A page from my diary

Prabhavathy

19/UELA/015

4th July, 2020

When the rains arrived, I found a sense of vulnerability returning to me hesitantly. The summer had broken me in with its white gaze and dry winds. There were cracks on my body that summer had left behind which I pretended not to notice or claimed had always been there. But with the rain, I had not the mercy of pretence. There was no denying the smell rising out of the cracked ground as the cool droplets dripped into the ones on my own body.

It was irritating, frustrating, and sensual even, the way the rain refused to come down for more than a few minutes at a time. It came down just long and frequently enough as to bring out scary emotions and memories that fell upon me like heavy but warm rugs. In a week I had felt all the sadness I had refused to feel in a year. In one evening, I had cried my yearly share of tears into the rain and rainbows lit up in recognition across the sky. The whole time it seemed like a waking dream, hanging on precariously to the railing, waiting for me to swell and snap out of it at any time.

I’ve been lying on beds, floors with sheets pooled and tangled around me, crying, thinking, and occasionally dressing up for hours only to wash it all off mere minutes after it is done. I was almost reluctant to give in to this state at first, trying my best to stay awake against the pressing need to pass into what I can only call a state of hallucinatory sadness.

But I am at peace.

I’ve been reading sad stories I couldn’t have managed to read a week ago and seeing Call Me by Your Name again. Director Luca fixing his camera solidly on Elio and refusing to move as he cries into the end credits is his way of symbolising Elio’s father’s advice, ‘Don’t cut away from the feeling’. These feelings are often ripped away or worse, disfigured, put down as vulgar pretentiousness or sentimentality and their spaces desecrated by everyday mundaneness that can’t for a moment process the depth of the human soul under the utilitarian glare of street lights and traffic sounds. For the ease of living, we eat, exhale and die.

I am not sure of what is going to happen when the rains stop. Will I stop feeling like this? Will this give way to before? I don’t want it to. But I know it will. So I close my eyes and pray it will rain again.