T.S Eliot famously wrote that "April is the cruelest month" - as a young student, one is automatically taught to recognise the irony of it - for isn't April the beginning of spring, all that is good and beautiful? Representing hope or even I dare say the buds of love?
But, I know now why April is the cruelest month. Just as, December is my cruelest month. It is when you are meant to be happy but cannot be - that happiness becomes cruelty.
I have not written in a while, because I have always promised myself this - if I write, I must be honest. And, the month has been too quietly painful, that all I could do was tell myself "do not feel".
And so, my birthday passed.
There was no miracles. A flock of birds did not arrive at my windowsill and burst into song. The dead did not come back alive. I had known this since I was twenty - there is no miracle in growing older. You find your own beauty and claim them as your own miracles.
Maybe the miracle lies in never ceasing to believe that life is worth living - even if that belief has to defy death itself.
But, still some part of me, found that little bit of drive left to write, and so I shall share this with you, with the hope that slowly one finds a way to transfigure pain:
Photography Credits: Kelvin Koh (Lightedpixels)
Just a while ago, at the ridiculously busy junction around work, where you have to cross two streets just to get to the other side of the road, I watched an old man and old lady cross the road. The old lady's back was hunched and she was leaning completely on her husband for support. The old man, supporting her, walked calmly in a straight line. They made their own slow rhythm across the road - neither heeding the crowd bypassing them or the blinkering green man.
I laughed then, because they were so clearly ahead of us. Farther than we would ever be. If growing older was like that, then time please wait for me.
