Kafkaesque

"I think her father died! Can you confirm?"

I was comfortably sitting in the chair of this tea shop, smoking away the jolly good health of my lungs while being surrounded by friends laughing at the stupidest of jokes, while for a moment, that sudden text took me on the most extensive guilt trip of my life. I already knew this was a possibility when she had let me know about her father being ill and that only our prayers might do him better than actual medicine. But, as always, like the inconsiderate human being I am, when she needed me the most, I slacked off and let my attractions towards momentary pleasures get the best of me. It is not like my presence there could have saved his life, which is not important. At Least what it could have done is given her some mental support, which sometimes is the only thing a human needs to hold on to.

Devoid of all reality, she stood there, like a zombie, disconnected from everything! An elegant girl she is! Always well kept, not a strand of misplaced hair! But that was not at all what she looked like then! As if a storm had blown over, and when it did, she was standing in a vast open field! I grabbed her hand in that quiet corner of the hospital to try and take away even the smallest fraction of pain she was enduring with the warmth of my palm! It worked in reverse! In a scary fashion, she rejected the comfort I offered her! Instead, I myself got drowned in a sea of immeasurable sorrow!

When they brought his cold corpse to the cemetery, the grave and the rest of the necessary things were already taken care of! The smell of agarwood, everyone in whites, sets of eyes that have lost their ability to produce tears momentarily, procedures with which I am a little too familiar! I have tasted the metal in my mouth, before, at such events of misfortune!

One of my teachers once said, "the hardest part of being in a community is when the time of letting some of your decorated members go draws nearer, but letting go is all we can do"! He stood up there on the mantle, looked right at us, and in an expressionless manner that is perceivable in a dead squirrel and in a cold voice, he threw those words at us! This was when a professor of ours died in a road accident. And throughout my life, I have seen many dead squirrels say similar things on similar occasions! Along with, "this is only natural", "they are in a better place," and vice versa. But the logic behind death being natural, for some reason, always seems to escape me.

I understand that the universe gradually moves on towards entropy from stability, and decay is only part of it! And so, death is natural! But why? I had scratched and clawed out my hair night after night, trying to make sense of this ugly phenomenon when my own sister died! A loss Which had burst my bubble about how one day I, too, was going to lose everyone I dearly adore! But the question remained! I have seen coping mechanisms in their roughest form and could not understand them! I have seen people make promises to their loved ones saying they couldn't possibly live without one another, but when one of them died, it took them only a few months to get back to normal. Which, for me too, is true! But why?

I know very well that the paragraphs I wrote above make me look immature, foolish, and sentimental. But truly, I can't make sense of death. Take the girl, for example. Once the pain of losing her father, who brought candies for her every day when he came through the door, sets in and she realizes that he is now wiped out of existence, she will make her peace with it. No longer she will cry or no longer she will wait thinking, "There! There is my father and his smile full of love" and wait while looking at the door like that forever little girl deep inside her!

I had heard someone make this analogy once when asked how he can say that there is nothing called the afterlife, where he said, "Take a good movie for an example! Like how you know you will die, you already know how it will end, or let's say I gave you the spoilers! Then, what are the chances that you'll stop watching the movie? In that case, life too is similar, enjoy it while you can!". This made so much sense to me that whenever I saw a friend or somebody I know neck deep in depression, I used it, and most of the time, it miraculously had worked! But now, for me, it is not working anymore! You can replay that movie again and again, but you can not relive your life! We have 105 billion dead to prove that fact! But, if that is our purpose, our destiny, only to die one day while there is nothing but an empty void full of eerie darkness on the other side waiting for us, then what is the point?

_{Smoking is a bad habit, I do not want to promote smoking in any way whatsoever}