A Certain Type of Sadness
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There’s a certain type of sadness you fear in those you love. A sadness you can’t name, can’t put your finger on, can’t even properly describe. It comes out in flickers of petty, domestic discontent. The tele-soaps have all got it wrong. All those grand conspiracies, lofty heartbreaks come with an end-goal. Unhappy homes are made of smaller stuff- things misplaced, little forgettings, rotten fruits in the refrigerator, an unclicked switch, a harmless question. Even a shared anecdote. For a while, I have been watching. Counting. What breaks the ceasefire? What disrupts the peace? It is, as the saying goes, always the little things.
Truth is, nobody cares about the little things. The little things only reveal an absence. Most of human history isn’t about momentous matters, and thereby lies the discontent. There are no great goals for most of us, so we find our goals in others. A leader, a hero, a loved one. We are told to be a certain way, do certain things, love and live. Mostly, that keeps us distracted. Sometimes we love so well that it is all we do. And our loved ones become our momentous matters. And it is beautiful and glorious and blessed most of the times. But then the sadness that can’t be named creeps in and we complain without knowing why. We lash out. We bristle at contact. We are so, so weary. One expects life to be beautiful after all this time. We’ve done all we were told to do. We’ve played by the rules, paid our dues. We deserve our rewards, do we not? But nothing goes one’s way and it’s exhausting and pointless and drab. We despair, forget, laugh and repeat. And circles and circles and circles.
We all have our own realms of hell. Some of us are good at putting on masks. Some of us are falling apart. And some of us are walking on egg-shells, tip-toeing on glass, trying to hide from the sadness we can feel radiating from those we love. A certain type of sadness that weighs on your heart till you’re drowning in deep sea with a mountain round your neck. And all you’ve ever wanted is a little song and air to breathe so you could forget briefly your lack of a sky. But every time you inhale, you can feel your lungs shrink a little bit more, the sadness of others enveloping the space around your heart, sadness that drains into you like ink into a sponge, making you desperately wish for a little lonely room.
Then you wish you could have been a little indifferent. That you cared a little less. Or wear a wall of insulation. Brush off the petty hurts that happen every day.
The peculiar sadness snakes around you, like a guilty worm boring away at your soul, and you wonder if you have failed at being someone’s momentous matter. And you wish, just this once that you could just be you. The sadness you cannot name breaks your heart.
There is a certain kind of sadness that you cannot name. A persistent longing for the unknown that won’t let you be. A certain strain of melancholia that you can’t put into words, shape into song or explain with a diagram. You pick the pen but it only makes lines and scrawls against the white- if there’s a language for that, it hasn’t yet been discovered. All you want is to be someone else at someplace else. Somewhere were magic happens.
You are waiting for a door to open somewhere, like a magic wardrobe leading you to your own Narnia. And you don’t want to be the promised one. You don’t want to be warrior queen. All you want is a patch of green from your window that is utterly, completely attuned to your music. You want a world where there are music and lyrics for the song you haven’t been able to find yet. You want a pen that knows what you seek before you do- a story that is yours.
There’s a certain kind of sadness that we recognize in the stories we tell ourselves- born of a longing for the sky, and a love for the earth. And we can’t have both at the same time. Yet we want both at the same time. We want it all- sky and earth, moon and sun, sea and snow- never together, always calling. And this is all our glory. This is our inevitable tragedy. A certain sadness built of uncertain joys.
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