Grief can do a lot to a person, specially when it is unrecognized.
Having grown up in a family which doesn’t openly acknowledge or talk about feelings with the promise of the warmth of company, I’ve seen and observed the conflict between life and emotions very often.
I’ve seen my father going on with his life, as normally as he usually would, with utmost sadness drooping his shoulders slightly, enough to hide it from the ones who do not attempt to fight the barriers he has carelessly built around himself. I’ve seen my grandmothers mourning for barely a day before adorning the same homely smiles on their faces, only they’re not as bright and warm as the ones I’m accustomed to (as if even the warmth knows where it is truly required). I’ve seen my mother express the pits of her darkness in controlled, guarded words, her eyes an empty storm before they resort back to their usual regard.
There are days when their shields fall and collide with the wet earth, days when they fall back on the thrones their backs hadn’t yet touched, days when in their light sunshine materializes a storm full of everything they had tried to suppress, and I watch as they fight it, helplessly, as they shut it away again, already dreading its inevitable return in the process because they’re too scared, too lost to accept it.
It becomes a cycle, really- chirpy evenings of March turned to flashes of lightening in the silence of August turned to terribly dark and brutally cold nights of late December turned to dimmed spring and it goes on and on until even the spring loses its soul, the lightening roars louder and the nights freeze even the warmest of fires.
How easily we switch on the lights to kill the darkness outside, how easily we switch off our own light to plunge deeper into the darkness inside.
