Elbow Room

She says with a sense of urgency to me, 'Settle down. I can only take so much. I can only hold on so long.' Makes me want to delay more. So she can take it for some more time, so she stays for some more time. I cannot leave her alone. She, who takes care of everyone, how will she survive without that trope? Without that next short-term goal. Because thats all she has. A lease, which she has assigned to herself, a lease not of life but of perseverance -- it keeps renewing itself. She thinks she is indispensable just for me. Even then she thinks i can well live my new life without her. What about the others who demand not only perseverance but her selfless unconditional nurture. They need her more than she realizes. Or she thinks she has set the little boats afloat to their rightful streams--and thats where her duties end. They must maneuver the waters themselves--she has equipped them well for that.

What about her? Where will she go? 'In solitude, silence... in the shadows' she says with a wry smirk, belittling her self or may be for the first time giving her self a substantial thought. I dont take her seriously. I mock her plans with my blunt logical questions, trying to convey how dramatic and unreal she sounds to me--hiding my ignorant fear that she might carry her plans out, at the same time. She knows that i'm not taking her seriously, that i think she is merely reacting to the immediate dispute thats occurred. She does not try to make me believe her plans are real. That she has been so troubled and consistently unhappy and dissatisfied that she will actually have the courage to follow them through. She tells me she has no reservations of family or society. That the pain is too much in its slow and steady grip that by the time I settle down it will have mastered her and she will finally be able to free herself from the stifling perseverance.

i think of those empty lonely eyes as i lie in the dark beside her, uneasy more with the closeness than with the gulf between us. Soon I will throw myself in the automatonlike routine of tomorrow and get sucked in like a card in the ATM machine-- till im reminded of it the next time...