Monday, August 23, 2004

vent

Assuming your pain is greater than anyone else's by default, assuming that nobody else could understand your superior pain or suffering, looking down upon anyone else that doesn't 'get' your particular brand of pain is snobbery in itself, not to mention unfair. I say this because I have checked myself often this past week looking down upon 'the happy ones', i.e. the ones with a normal, relatively happy life, at least in my eyes. I look at them, not just with disdain, although I am guilty of that, and not just a feeling of some warped superiority, as if my own misery serves as a crucible through which I emerge better than another, although that's been there too, I am ashamed to say. Most of all, though, I look at them with a mixture of jealousy and regret. Jealousy, it's obvious, because I can never be like them. Regret because I almost was. It was all so close, this life of sensations, not thoughts, that I could have, had I realized what was to come, reached out and grabbed it and bottled it up in a jar and hidden it away in some lonely cupboard, never to let it go. As it is, I ended up doing that anyway, but now only to take it out of that lonely cupboard to stare wistfully at, them put back away. It can never be mine.

Perhaps, in the first grade, I had a chance, I could have been among them. One of the happy faces I see on Orkut everyday that seem so familiar, but a lifetime apart from me. By second grade, the proverbial deal was sealed. I was to be an outsider for always, as resolutely as if it was branded on my forehead. There was no going back.

But then I stray from my original point. But then who cares?

Misha at Monday, August 23, 2004

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