A few nights ago I read the diary I kept when I was a teenager and I experienced a tremendous session of hysterical laughters. It's useless to mention that I found all the clichés specific to young ages (12-16): secret alphabets, schizoid moods (I quote: "I am the saddest person in this world, because X doesn't love me. Oh, my mom is going to buy me a fur cap. I am happy, happy.", miserable quotes, songs lyrics and lots of drawn hearts and incredible amounts of exclamation and question marks.
Later a sort of nostalgia hit me and I realized I was laughing because in the long process of growing up (now speedily approaching an age when I was supposed to have myself a teenage kid) I lost my innocence and the strength to reveal my feelings exactly as they were. I forgot the black and white expressions and I simmered in seas of gray tones. I forgot the pureness of writing down exactly what you feel, because it's sort of ridiculous. Mature women are supposed to be cynical or at least to show some self-confidence and a patrician resignation.
Then I decided I need to learn again to play and to my disgrace and awe I chose "poetry". For fun. Twitter style. The reaction of people was puzzling. Everybody encouraged me and they seemed highly enchanted by my little "pearls". That's why I decided to post them here,too for the record. As a back-up.
"I wrote your name on each and every stone/Then each and every step hurt my bare feet."
"I chained my words for you inside my battered heart/As you considered them too pungently tart."
"I carved your far away features in the trees bark/And then the leaves were smiling and blinking at me."
"I buried your unspoken touches deep down my body/And so I learned the howling yearning."
"Sweet surrender was my candid tribute/So why you trample it and painfully contribute?"
"Humbly my soul didn't ask you for the ticket when you came in/But why did you have to plunder it when everything was free?"
"You are smooth, and clean and green/Lemon flavored gelatin." - ode to my dish cleaner in a jingle style. :P
"I turned my eyes to you expecting a miracle/To find the wind solacing your faded wrinkle."
"Fearless and fair maiden shelter thy eyes/For thy king's heart is melting into ice."
Conclusion? Playing with words brings back pieces of genuine smiles from old times when I was not afraid to say what I was going through. Ridiculous? Maybe. But the catharsis effect deserves all the efforts and all the grins.
13 comments:
Nothing ridiculous about it.. keep on writing, I love your wordstrings... (esp. the ode to your dish cleaner :p)
You are a very special soul Mona, stay true to yourself whatever happens...
Leia dear... I intend to continue this "search" with words until it becomes a second nature. Most probably this will happen when I am an old lady, stretching on a beach, wearing orange lipstick, a big hat with ribbons and sipping a cocktail. :P
and why do you think I write? ;-)
@Diana then...heck...let the words flow in any form. :P
Oh I write when it gets too much to keep inside and that happens a lot. Poems are good, i started writing from there and i keep going back to them.
Stay with your muse :)
N
I don't quite agree that you should stop writing whatever you feel. In a very recent venture after I moved to Canberra, I have started writing my personal thoughts (all of that I feel) in a e-diary, which is just a simple text file on my De...sktop. Bits of it is quite "censored", or just being plain desperate and feelings which you probably don't want anyone else but yourself to know, but they are also true. So keep writing that diary of yours. Someday, like you found out, they will make you smile/laugh. Someday, we might just need something to laugh about and why not allow the self to cheer up the self! Cheers!
@N Well, you know very well that I wrote, I write and I will write... The poetry thing though has always been avoided because of the innerent critic in me (created by the studies I made). I could accept the idea of me being a novel or a short story writter, but never me trying the sacred poetry.
I dont know who is my muse actually. I am confused. :P
@Amit I do have a diary, Twitter. :P Sometimes the 140 characters limitation forces me to be kind of abstract, but if I revisit old tweets from last year for example I remember exactly the day, the events, and most important, the feelings. It's just that Twitter diary imposes you to be too criptic and too abstract many a times. Now with the little poems I dont feel like whining in public. :P
And thanks a lot for your words. Really appreciate them! :)
wat nobody tells us wen we r a teenager is that, "life is not to be taken THIS seriously!" 'cos at that time, though we appear nonchalant about things, we r actually fretting about every damn thing!!! n then wen we grow-up we simultaneously laugh at our stupidities n crave to b doing them again :)
p.s. interestingly, i too was having a trip down memory lane last night as two or three super-duper hit movies from my teenage years were on the tv channels. i thought i'll write about it n post on d blog. maybe after commenting here, i will :)
@Adee I was actually told to cool down, as later I would smile remembering the young days, but I did not believe such things, as you know how stubborn teenagers are. They consider they know better and nobody is good enough to understand them.
I wish though... people insisted more on this, as I realized I programmed myself for some things that followed and marked my entire life.
Anyway, waiting again for your Delhi dreams. :)
and i, for ur next straight from the heart post :)
I was slow to get around to reading this and that means I've had less time to savor the deep richness of the words you use. Well done.
@Gordon Oh, I myself move very, very slow as you can see. LOL Thank you for appreciations as always. If I bring a smile or even a smirk on somebody's face I am happy. :P
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