Erebus and I / Ojaswini Trivedi
Who saves us? What protects us? Or are we just living our lives with the illusion of being protected. Of being saved.
Hurt is the chalice of nothingness, writhing through the voiceless screams. The mind crawled up in a desperate embrace, bleeding, shivering, hangs itself from the ceiling.
With nothing to hold on, with everything to let go. What is the truth? What is right? Who decides what our conscience speaks? Who lives through, who survives the maelstrom of starlit sighs.
I remember that night, alone, terrifyingly-complete. The lights turned down and the darkness eager to consume me. For a first, it didn’t charge at my insecurities with vengeance but tip toed with a docile ambiguity that allowed me to accept it with arms wide open. Night was kind to me. Maybe the moon was watching.
The background rhythm played in sync with my closing ventricles, expanding lungs and perhaps possessed arms. The sanctity of its beauty transcended into every cell, each tissue. Unbiased with the form or function.
Only one song played that night.
“Bottom of the Deep Blue sea” by MISSIO. The song. Ironical? I know.
My feet ached, and I swayed endlessly. Almost as if the night was my guide, the security man outside my window. Convincing me that Pain and Anguish would have to cross the seven seas, climb the tallest peaks, jump across the chasms, speak the strangest of languages to reach me.
I was safe.
As if maybe for the first time, being numb was equivalent to being happy. Maybe sometimes feeling everything is like feeling nothing at all. Like a snake swallowing its tongue. Or a snowball exploding against a Pine tree.
Au contraire, I never felt more alive. Like the first breath of air after plunging out of the water. Gasping, lungful of the escaped nuances- All gushing back into the realms of my truth.
The soothing audacity of hurt comes in unabashed like the lust for love. It’s heavy. It’s bored. It’s engraving.
Dancing barefoot on the wooden floor, with nothing but a mirror around me. It broke my heart in a different way. It crumpled my soul in an unfittingly. I felt distorted, perfectly.
All of a sudden in those frail moments everything I did and didn’t do made sense to me. Almost as if a gospel truth unravelled beneath the sheaths of my eye lids, trotting through my veins, into the earth.
With every move, my heart imploded, it succumbed to the bliss, the night had to offer.
Is that what love looks like? Oh the shear godliness of it.
Somewhere through my illicit affair with the night, as I laid on the floor, breathing the earth, staring into the sky across the translucent concrete above me.
My toes crinkled.
The desire and occurrence of complete degradation followed by the innocent upheaval of honesty, lastly toppled with the cool embrace of bliss.
I gasped.
Maybe, this felt like love, after all.