POURING IT OUT TO STAY UNSHATTERED

Chinese Virus led me being holed-up all alone in a tiny apartment, nearly 3,000 kms away from my wife and two daughters, that too having crash landed from a high-flying corporate job!
As the sun would descend, the darkness would engulf me. I would cry, every other day. Talking to someone over phone would make me cry even more. How many people, how many times and for how long could I call and talk, anyway. The wanting-to-be-a-journalist and a poet in me, in my school days, which had all vanished with the corporate rat-race and overwhelmed by the illusions of grandeur, started breaking-through like a single ray of faint but stubborn Sunlight from behind a sky full of darkest of clouds. I wrote a five-verse poem titled, ‘When is it really dark’!
Darkness, Despair, Death…I was overwhelmed. I wrote a two-verse poem, ‘Die to be alive’. As I wrote, I could share the out-pouring, no not with the family, but with my select group of childhood friends. Writing itself was cathartic at one level. Chatting about the writing individually and with the group as a whole, via texting kept me meaningfully engaged.

Painfully, gradually and yet surely, I felt like my school-days self. It was like I thinking about myself as I was in one of my happiest phases of life! Suddenly the darkest of dark clouds weren’t as dark. There was so much text from my group of childhood friends, I started appreciating every message I started reading more, mostly to pick up words, terms and ideas to write. I wrote more. I read more. I shared more. Discussions now, were more around the writing and not so much about the miseries behind it. Gradually, the focus had shifted.
While I was about to break out of my isolation, back to be with my family, something I penned down got published, commiserations poured in. All my stress, desperation and miseries were not only mine now. There were thousands of others, who shared the same! A virtual brotherhood with many who were going through similar strife, evolved. All that was inside, was now out. I felt lighter. Pari passu, many appreciated the writing itself. Creativity, felicity with words & phrases, ability to turn emotions into moving expressions! I also felt I wasn’t so worthless, after all!