2022!

2022 is here and I am still writing, although not as regularly as I used to unlike a few years ago. I do not know whether I should attribute my lack of writing to work, other mediums of expression like Instagram or indifference to documenting my thoughts. I still maintain a diary and write in it but how the notes in it have changed over the past few years. As I succumbed to the age old system of being comfortable in my job, I have since given up on a lot of things that were a strong and inherent part of my life. 

I am ageing now, being a tad too old to ponder over every single emotion and yet I find myself morose and cheerless having abandoned my ambitious plans. I suppose it's going to be easy, blaming failures and unfulfilled obligations and goals on this self imposed restriction over the past two years. I feel like time is indeed running through my hands before I can even comprehend about the things I wish to do and people I want with me. What a strange longing! 

Today also happens to be my grandfather's 24th death anniversary. I was very young when he passed away and can scarcely recollect his voice or his face except from photographs. He seems blurred and gradually disappearing from my memory. I do not have any keepsake from him and I wonder whether possessing one would have helped me remember him better. Are we really the sum of our desires or are we wholly material beings who need physical manifestations to remember people? Strange that I cannot make myself go away from this tiny thought of whether he ever knew me as his granddaughter considering how fragile his memory was! I see him always seated on the bed near the door with his olive green shawl wrapped tightly around his shoulders, head bent low and stooped, his gaze fixated on the floor. I would never know if his memory was already withered to register me as his granddaughter, if he knew me as a person and loved me like one. I could never tell him what I thought of him. Secretly I was pretty scared of his weak stature, and he appeared like a distant giant whom I was too afraid to approach. He had a mole on his cheek and the only time he raised his head when I saw him clearly etched his painful gaze in my mind. 

I wonder how much my Dad misses him. I know my grandpa's favorite poem because my Dad mentions it every time he hears it being narrated on the radio. I only have a saturated and pixelated image of what he must have been as a young person and someone who lived a life far differently than we do now. What shall happen to all these anecdotes and memories we have collected, one day? Will no one ever find out how happy and sad we were, of what made us strong and vulnerable, of how we loved and lost? I wonder if I will remember my grandpa when I become his age too. This reminds me of a sweet movie I saw a couple of years ago called COCO. I cried even when I was watching the movie and long after it ended. It gave me so many glimpses of loving the people I care about, of sticking with them no matter what and really making it through adversity. Whether I conjured my own experiences into the characters or they really did matter to me, my tears were a reminder of how frail my heart was! I felt gullible and weary from the emotional overload. Everything that was contained inside me shattered into fragments of sorrow and pain. Tonight, as I write here I am surrounded yet again with this inexplicable sorrow for a longing in my heart that ceases to wither.