Elbow Room

She laughs like its her last time. Pouncing on every opportunity. Sometimes a little too hard. A little too gayly. Hugging it tight like a favourite cousin you're afraid you wont see for a long time.

She just surrenders, as if doped. Careless, mindless, free. As if she owes no one nothing and no one owes her nothing. Her playlist has undergone a drastic change. She likes the head-banging rock music suddenly or at least it likes her. It has the same numbing effect like a hot water bath, the excess in this case not being really hot water but really loud noise.

It doesnt mean she is never sad. You could have a sense of humour, take yourself less seriously, eat a lot of chocolates and still be sad. It seems like she is unwittingly sad most of the time. You would think it was better than being consciously sad, but it isn't really. Its like you've hurt you're knee but you don't know it. You keep limping, confused but indifferent for it doesn't hurt. And in the backdrop, that invisible wound, like termite is gnawing at your knee making it hollow from within—till the day you cant walk anymore.


She wakes up in the morning with another strange dream. She sees she is living by the sea in a shack like one you may imagine painted on a cover of a children's novel. The sea a deep azure blue, coiling tides at the shore, a little girl with torn clothes and a dark complexion, sitting with her hand around her dog on the beach, watching the waves come and go. She dreams she is that girl. And a wave as huge as a Tsunami rises like a monster, asleep for a hundred years, from the bottom of the sea, and destroys her little hut and everything in it. As the tide rises like a massive wall in front of her, she rushes back to her shack, and watches frozen with fear from a round tear in a curtain. Her eye round and animated from the whole, like a cartoon character's with curved lashes, that makes a magical sound as it blinks.

And what does she see?? All the aquatic life and fishes and sea animals, in the this fantastic wonderwall rising along with the water. But what she sees most clearly is an octopus. Suddenly she is on a log of wood floating on the sea and the octopus is hazily around somewhere. She is afraid of the huge octopus with its many tentacles more than the water itself. It has a face, that octopus. She could clearly see it. Like King Triton; yes, Little Mermaid's father with the trident in hand! But evil and angry!



And as is customary in dreams, she is suddenly eddied into another place totally unconnected. She is in her bathroom now! With...him! Saying her last goodbyes, hurriedly, for the sense of urgency and danger created by the Tsunami hasn't altered with the change of scenes. She hugs him, cries, kisses him, and there's somebody at the half-open door, knocking...Probably its her brother...

And then, it dwindles from memory. A mass of fog. Thats all she remembers.

Sitting in office, intrigued no end by her strange strange dreams, she searches what her dream means, if anything, because you know, not every dream has to mean anything. What she finds is this:

To see an octopus in your dream, means that you are entangled in some difficult matter. Your judgment is being clouded. Alternatively, the octopus indicates that you are overly possessive and maybe too clingy in a relationship.

To dream that you are in the bathroom, relates to your instinctual urges. You may be experiencing some burdens/feelings and need to "relieve yourself". Alternatively, a bathroom symbolizes purification and self-renewal. You need to cleanse yourself, both emotionally and psychologically.

She finds it funny,and useless. A Dream Bathroom to "relieve yourself" of psychological burdens? Merlin's Beard!

Immediately after she wakes up from this dream, she is still somewhat dotty. Still in bed with her head in her hands, she sits with her mobile in her lap. A few messages blink on the screen from last night. She doesn't open them just yet. She still hasn't completely stopped sleeping. Odds are she is still dreaming a little. With one foot in her dream, and the other in reality, she tries to take a stance. She is unsure where she wants NOT to be. Its 8 am, she has a faint clue that she is late for work. In such a precarious situation, her phone beeps a new message. And its him. She knows she would rather go back to sleep.

Confused, sleepy and disoriented she staggers to the bathroom. About to close the door of her room behind her, her hand comes between the door as it closes. Aaaaaaaaaaah. She totters to the dressing room. After about thirty seconds, her finger bursts with pain like an atom bomb. And right there, she begins to cry. Her brother and parents are fast asleep in adjoining rooms. And she begins to cry. Cry, as if everything in her life is wrong because she caught her finger in the door. There goes her sense of humour and everything happy or funny or right in her life! Because she caught her finger in the goddamned door!

Only she felt like in crying about the finger, she was really crying for the hurt knee which hadn't really begin to hurt yet.