The Illusion

Maya put on her usual mask and walked out the door. Sighing, she told herself, "Remember to smile. It always works." And she walked on, head held high, and soul weighed down, but face smiling. Acting always requires rehearsal. And no matter how many times Maya acted out the role she gave herself in life, there was always some amount of anxiety in her, before she went about her day, resulting from the fear that she wouldn't do a convincing enough act. 

The curtains were drawn open and the show began as soon as she met her friends. Maya was masked, existing as her character and not herself. And just as though they were watching a movie, with actors so good. you forget that the characters they play (and you relate to) are not real, Maya's friends got caught in her charade, buying every minute of her act without paying for a ticket to watch her perform. And she went about her day, smiling and laughing, existing as the happy person everyone knew her to be.  She cracked jokes and laughed at them, and continued to smile the smile that touched everyone's hearts.

But, beneath that mask,

And as she is pulled from the wreckage of her silent reverie, for a moment, even she believes she is happy. For a moment, she really is. Then the walls she built come crashing down, but the crash down on her - suffocating, constricting,  holding her close to her own wreckage. As she comes closer to the scars of her weary soul, she becomes a beautiful mess - with her imperfection giving her strength. Her soul has more power than the damage caused to it.  And slowly, the force of her burning, passionate soul takes over; the mess that is left behind, leaves her just beautiful. And she is freed.

I wrote this because a friend sent me the picture and knew I wanted to write something around it. I usually don't give characters names, but the name Maya seemed right and then I found out that it means illusion. Maybe it's why I didn't use her name after the illusion broke.

I think we all live charades, trying to make people see what we want them to see. Some people see beyond our masks, and even if they don't, the strength that the we have to heal ourselves, is something so magical, so beautiful, that we can't help be anything but. 

Where the Heart Lies

Before I begin, my sincerest apologies to the few (?) of you who read my blog because I've been terribly unfaithful to it. There were so many things I wanted to write about, but somehow I never felt I'd do any of it justice. Although I am still slightly apprehensive of being able to meet my standards of writing, I thought I'd write about something that has been finding its way into my thoughts off late.

I always thought I was sure what 'home' meant. I always associated it to the physical place of my house in Chennai and the memories I had with it. When I first moved to the house, I practically abhorred it – mostly because I was terrified of it. It was a lot bigger than the apartment I used to live in, so I couldn't move from one room to another without having someone with me. Soon enough, I got comfortable with the ground floor but going upstairs scared the living daylights out of me, especially when it wasn't daylight. But then, since I had to live there, I got over that fear too and moved on to being scared of staying home alone. But of course, that went away eventually and I started waiting to have the house to myself. Having literally grown up with the house, it's hard to not call it home.

Yet, home is a concept that tends to get distorted when you're away from it. It starts to mean a lot more to you, and then suddenly not matter as much. At least, that happened with me. While I stayed there, 'home' was where I lived – where I had my own room, did my own thing, slept on my own bed. But when I left, home was where I felt I belonged – the place I went back to during holidays without thinking that it would be dreadful to not leave it for the entire vacation (instead, preferring to stay there the entire time in spite of the lack of activity that would ensue), where I went to meet people I had known for 14 years and more, where I ate my mother's rasam, ran up and down the stairs, and revelled in the comfortable feeling of familiarity. It was the place I vehemently declared was better than Bangalore because it was home.

But, as I said, home is a feeling that gets distorted; and while distance initially makes the heart grow fonder, 'home' being out of sight slowly starts to nudge it out of mind. I realised that apart from the house, my school and the beach, and the increasingly distant feeling of familiarity, home  had started to have less significance to me the longer I stayed away from it. The people I had known for more than half my life, became less known to me as they moved on in their own lives; as the people I came to know a year ago started becoming easier to relate to. It's natural, I suppose, to be more in touch with what is around you, but it is also rather disconcerting to suddenly find strange what was once familiar.

Suddenly, I found myself wanting to go back to college, to the people I just met, to the place I'd stayed in for a year; wanting to leave everything that I had known and lived with for all my life. It isn't even that I loved Chennai any less, I just began to love Bangalore more. Since most of the people I was close to from school weren't even in Chennai any more, being physically present there didn't matter as much. When I was there, I longed to meet my non-Chennai friends, and when I wasn't in Chennai, I missed the place and the people. So, as I fluctuated between succeeding and failing at keeping in touch with my friends, everywhere, I started to realise that wherever I was, there were always people and places that weren't with me, that I constantly missed.

While I will still call Chennai 'home', it is mostly out of habit and the notion that longevity is directly related to familiarity, and although the city will always have a special place in my heart, home  has seized to be a place to me. Instead, it is a constantly evolving, moving feeling that has nothing to do with familiarity or physical presence. Simply a feeling that is with me as long as I am happy. Whoever said that home is where the heart lies, spoke truer words than they thought they did, because as Sarah Dessen said, “Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.”