A box of Chocolates

A Circle and a Square - Part 6

Kriti curled up into a fetal position, pulling the yellow quilt from her childhood over her head, the one she saved like a priceless treasure, not letting her mother throw away despite its now tattered edges. In the darkness, left behind by her mother as she switched the lights off on her way out of the room, Kriti could hear her heart beat arrhythmically.

A lot had happened in just one evening. Secrets, she had been oblivious to and would probably have been oblivious to for the rest of her life, had stained everything around her like ominous blood spots. Her mind was like a ping pong ball being smacked in all directions, making it impossible for her to hold on to one emotion. She couldn't deal with the questions coming out of some unknown depths within her, pricking her insides like sharp pins. She wanted to block them out and just lie numb....hoping for them to lie low for a while so she could breathe..

For days she stayed put in her bed, only to get up to go to the toilet. For the first day or two after that evening, her mother came by to chat like other days, as if having completely forgotten the occurring's of the bygone evening. But by the third day, she limited her visits to just bringing in food and taking out half eaten plates. For the most part Kriti remained in a shell, fighting the demons in her head. After a week, the driver was finally sent back to Gurgaon, without her. She took a few days of leave, but once they were over she resumed working from her bed. Having always despised the long hours and the mechanical nature of her job as a software coder, she used to wish she could do something creative and would envy those who could use all five of their senses in their day to day work. But as fate would have it, she was now thankful for the same things that she once loathed. She was glad coding didn't require her to feel anything, that she could be emotionally numb, almost dead and yet continue to deliver at work. In fact her productivity jumped, as she began spending longer and longer hours immersed in work. That way she could avoid interactions with human beings in her vicinity and forget about the demons in her head for a few hours.

But they'd return. They always did - surreptitiously under the blanket of darkness brought by the night.

Outside, her parents and in laws were growing increasingly worried about her mental state. Once again, their son in law had been proven right. All of Kriti's abnormalities could now be attributed to her delicate mental state, which automatically gave him the vantage point in their marriage as the one suffering for the sake of love.

In all the days since, Kriti didn't speak to Dishan even once. Even when she was trying to make sense of the whirlpool of emotions drowning her, the one rising its head like an adamant hissing snake was 'why did he break her trust? And not once but over the years. The things she had shared with him, the things she had felt obliged to share with him out of love and loyalty - her thoughts, her pains, even her mistakes, things that made them a couple, why did he have to share them with her parents? WHY??'

She would ask the Why again and again and again and get no logical answer.

She didn't know if she was more upset at losing the life she had known to be hers, or to discover that she never really had the life she thought she had, didn't know the people she thought she knew inside out, at all. She had been an ARROGANT GOOD FOR NOTHING MISCREANT to her father and REBEL to her mother. They had always needed THE VALIDATION FROM A THIRD PERSON TO KEEP HER FROM STRAYING.

Then one day she had an epiphany. She called up a mental health institute and booked an appointment with a therapist. No, even after all that had happened, she didn't think she was insane. But she needed to speak, uninhibited, and without being judged. The people closest to her; the ones, one would normally go to, had failed her, so she needed to speak to someone who was bound by law and professional ethics to provide her a safe listening space, and who unlike her kin would not broadcast her secrets from the radio.

Going to the therapist proved to be a turning point in Kriti's life. Not only did she get someone she could share anything with, that someone listened like a colourless wall. When Kriti first started taking the sessions, she could feel the incoherence in her words. Words after all are a reflection of one's state of mind, and Kriti's was a mangled mass of garbled emotions. She'd mix up incidents from a month ago with happenings of a decade ago, mix up emotions and impressions. Sometimes just like that she'd burst into anger and a few minutes later melt away in tears.

But her therapist assured her that this confusion was an essential part of her journey back to herself. 'if one wants to clean a jar of muddy water, one has to stir it first, and the mud would eventually settle down at the bottom.' She told Kriti to maintain a journal and write down every single thing that weighed on her. It didn't have to read nice, or correct, as long as she could pull the demons out of her head and lock them in the pages of her diary.

As the diary started filling up, Kriti started feeling lighter and began sleeping better.