“Nothing, nothing at all”; she murmured; she would do that often, pixelating whatever she had in her mind; a well-defined norm it had become. It wouldn’t leave any room for further questions; questions because: the conversation found no headway, more often than not; I had to shamelessly pursue her with my Whys? ; She would still sing her ‘Nothing’ tune and nothing really followed thereafter. Silence at times, a few more murmurs with her hissing a ‘Nothing’; again. Nothing it really wasn’t, for her ‘Nothingness’ was infectious. It would cut across whatever I had in mind, transcending nowhere and it would head into a zone where lied nothing but an afterthought; “What did she mean by the Nothing??” the question lingering in the mind; but She being She, gave no takeaways at all.
Her words, like her; were often subdued; her silence wasn’t; sandwiched between a few words at times, it was as mystique as she was. The silence that was often set in motion with her ‘Nothings’ was incoherent; making it all the more difficult for me to comprehend the same. Adding to the gravitas of all of it was her calm; hard to ascertain it was, yet so highly serenading. But, underneath all this; there lied something worth every word that she chose not to utter; a battle like none, the warrior in her chose to slay the monsters of chaos with her sword of silence. The ‘Nothings’ were perhaps the remains of the clashes that went on; on the inside.
Her temperament; although volatile at times, was restrained to an extent; her mood swaying to both extremes; the only constant playing pendulum to this whirlwind motion at times was her ‘Nothing’, not giving away anything; just nothing at all. Be it the calm that would descend upon her mind and show up on her face; or be it the raging storm of turmoil that would gather momentum and hit her senses hard; the veil of her ‘Nothings’ held things up for her, holding the fort of her calm with all it’s might, perhaps, it was the base on which the fortress of her sanity was built. It kept her real; made her real and to an extent she had embraced this to be the reality that now surrounded her. The mind boggles as it thinks; as to how she could manage it all and still come up with a ‘Nothing’, just ‘Nothing’ at all. More than annexing to, or being anything real or absurd, it made her the Real Deal, she was; and Yes!! She still is.
No infringement of the worldly chaos could test the resilience of her will when it came to her “Nothings’, it had become intrinsic, perhaps it had mutated into something: that had now become symbolic of her. She wouldn’t trade her ‘Nothings’ for anything; for she knew everything that had gone into making the ‘Nothings’; and it rubbed onto me as well. I found her ‘Nothings’ as intriguing as she was; they were thought provoking; posing a thousand questions; the answers though were lost in her ‘Nothings’; I didn’t mind, for finding an answer would have momentarily halted the cycle of Nothingness that seemed so tantalizing to the mind. Cycle it wasn’t; it was a ferry wheel; the joy of getting hit by the adrenaline of ‘Nothing’ she seemed to pass on to me every time; it was enthralling indeed.
And, her ‘Nothings’ wouldn’t cease at anything, it would lay siege rather; imprisoning my mind; the mind in it’s place would readily surrender to the will of everything that made up her ‘Nothings’. Out beyond the reach of anyone and anything, she held on to her ‘Nothings’ tight; exercising immense control over it, for this is what remained of her; her everything that now felt like ‘Nothing’, perhaps the ‘Nothings’ were her everything now. And, I would give up anything, to follow her into her ‘Nothing’, the ‘Nothingness’ she surrounds herself with; now seems worth the chase. Nothing like Everything?? Ahhh… Who cares??
P.S: “Nothing changes, if nothing changes”. Not in her case though, for that’ll change everything.
abhishek purkayastha 