Becoming whole

I am becoming whole again. Fragmented, broken, angry, I was for the last four months. Anger, not of the righteous kind that nourishes you, anger, of the impotent, diminishing kind that makes you smaller.

I stopped writing, which I had begun after years of hesitation. I read scraps of tabloids, watched movies disinterestedly, and listened to whatever noise played out in the garb of music. I also became quieter, which some say was not very noticeable and akin only to another degree of silence.

I felt as if I was fighting a losing battle against monsters, both real and imagined. Frankly speaking, this is what I feel now. Then, I did not really feel much. Just something sore inside, when pain refuses to go away but is always around, popping up every now and then. Staring at you, mocking you.

Rather then bore you further with the "why" and "what", let me tell you a little, borrowed, story.

In Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, Mr. Hamidi is looking for an accomplice to help him commit suicide. More accurately, to bury him, to cover his grave with earth, once he has killed himself. In the industrial wasteland of outskirts of Tehran, he seeks the lonely and impoverished, who would be desperate enough to accept his offer of money for little help. Adolescent soldier away from his native town, rag-picker, exiled Afghan seminary. Some get scared, some discourage him. One of them asks, why don't you share your pain, may be, it will make it subside? Mr. Hamidi desists, even if I tell you, you will never be able to feel what I am feeling inside. You will sympathize, you will probably feel pity towards my condition, but you will not understand me. Mr. Hamidi does not tell anything, but he lays bare the ultimate loneliness of human condition, and its accompanying pain and suffering. But, he still finds something in the "taste of cherry" to go on living.

Suddenly, I am also feeling that the happiness, that I have longed for and tried to attain, is returning. Perhaps in half measures, not fully, but I am losing the resentment towards happiness that I had built so assiduously. And I can feel a void getting filled within, I still don't know by what. I just feel that I am slowly coming back to life.