Happy Birthday

Birthdays demand contemplation, I believe, and as I step into a new decade I stop to ponder over the person I have grown into. This is “emotion recalled in tranquility” for it has been three days since my birthday ( Rimi di was right when she said that we are too well read for our own good) and now I sit with the afterglow of the day. It is recognition of the irreversibility of the aging process as it is about my feelings of helplessness. I have become helpless, I realize, a mute spectator of sorts to the drama of life that unfolds in front of me, I wait and watch but have no say. Somewhere in the exchange between adolescence and adulthood, time set in and left me defeated. I am awed by the strangeness of life, shocked by its sadist humour and amazed by its power. I linger to savour each moment that it offers as I see that survival would require me to let go of every inch if the person I was.

I stare at the picture of a stranger. He evokes emotions in me which I had forgotten I had the capacity of feeling. It is this voyeur I have become. I watch myself perform the rituals expected of me, I feel the fragmentation of my self as the world around me rapidly changes. I see the world I love so dearly fast disappearing. The loss is irrevocable. I refuse to grow up in the attempt to stop time’s flow. I desperately hang on to the tiny vestiges of the daddy’s little girl. My father asks whether my birthday gift made me happy. I smile, I lie, the euphoria that was so spontaneous once doesn’t happen, I try to fake it.

Nothing makes sense any more. The world has lost coherence. It was so easy once to arrange events sequentially, logically, but now they decline to fall in place. I think of the sweet simplicity of the earlier decade when a diary entry on 29th July, 1996 read “My Happy Birthday” and tears come to my eyes. Every step I take takes me further away from solidity, from meaning and from sense. The lines become crooked and blurred. My body is slowly melting away but the surrounding space refuses to receive it. I have ceased to have an identity… I remain stranded in between…I scream…A very happy birthday to me.