiguity alloted inside us. I haven't figured out the answer to this myself but I'll tell you there will be days when you will feel a child's laugh, feel someone's caring eyes on you when you can't even look at yourself and someday doors will open themselves just moments before you try to knock on them and things will unfold just the way you wanted them as a young petulant soul. 

When I was young and got married just to be screamed and buried at, there were others too displayed in the tabloids, and if I could have been given the opportunity to just see them, I would have felt stronger in that pain, knowing I am not alone and that I might just not die in vain. But those tabloids or newspapers as they called them, contained old news with a new name of being disowned, the newspapers piled up neatly as I was maltreated routinely while those tabloids, those heinous humanoids who addressed themselves as humans took polaroids of their offence. All this stood at a standpoint under a paperweight which I could never gather up the fortitude to pick up, and I know now that it still waits there, creating a coerced spectrum just be picked up out of curiosity just like my teardrops created a sight of misery that everyone wishes to draw upon but none to draw away. I think my sadness wasn't balanced or weighed just enough to be lifted up while the paperweight was heavy enough to prevent the paper to blow away, but oh dear, only I know what weight it carried underneath it, just like I do till my nineteenth breath of proving- 'hope myth'. 

In the ages of dress rehearsal every day I do my death rehearsal, so do tell them to tell me how it feels to put up a death rehearsal at an appropriate age with the humans surrounding you, making you feel young again. Ah! when you are young, you feel so old and oh! to be old to know how to feel young; the dream unaccomplished but not unaccompanied. You see, it takes some cruelty to make one feel like a seven-lettered object at seventeen instead of a writer or a person with feelings when they carry the weight of a hundred letters in them which they never opened because they know their smile would be gunned. The letters in me,

where I painted a perfect portrait of their pitilessness made me say that the day I die would be the happiest day of my life, I wished for it to be a lie; because it came out of their sheer cruelty and suffering but I believe finally some ecstatic coincidence heard me and in order to heal me will make the day I die the happiest day of my life because it will be the very first time the universe will hear you cry, that day I will give you a life and remember crying is no weakness since birth it is a sign that you are alive and within you I for eternally live.One last epistle, my dear child, I cherish you the most in this abundant universe.” The quivering hands, much wrinkled than the hopes, put down the bundle of pages in an envelope on the bedpost bearing a paperweight with a scarab beetle design imprinted within it, and with her left hand placed it on top of the envelope, she almost glared at it with grace. The human who was always left was now leaving but leaving behind something in between hope and life. Days passed as she passed out pitying the echoes of ‘Carrying cradles, carving crowns, could care less,’ as she waited for someone to make it real. The happiest day of her life arrived indeed, as she left it because of our deeds but delightfully a weep was heard and finally we thought some years later, the letter was going to be heard. The mother had prayed every day that her child shan't hear the harsh remarks of this cruelty, shall hear no bloodshed and brutality that she had heard. She pleaded almighty to only allow him to hear brotherhood. 

Turns out the mother had heard enough but was never heard each time she was hurt, and now her child would not get hurt because he would not be able to hear a single word of this shameless world where no brotherhood came into existence. It never mattered to the kid because the mother wanted one quality, that is to be a star and scar reader, and I would bleed but not deny that better brotherhood is around the corner, because for the first time the paperweight has been lifted by the ones who really bother.

By Akshita Srivastava