The Grey Sky

The sky gets murky every afternoon these days. A few heavy, grey clouds appear out of nowhere; stay for an hour or two and then disappear into nothingness. Rainfall has been scarce in our part of the world this summer. It is hot, humid, and quite difficult to breathe with two masks on! Yes, the virus is still managing to find hosts here on top of everything else! It turns out, our personal-grey-clouds, unfortunately, are not great at pulling off disappearing acts – they have been here for quite some time now.

I am beginning to lose sight of the bigger picture. With so much going on, and nothing going on at the same time, the void is becoming difficult to avoid. It had begun as fear for life, not particularly your own, but of those you love, but has now turned into a strange, apathetic feeling. You want to rid yourself of such a feeling, but you are not quite sure what that entails. Maybe we already had enough on our plates, and now the contents are spilling over. Maybe we are not giving ourselves enough credit for trying to go on despite the raging pandemic. When they say, “there are worse ways to live,” they forget that this, if not the worst, is not an easy way to live either! There are days that I cannot recall at all, and I have heard a few people say that this had been happening to them too. When all you can remember is: being sick, hearing about people getting sick or dying, looking after people getting sick, sanitising desktops, doorknobs, sweating through masks, canceling plans to go out, and working twice as hard as before (because the workload keeps on increasing), the individual days do not matter! I can feel myself passing through time, which for once, seems to be standing still.

You can pick up the broken pieces with an intent to rebuild only when the storm is over, but how do those with perpetually stormy skies find it in their hearts to keep going on against the winds? How can people manage to hold on to hope even when the cloudy skies above their heads forget to rain? I think I have not made peace with the altered circumstances yet. Is this realisation enough for now? I am sure it is not. I have to do better to feel better! I hope I get there. I hope we all do.

“Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?”
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World