How Long Do You Wait for Someone, Something?

How dark is the place that you are in?

You sit in this airy room painted a happy green, wispy young trees dancing in the breeze like children after school and sun shining in the thick emerald foliage underfoot, the sky a rare powdery blue and fluffs of white glide dreamily through, the happy yellow-green-mauve chequered curtains sway as though in a breezy trance – and you think how cold it is.

How cold is the trickle down your oesophagus that numbs and burns alike as it goes? You hastily gulp down some water and contemplate going back to sleep. You have nothing to do now, nowhere to go, no deadlines to meet, no potatoes to peel, no clothes to fold. Other people have taken care of that and left. Other people are sleeping in other rooms, and they have also left but it doesn’t look so, yet. You really wish you could go back to sleep, or try to. But why would sleep come in a green, airy room with the sun dancing on its wall when it never came in the purple haze you are accustomed to calling night?

So you have no choice but to contemplate the question you have been trying to lose in descriptions of airy rooms. How long do you wait, for someone, something? What happens to you as time passes? Does time truly pass, or its just you, caught between growth and decay and trying to forget the fact that you are, in fact, waiting for death to happen?

Or would it be waiting for life to happen? You don’t really understand how these are different. Life is what you keep yourself distracted by while waiting for death. And what would be love be then, waiting to be understood, waiting to be nurtured? How much does it nurture, how much does it change, and to what end? What is the nature of this change that love brings about, is it growth, or decay, or both in certain degrees in certain aspects of your life? What does it help grow? What does it help decay? A shadow and a smile and a ghost of past events, distorted through the echoes in your mutating brain cells.

Memories change. They mean different things, they signify different things, they even reflect back very different things than what may have originally happened. Of course, what may have originally happened is not something you can ascertain by any means really, unless you recorded every second of your life in a device. Memories change for everyone, and for each the distortions are unique to their own brand of lunacy. So you wait for someone, something as your memories of someone, something slips from your mind and your fingers, one grain at a time, and are replaced by new grains. You no longer remember what it was that you wished to be understood by the other. You are no longer sure if it is the same thing anymore.

These new grains feel different. Tastes bitter while the old ones were sweet. Were the old ones truly sweet? Your memory is slipping there, too.

The accompanying painting is Melancholia by Edvard Munch. It was painted in 1892. The image has been sourced from Wikiart.