The Ghost in the Closet; Thoughts on life, growing up and regrets.

  

“Skeleton in the closet is a colloquial phrase and idiom used to describe an undisclosed fact about someone which, if revealed, would have a negative impact on perceptions of the person.”

 

Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.

Anne Frank

   Raindrops fall softly on the tin roof of my house. The gray sky with the gloomy clouds is the perfect setting for deep retrospective thoughts. Nostalgia overwhelms my senses and with a dull ache in my heart, I give in. As the rain pours down heavily outside, I let my mind wander into the  alleys of the past.

   There I see a house.

   The old house of my childhood days.

   The white paint appears fresh. The windows are clean with the new curtains and the garden is as green as ever. 

  Still as same as it used to be, years ago.

   There I see my mother. So beautiful and so young.  She holds my brother in her arms and she beckons me to come. I run to her and hug her. She laughs. I tell her that I love her and hold her hand. Now thinking about the child I was, I realize that I must have lost the ability to show compassion some time in the years that followed. 

   Then I see my grandmother. With her subtle yet strong face, she smiles at me. Her smile is simply beautiful. It could melt even the coldest of hearts and made her beady eyes twinkle. The authoritative person that she was, I never thought that I would ever see her vulnerable. However even the strong spirit has but a mortal body. 

   I remember the winter evenings. Moments spent with her in an idyllic town, where I spent eighteen years of my life.

   Long walks on a quiet road, white vapours escape her mouth as she talks about the town in her days, her lips gently curve as a smile draws upon her face. How I loved to hear her talk! The way she spoke about her life, her thoughts and views, I could not help but grin at her enthusiasm and gaze at the lines on her face, deep with age and experience; wisdom of yesteryears.

    When people I once knew become memories, I often associate them with a certain phase, or different kinds of feelings that their presence evoked or perhaps a season in which I have the fondest moments of them. It could also be a colour, like yellow which reminds me of a friend who loved yellow flowers, and wore a yellow dress during school fate and who drifted away with time, but at one point, was an important part of my life. People fade, not dissappear, and even when they do, their memories never change. So when I think of my grandmom, I remember my childhood, my growing up years, a cup of Maggi and somehow, monsoon and rain.

    As I grew older though, I began to embrace the changes and challenges that came with becoming a young adult. I often felt like my voice, my opinion was not given  enough credibility by the elders and at times, I became frustrated. I remember at one time, I tore all my painings and art work because I was not given the permission to visit a gallery with my friends on a Saturday. The environment at home was strict and at times conservative, but my reaction, I must admit now, was gratuitous.

    Being young is exciting yet difficult, a voyage of discovery riddled with perils of self doubt and anxiety. A young soul is ever ready to brave a torrent of torment and chaos, but is fragile as when love interwines. The best part about youth is the feeling that it will last forever, the nights will go on, the memories will be endless, and life will always be as good as the moment; and  there, in its beauty lie the blemish.

   I often locked myself in my room, listened to rock music all day and tried to write love songs at night. Life of a sixteen year old girl was supposed to either all pink and glitter or the opposite. At least that was what I thought, and I chose the latter. I liked being called a rebel. The idea was alluring. Then one day, suddenly, I lost my grandmother. Having spent all my life with her, the rebel in me was broken beyond words. However I knew that the demise was not a bolt out of the blue. I knew that it was coming since months. Yet, when it did happen, everything seemed unplanned, unprepared for, like all of a sudden. 

It is funny how death works, like a candle on a windy night; you know the flame will blow out, but when it finally does, you realise that the darkness is nothing like you prepared for or hoped it would turn out to be like.

   It did make me realise how life is eventually made up of small things; trivial matters that we often overlook on a daily basis. I knew my grandmother when she had past the age of work, way after the zenith of her career, beyond her prime and yet that did not matter. She loved me, she talked to me, she understood me amd when she couldn’t, she gave me her reason, her POV, which made me consent sometimes but also understandably reprimand and unreasonably retort during other. I do wish I could take back some harsh words I had spoken in my rage, and replace them with those of love and gratitude, that I really felt. However, it is easier perhaps to have regrets, to succumb to pride than to surrender to love.

  The rain is falling heavily now. I glance over my phone on the table beside the bed. I pick it up and check my notifications. Fourteen new Whatsapp messages, three pokes and five friend requests. I casually go through my timeline when I notice a link which has an image of an old man, with the caption ‘Sorry statistics reveal the truth of modern World’ and has the headline; ‘Rise of Old Age homes, a matter of concern’ written in the link. I feel a pang of pain. As I read the article I feel angry at the people who can’t even take care of their own loved ones. I feel sad for the elderly who have done so much for their children, yet have to face the adversities of later years all by themselves. 

   When I finish reading, I keep my phone down and sit by the window; a seemingly perfect setting for nostalgia and fervent feelings to grasp my heart again.

 As I stare at raindrops hitting the ground, somehow I am reminded of a sentence I can recall vaguely which was something like; “The worst that you can do to someone is forget them.”  I must have read it in a book that I have about forgotten now. How frail our memory is really. We forget our keys, facebook passwords, appointents and promises that we made to ourselves and others. We forget the books that once moved our hearts, we forget the songs that made us smile at sometime and then we forget the people who have always loved us. It is an irony that in a world where computers and internet ensure that not a moment is ever lost and we are always connected with everyone at all time, we have somehow lost the ability to create memories and make connections with the people in our lives. I think this will be the biggest criticism of our time; a generation that knew more of the world than of themselves, lost in a sea of opinions of anyone and everyone, that thrived on attention while struggling with insecurities and a generation of sad people who, like the ones before them, were in love with the idea of melancholy, passion and romance but unlike the ones before, reduced emotions to emojis, love to a relationship status, success to popularity and people to profiles.

   The rain has stopped. I open the window and I am greeted by the smell of the earth, fresh after rainfall; petrichor as it is called. I feel refreshed. Then I decide to do something I had not done for sometime. I pick up my phone and dail my mother’s number. Her voice is soothing as always. She tells me that she misses me and she hopes that I am fine. Then suddenly, I tell her that I love her. She is taken by surprise and so am I. Perhaps it would be easier to pass a sharp comment, that would be more expected than a show of love from my side. And because it was easier, that was what I used to do, maybe more often than required. I hear soft sobbing over the phone. She tells me that she loves me too. 

  A ray of sunlight breaks through the black clouds. Sometimes, life looks too poetic to be true; but we forget that poems are inspired by life itself. 

  After a while I keep phone down. The sky is clearing. The dark clouds are drifting away. Then instintively I pick up the phone and call my brother. I decide that for once, I am going to use the phone for its original purpose which it has lost somehow; to stay in touch with those who really matter.

 I talk to him for sometime. I pull his leg. We laugh. He tells me that he will call me as soon as he gets home from work. We have some catching up to do. In fact I have a lot of catching up to do with a few more people. Then I decide to call my old school friend. And then my aunt perhaps.

  I realise that while our human memories may be weak and untrustworthy but to forget someone is a matter of choice. We can choose to remember the people in our lives and constantly remind them we are there for them, not because we always need to, but simply because we can and we should. Someone had said, ‘We are born alone and we die alone’, but we don’t have to live alone. Because loneliness is terrible and nobody deserves that. Love is an integral part of our lives, interwined with our very existence. We may die alone but we will die knowing that we learned how to love while we lived. I think that our generation has the great power of having the least regrets because we have the ability to tell people we love that we love them, no matter how far they are and not wait for the day when we cannot, as Death does not have a facebook account. 

  In conclusion, I have a confession to make; I have regrets. A lot of them. I think that we all have them. Perhaps it is human nature to do the wrong thing and then, to regret. They are the skeletons in my closet, my secrets that I hide from the world but I only know too well. And at times, when I visit the old vaults, they rattle in the closet that I do not wish to open. However, I know that I need to accept them and let them serve the purpose of reminders of my choices in life, and not let the skeletons turn to ghosts that haunt me. Because regrets, like ghosts, can haunt those who believe that they have the power to do so. 

 But unlike regrets and ghosts, we have the choice to do something about our lives and bring about a change in someone’s life. And that may just happen with a simple expression of love and letting them know that they are remembered, because we chose to not forget them. 

EDIT- The post was one of the ‘Commendable Mention’ in the prestigious Wingword Story Writing Competition 2017 organised by Delhi Poetry Society.

Results of Wingword National Story writing competition 

I am deeply humbled and grateful.