The Twenty First Birth.

"Sometimes the hard times won't leave me alone...."

Reality checks are painful for me. If they weren't, I would've checked how long ago it was that I stopped writing.My hazy memory places it to around two years back.I could probably tell you why. A faulty internet connection, leading on to loss of habit, unwillingness to make an effort and finally and painfully, a loss of motivation. Along the way I was even convinced I'd run out of topics to write on. And for sometime, I had. Then after a log period of guilt-laced hibernation, random observations would come to me, observations that would normally have a found coherent form at the end of the day in another blog-post. But now nothing. I'd forgotten to write, as far as such things can be forgotten.

I could tell you a million things about these two years. About how it feels to be sucked in a quagmire of frustrated ambitions, hopelessness and eventually, a shattering loss of self-worth.A loss that was not so much of self-worth, as the perception of it . I could also tell you about looking into the future, only to be able to see, more clearly than ever, a future of ruins even more desolate than the present I've been living in.

A couple of years, spent so ruthlessly driven by cruel circumstances that, harking back to the song I quoted at the beginning of this post,

' Now the face that I see in my mirror
More and more is a stranger to me
More and more I can see there's a danger
In becoming what I never thought I'd be '

You cannot be wholly responsible for what you are, and I've been tossed and turned ruthlessly till I can scarcely compare myself to the Child I once was. Brishti'r bhejar bhoy hoi na, by becoming evil you no longer suffer evil, and by becoming insensitive you no longer feel the sharp pains that once threatened to bleed you out. But even then, there cannot be a loss of the awareness of the past, and the loss felt, though camouflaged, is deep.

But then, somewhere in the course of writing my now almost forgotten blog I learnt, from an infinitely more talented person, that whining never helps, and true to my thirst of bettering myself, I kept it to a minimum there as I hope to do here.

You see I'm merely building up to the renewal of my writing phase, a prologue of sorts trying to fill in a gaping hole in what I initially meant to be my chronicle more than anything else. I feel compelled to start anew, afresh, continuing my chronicle in another  private domain, my readers( if any ;) ) chosen by me. And hence, The Twenty First Birth.

I send up a prayer, hoping that this is more lasting effort than the last, a chronicle that continues, as I reach the end of the first of the innumerable efforts I must make, building a sense of worth.

(Lyrics courtsey John Denver.)