Tabula rasa

Valentine's Day is not a faraway memory, I can still remember the innate urge to prepare something "special" as the day draws close, to get a gift, not any other gift, but a gift that fits nicely into a series of gifts so that I create a meaning for the gifts that can be remembered, and a gift that whenever it is thought of, it thrills, then after a while, it lingers. When this particular Valentine's Day came, however, I forgot. It occupies a merely numerical existence in my mind that beckons no sweetness; it does not instigate my urge to do something, or in fact anything; it perpetuates a zombified state--a blank created by something taken away.

Or is it a clean slate, tabula rasa?

It always hurt the most when things first went off. It is like the most precariously held expectation starting to tumble down. It may be a small sign, a simple look, an offhand remark, a dismissive tone, but it hurt. When a relationship normalizes, I start to feel it is normal, part and parcel of everyday occurrence that makes a relationship real, that makes a life a life, not drama, a state of being worthy of experiencing, not al-together blissful, but anyway, worthwhile. So such a small sign gets internalized into a mechanism of blind acceptance and self-denial that "a sign is a sign, and a bad sign is a bad sign". Its weight is lifted off the heart. It no longer hurts that much. It ceases being registered in the consciousness of a mind now knowing how to be blissful, and grateful. So the angular shape smoothens, the irregularities normalize, the spikes hammered down. 

So I am fogged in this blissful and grateful state, wrapping myself in blind acceptance and self-denial that everything is good. Badness is temporary. Things change. Things get better.

The truth is: things cannot get worse.

Self-suppression becomes almost an innate attribute but pent-up emotions need to get released elsewhere. Work is a good way to seek solace from. You bury yourself in work, in intensive intellectual working, in a vague comparison that boosts a little bit of self worth; then you try again.

It is like a reboot. Clearing up everything. All the fragments of realisation here and there, all the useful revelations or wasted junks. Gone. No single discretion is involved in that.

Tabula rasa.

I have in me a perpetrual, fear, for this. How to start, from here? From where?

Cowardly, I refuse to face this clean slate that is bereft of all the prejudice or harm I have suffered from. I refuse to embrace it as a new lease of life. I reject the opportunity to be reborn. I want to sleep it over.

So when nights are deep, I cry and bite the pillow. I shiver and I start. I am lost.

And the pattern repeats and repeats and repeats. There is some karma that makes it repeat itself, linearly, inter-generational, era after era, trapping everything inside in a huge engulfment.

The same biting of the pillow, the same shivering, the same startled face with fear. It recurs, just in different physical places, just...feels the same...

When I finally have the courage to say: enough is enough. When I finally feel the true anger. When I finally tell myself to breathe rather than to stand all these. I truly feel alive, burden-free, hopeful, invigorated, tabula rasa.

My fresh start.