Kashiana Singh
's prompt for TSL for Napowrimo on writing a letter to oneself in the future as to what one would say if one did write that. I came back at a time when things were bad in the country. You remember? There was covid here, covid there, covid, covid everywhere and no jobs or lost ones and salaries halved and people struggling, ill or dying, ruined by half-baked rulers, not a drop of solace for anyone, anywhere. The poor suffered more and more of the middle class became poor but I wanted to see things through eyes that were no longer political. I heard people mourning, it was like the wind through vast tracts of once fertile land full of sheaves of paddy now desolate and barren, sighing, soughing, and I watched silently, avoiding adverbs as that was the way to go about describing what was happening.
I read the Bible and even if I did not the apocalyptic sections came back and spoke to me more than any other, haunting my memory, as a good metaphor for what was happening. But I was not ready to give in to the waves of despair all around, I was ever a fighter so one fight more, one more fight, again starting all over with nothing or whatever I had already made from nothing, with the help of God and whoever else had helped me along the way sent by him for which I was grateful. No man is an island.
I started all over again. It can be tough in a land with a wife, three kids, one having autism, two girls, where no one wants you as you are out of sync, you don't belong anymore but have to work your way back to belonging with new parameters and too old to do it in but I was used to it as long back I had penetrated to the core of life that anyway no one mattered to anyone and when you died you died alone, and it was a metaphysical reality. I could start over and over again a dozen times as I had already done and not worry as I was in the ground of being where it was all quicksand.
There were two kinds of people, the remembered and the forgotten, just as there was the rich and the poor, and I had always tried my best to live in such a way as to be forgotten, amused by the ones who tried to be remembered who did not seem to know that no one who became remembered became so as they wanted to but because they were meant to. Be remembered. I did not long for immortality, in other words. If I was meant to be immortal it would come to me on its own and not the other way around, I did not have to go searching for it.
So here we are, old man, the me who started all over again, something I kept doing, and the you I became. It would be wonderful to say that I made no mistakes or that it was horrible as I made only mistakes but the truth is however many times you start over nothing changes as you are more or less the same you, you make the same old predictable mistakes and do the same old brilliant things in a new guise that pan out well for you and meanwhile life changes around you and you adjust to it, the children having grown up and various other things that change.
Most of all the masterpieces that would not or did get written. Remember them? Given a second chance would I do it all different? Never. It was not perfect but it was not all bad. It was me through and through and it was all I had, it was all that mattered and I was happy with that. Do I wish we had previous lives or future lives, No, all rubbish. Just one is enough and you need to try to live it well. This one was good enough, is good enough, will be, sitting here and talking to you as your past, my future, in some unspecified scape waiting for our wife to come in or our son or daughters or someone else or revisit our shared memories and the new ones we are making even this instant like this moment. What more does one need or want? Nothing.
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