After The Difficulties

Your eyes opened while you were trying to close them. They felt like they were burning. Closing them did not help. It did make the pain of blinking go away... so you told yourself. But that speaking to yourself hurt too. You tried to remember: when did this begin? Remembering hurt the worst, but you had to get to the root of it (you wondered why!). Did it start in your sleep? Could sleep have told you about it in your sleep? Did you forget that? You had to go back to sleep to know, but this pain would not let you do that. So, you got out of bed.

You kept trying to recall what had happened. Past days and nights, hours and minutes past, all swirled back. Your eyes grew foggy with their swirling clouds -- it stung. It was as if you had touched the hot lid of a pot on the stove. You could hear something swirling inside the pot through the lid and wanted to smell its vapours to know it. But you had burnt yourself in getting the lid off. Why did you have to take the lid off, you asked yourself. You could see the swirling inside through its vapours... was that not enough to know it? Why did you have to know it at all? The sting pierced again. You could not keep asking yourself things; it was a trap. You put your slippers on; you had to stop trying to ask yourself to remember. So, you got out of your house.

You walked on the street trying to forget the pain of the sting. You almost brushed against someone. The sting hit again. You now began to calculate your route in advance to avoid such mishaps. You soon realised it was impossible to calculate in advance; you could not calculate the movement of others. All you could do was evade others. But how could you evade when no one was coming toward you? You wanted to evade the ripple one makes through the air while walking. That ripple felt like the buzz of a wasp that circles and follows you incessantly for something you do not have. You try and swat the wasp away, fearful of its sting. Through that fear, you begin to feel the sting of the wasp even without the stinging. Those ripples in the air of people walking past you felt like that sting which has not pricked. The fear of the circling wasp's sting had transformed into the fear of the sting of the air rippling around you. You stopped walking and sat down on a bench by the street to stop the ripples. But it felt like you were back in bed with all the pain. You got up from the bench. You rushed to the bus stop in front before anyone could walk past you. You waited for the first bus with another person at the bus stop. And you got on the first bus.

You did not hear the buzz of the air that the bus rippled through outside. You could only see the street rush by through the closed doors and windows of the bus. The people in the bus were not moving. You did not feel the piercing pain any more; the sting seemed to have retired in the stillness of the zipping bus. The movement of people's breaths did make the air very bitter to taste, but your brushes against people did not sting. The bus suddenly screeched to a halt and someone put a hand on your shoulder to balance. You began forming the first words to speak to that someone. The person looked at you, smiled, and rushed off the bus as if in a fit of anguish and joy. It tasted like something you eat too much of because it was tasty and because you were hungry. You remember the delight of eating it even as you feel nauseated. Your warm blood was going to burst through one of your veins; your temperature had risen. You needed to be in the rippling air to cool your temperature. You left the bus at the next stop. And you got into a large park.

You heard the buses zip by on the street as you walked in the park. You heard the wind make ominous sounds through the bushes and the trees in the park. You let the wind pierce through you because it cooled you. You endured its sting for the coolness it lent. You stepped off the paved walkways and started walking on the grass. You heard the grass softly cracking beneath your feet. The cracking grew louder and you began to feel the weight of your feet. You felt exhausted like someone who looks over a cliff and feels exhilarated and exhausted by the depth of the fall, but keeps looking on, unable to judge the taste of this mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration. You kept walking on and reached a pool. You looked at the sparrows drinking from the pool. You took off your slippers. And you got into the pool.

The pool was deep enough. It was beginning to drown you. It was also beginning to cool you warmly. It sucked you in and made you flap about to maintain balance. It made you gulp water as you went down looking to plant your feet on the ground. It made you gasp when you resurfaced to catch your breath. Its sharp reeds scratched you and its reefs bruised you. It made you drown when you breathed too much air in and it let you breathe when you had had too much water to gulp. It gradually taught you how to float on the surface. It trained you to remember and forget the stinging as you floated with your bruises and scratches.

You were still enough to let the sparrows drink loudly from the pool. And you got into a sleep.