Hello everybody, so it’s August and we’re still in a health crisis limbo, and I thought that maybe I could go back to writing short fiction things again. 😅

Anyway, here’s one that I’ve been trying to make sense of, the past weeks. Haha. It may have been inspired by true events, and some may have been parts of my wishful thinking, you just go figure. Haha.

Here goes.

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“Can I just say that it’s always almost difficult to navigate between so many things, and if anything, this point in time that we are in, has transformed our fears into warped ghouls and monsters and demons that we never knew existed in our heads.

And they are an awful lot up there, really, competing for our limitedness, and sometimes, the easiest way to face them is, although straight on but with both hands up. Wishing we could do so many things else, despite being hostage to them, inside our wretched inner darknesses that come in varying hues.”

She wrote, as she closed her heavy eyes, and sifted through the endless circles inside her head that was heavier by the day.

She realized how difficult it was to be actually very limited. A year ago, she reveled in the fact that she had her own life in her own hands, and she had limitless options and choices and opportunities.

Now, the only choices available, it seemed, were to either survive or perish. It was like war and it was a complex thing to grasp, amid technology. Just when we all thought we had been living our best lives in the history of the world.

But now, there’s only longing and forbearance and an endless test to our life resolve, our patience, and our ability to adapt and cope, and yeah, our wills to survive.

Now there’s only yearning for space and time,
for presence and touch,
for love,
for assurances,
and for hope that we’ll all get to fill the gaping holes that the endless days have cruelly carved in each of our own lives.

That’s how it feels.

There seems to be a lack somewhere that we cannot seem to find fillers to, and it grows, oh it grows. And it gnaws, oh it gnaws. And we fear it becomes bigger than ourselves, and eventually, far more bigger than the whole world and all of us, all together.

Sigh.

And, god, they never end.

They come, those fears, in many versions— in dreams and nightmares,
in blank faces, and worried eyes,
in hurried walks and shaky hands,
in painfully slow answers to assaulting questions.
In the silence,
in the confusions amid our convoluted realities,
in the lacks and ineptitudes of supposed authorities and institutions,
in the many questions that we do not have answers to– what now, till when,
what can we do?

“But what can we do?”

She wrote again. It was a rhetorical thing that had always encapsulated her post-thinking hours.

“What else can she do?”

She shifted from her seat, and remembered her phone light up for some notifs earlier.

She read through the whole stack of notifs, group chats have never been more alive these days. It’s like everybody was always desperate to connect to people, to groups, or to just about anything, for the fear of being cut off from lifelines of sorts.
Lifelines that are what seems to be the only possible things that make us going right now.

There was a video link from the oldies of the choir group, an inquiry from another group from work, deadlines and things to do for volunteer work, updates from the aunties, memes & jokes & some hot topic about an unfamiliar person who apparently was annoying to all from the college group, a random inquiry from a random person, a continuation of the political discussion in another friend group.

The last two ones, though, being the simplest of them all, reminded her how it was always important to ground and anchor ourselves to the things that actually matter.

One said, “Yaaay, I got the job! Thank you for all the prayers, loves, I miss you all.”

And the other one said “Hey… I love you…”

She closed her eyes, sifted through the endless circles inside her still heavy head, and slowly allowed the whole world to close in on her. It was a moment of surrender, but also a moment of peaceful trust to the hands that stirred the fates of us all.

Perhaps in the heaviness, the universe somehow tells us, it’s alright, let me hold your hand. You’ll get this through.

We will all get this through.

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Stay faithful, my friends.🌻