Anna walked past the meadows where hope swayed. She followed the stream where life took its course, and stood beneath the tree where dreams were sold. But somehow, she could never make sense out of any of it. To her, everything was like the paintings she created—black blobs of paint over the white canvas. Colours could never make sense to her, and she stood there, seeing what nobody else saw—shades of black and white. The swaying hopes were black, the river through which life took its course seemed to her to be flowing black liquid, and the leaves in the tree beneath which dreams were sold were all black. The wind that whispered in her ears talked of dark tales and the world was exactly like her canvas—with blobs of black paint everywhere. Oh! She could never tell the difference—it was like an ancient ache that she lived with, she had perhaps never gotten used to it; just that with time, she had grown numb.
Her ‘re-cycled self’ she called herself—her present self that is. She believed that over the years, piece by piece, she had let go of herself; day after day—in the form of the beliefs she had stopped believing in, in the form of the hopes that couldn’t keep her company, in the form of the dreams that had swiftly flown out of the window, until none remained. And somewhere, in a place called ‘away’, the bits that she put away with every passing day were put together to form a new and re-cycled self of her being. The re-cycled self looked like her, sounded like her but to her it felt different—so different that when her face showed in the mirror she saw a face of a stranger staring at her, a face that poked fun at her, a face that jeered at her for letting go of her dreams, her hopes, her beliefs. Oh! She could never be sure of what all she had missed or if she had really missed as much as she thought she had—she could never tell.
“Why can’t you ever think positive?” asked the people around her. She would look at them and think, “What difference would that make? What difference would anything make? After all in the end, it’s about nothing. Like the answers that evade me, I can live on without answering this question.” She somehow
never got what the positives and negatives in life meant after all. There were the wrongs that she was accused of, the wrongs that she was blamed for, the wrongs that were strewn all around her and there were the rights that she was never credited for, the rights that never came her way, the rights that didn’t keep her company—she wasn’t sure if they made up the positives and negatives—these very rights and wrongs...
Oh! In midst of it all, she couldn’t help a few things and it was amazing how life did what it did— it just moved on. When she stood beneath the tree where dreams were sold, she could see the passers-by glance at her and then go about their own business and she could feel their thoughts—the thoughts that questioned— “Isn’t she the girl who let go of it all? And what is she doing beneath that tree?”
And somewhere deep within herself she heard her scream, “Yes, I am the re-cycled girl and it was I who let it all go, it was I who let my old self vanish into nothingness. What for, you might ask and I would say for nothing. Now when I am the one who has lost it all along the way, to the rest of the world it is for nothing. And beneath this tree, I stand, not to buy those dreams but to take refuge from the scorching sun—my muscles have started to quiver.
As for dreams... they fly out of the window like fleeting memories… Oh! Questions popped out of everywhere and all she did was seek for the answers. She would sit with her canvas and on and on she would go with her brush strokes. She would dip her brush in the thick black paint and go on with her strokes, knowing exactly where the next stroke would go and how. Now and again she would dip the smothered brush in the jar of water that lay beside her and see the black paint render the water the same color. “Everything after all turns to that colour,” she would say to herself and go about her work.
Was it about her perspective? Was it about the fact that over the years letting go of herself had made her lose the sense of colours? She couldn’t tell the reds from the greens, or the yellows from the blues. Her friends talked of passionate red roses, of the radiant yellow sun, of the liberal azure skies, of the silver calm moon, but she just couldn’t make sense in it—in any of it for that matter. Where did all the colors go—why were they running away and hiding from her—was it about being the re-cycled self that she was? Oh! She just went on with the paintings—painting things as she saw them—blobs of black paint over the white canvas!
Sometimes she would hum along—it seemed like a soliloquy of a long lost wave. Like a lone, desolate and lost wave she sought a long forgotten shore. Her fleeting memories had long started to betray her and she didn’t know where to look, which tracks to follow. It was her search that seemed to go on forever.
She couldn’t tell if her fading memories were merely wishful of a past that wasn’t even existent; she wasn’t even sure if the paintings that she created were just pictures for an aching heart’s delight—she wanted to do nothing at all and yet she did it all.
She knew that she had thrown herself to the poisoned streams but her wandering eyes gave her no rest, no escapade from the adventure she sought. The ‘necessary’ has chained her and she had let herself be chained for long. Living for dreams that weren’t hers’, believing in what she could never have let herself believe in, hoping for the necessary and not what she truly wanted to be hopeful for, she had walked paths that had been strewn with shades of black and white for long. It was this re-cycled self that held the deception, a deception she knew she could break free from. Like always, she asked herself, “What would it take to break free?”
She knew then, what she needed to do. Bit by bit she put away pieces of herself and dipping them in the colors that she had lost over time, she put together a new self which could dream, which could hope, which could aspire and which could believe in all that she knew she wanted to believe in and there she was in a place called ‘away’, the new and improved ‘re-cycled self’ of her being.
The next time she walked past the meadow where hopes swayed, followed the stream through which life took its course and stood beneath the tree where dreams were sold, she knew how she would feel and what she would paint. The strokes would still be precise but they would sure be colourful. Oh! She had a feeling that they would be!
- Anita Krishnan
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