Scary stuff.

Life is one whirlwind, roller-coaster ride with a baby. Being a first-time mom seems to be even more challenging. You hardly have time to breathe a sigh of relief that the nine long months have come to a happy end, you have several other worries to deal with now, not just, "I hope the baby is safe inside", now it's a potpourri of issues about baby's health, behavior, growth, milestones, your own recovery, nursing, sleep-deprivation and a totally out-of-wac endocrine system!

Gak! I bet a few of you read this post today and decided to maybe wait some more time, say a year or two, before you have kids!

Anyway, baby~r gave me a scare today by deciding to not breathe for a few seconds while crying. That was scary! Scarier than the time when I almost drowned in the local gym pool. The latter had a kind of finality about it, I thought, "Ok, here we go. I guess I am drowing, when does the life-flashing business start? blubb blubb blubb".

The dear husband had cautioned me against swimming past the blue flags and so that's what I did.
I swam till the blue flags and abruptly stopped.

I went down.

And further down.

Only my feet did not touch ground when I thought they would and so I went almost a feet below the water surface and kept bobbing up and down like in a really weird comic routine.

The other time I was really scared was the time I lost my identity after graduating from Bits, Pilani. With a somewhat decent 8.75 GPA, related grade sheets, 10th and 12th report cards, passpost, birthcertificate and cash, I boarded a bus from Pilani to Delhi with a bunch of my friends. Now, I have never been any good at packing suitcases. And since I had everything that defined my four college years in Bits to pack, I did what I could and ended up with thirteen pieces of luggage! One of them was a regal looking suitcase with all the important documents that defined...me. When we got off the bus, I very carefully collected my paraphernalia and got down and started counting them. I counted twelve, recounted and wondered what I was missing. Of course, the suitcase. I looked up and suddenly the bus was gone. With my precious suitcase.

Then, I went a bit crazy. I tried to run behind the bus in traffic and one of my friends stopped me and made me sit down. A couple of my friends even rented an auto to chase the bus but came back because that particular bus was lost in a sea of similar looking buses.

I cried and then cried some more, didn't eat for a day. I called my dad from a pay phone and told him the whole story. When I boarded the Delhi-Chennai TN express, I was still crying and hadn't eaten for more than a day.

And then the magic happened. The train stopped at Baroda maybe? for a few minutes and a stranger boarded my compartment and handed a box of sweets to me. He was my dad's materials-supplier and the best part, he held my suitcase in his hand. My dad had managed to track down the bus in Pilani and to get someone to collect the suitcase and hand it over to his colleague. I was thrilled! He then called my dad on his cell and handed the phone to me. I was too deliriously happy to say anything that made sense at that time. He got off the train just before the bell rang for the train to leave the station.

And then my friends gave me ice cream. Yeah, I know, just like in those movies where things mysteriously appear. I think one of them bought an ice cream for me because I hadn't eaten for a day. That was the yummiest ice cream I have had till now!

Ok enough of scary experiences. I don't want nightmares! Goodnight people!

Tweet

Yes, lucidly written!

That little black box hidden behind layers and layers of sane, white in your head and mine, waiting for the right time to spill its black outside…Do you know what lies in that black box?

Fear.

Cold, dark fear.

Not the kind that you confess to friends and perhaps even laugh about, not the kind that dances for a few uneasy seconds in your mind and drifts away just as easily, but the kind that has an unnerving, churning, wringing grip on your stomach, the kind that fills your mouth with a bitterness that won’t go away no matter how hard you swallow, the kind that nudges you awake from deep sleep and you realize you are sweating and you are scared to open your mouth because you don’t know if you can cry for help…

That kind of fear.

Fear that some of us, the lucky ones, feel only in the middle of the night - when it’s too late to be called night but too dark to see light, when time does not exist and night blends into day.

The unlucky ones? They feel it even in the middle of the day, for a few seconds when the birds seems to have stopped mid-song, when even dogs don’t bark, the walls suddenly close in on them, without warning and then they feel...fear. Just them and the creatures of their imaginations (or perhaps a reality so aberrant, they (we) don’t, can’t even acknowledge its true nature?) – the ugly, putrid, misshapen gnomes, luring them into the dark caves of their own selves, filled with evil thoughts and terrifying accidents, ghosts of the past, secrets that have been entertained but hidden and locked away. But no-one, not you or me can stay lucky for long. Can we? Sooner or later, the dark world of our fears catch up with us, a race with a predetermined result. We still run the race, hoping to outrun the black cloud of our own imprisoned feelings, the what-ifs and hushed thoughts hiding behind the screens of our defenses and then one day, we can no longer run, we can only wait for the cloud to descend, to weaken, to break our spirits…

Perhaps you hear it (if you listen closely) when you are under water, when your feet can no longer touch the bottom, and your face is hidden away from light, when you are in another world, a blue world with the dulcet sounds of water. One moment you see the bubbles in front of you, you are laughing and floating at ease.

And the next moment, perhaps you closed your eyes for a second of rest and everything changes - the sounds die down in a whoosh and it’s as if, the bright blue world turns a nasty, inky black, the warm water turns frigid – the hackles in your neck stand up, your arms and legs flail desperately and then drop down flaccid. You stop struggling because a voice whispers, “Hush now! There is only one way to go!”, until you no longer see the bubbles or the blue, but only feel an uncomfortable creeping sensation...as the swirling black vortex swallows you…down, down, down.

Cold, alone, scared.

That kind of fear.

---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x---x

Blame this little snippet on Lisey's story (not for the weak-hearted) or my little swimming accident. Fear is universal. Real fear lurks just under the surface in all of us, waiting, waiting...have you ever felt real fear?

Tweet