Chapter: 11

COMFORTABLY NUMB
26th January 2004 – 26th January 2008

How do you define pain? I am sure you must have felt it at some point of time in you lives. You stand there Numb, Motionless, Away from the realities of this world. Momentarily you come back, you try to breathe, you try to feel, you try to react but you can’t, It’s like as if someone is smothering you, pulling you deep down inside a never ending chasm. Next comes the long silence which hurts you even more followed by a shriek inside your mind. You try to close your eyes, you want to cry, you want to scream in agony. Next moment you find yourself laughing, laughing so intensely that you start to tremble. Oh lord, is this a bad dream, am I hallucinating. You want to say something but the sound doesn’t come out. You continue laughing; your whole life starts running like a movie in front of you. You want to go back in time, you want to rewind the movie but you can’t move. Dead Silence and then it comes out, your first tear, and then next moment you find yourself lying on the floor howling, screaming, and bawling incessantly. It’s like a volcano which just erupted; everything which was stuck inside now finds a way out. And then it’s a blackout.

The day after the storm appears so peaceful as if nothing had happened. You begin to doubt if at all there was any storm or was it just an illusion, a nightmare maybe. You feel relaxed but wait something is missing. Did it really happen? Did she really go? Where am I?
I went to bed again thinking I am still watching a dream, pretty real though. I woke up in evening next, still something is missing. Oh lord, please I am not really strong, I am just a poor kid, don’t do this to me. The bad feeling keeps sinking inside; the catharsis was not strong enough to keep it out. It chokes your throat, it submerges your heart. Oh lord, please don’t do this to me. I am no sinner, I never meant to do any harm, you know I had true intentions. I kept on repeating these lines but she didn’t come back. It took me 3 days to come out of my home. I started behaving like a zombie, who has no life, no purpose. I used to stay in silence for so long that it started scaring me. I kept on waiting for her call, thinking she would definitely come back. But it was as if she completely forgot my existence. All the good things which we shared, all the trust we built, all the magic which existed, everything went away. It was as if only I remembered all the things and everybody else just didn’t remember anything. They were behaving as if nothing happened at all. It was like all those 8 months which we two shared was a dream and this was the actual reality. How quickly some people can move on with their lives as if nothing happened yesterday and there are some who just hold onto the point at which the separation occurred.

After these four years, I knew I had become Comfortable Numb. I allowed the pain, memories, to settle down. Infact they were so deep that no Catharsis was strong enough to push them out of my body. I needed something strong, some powerful intervention which can heal these deep wounds and I prayed to God to take my soul to purgatory so that in his divine presence, it could be rinsed of all the sins committed by me.