The “noise”

What is abnormal? I ask myself. On the Christmas day to roam around sullen and gloomy without any trace of joy or celebration in my face or my clothes or to feel everything else outside of my head to be the “noise”. What is normal? To wear garish clothing, smile, laugh and feel happy and vigorous about life? Am I that abnormal to feel out of place on a day when everyone else is happy or at least pretends to be happy?

On this sullen day of 25th of December, when my eyes and chest feel heavy, when I don’t give 2 hoots about how I’m looking on the outside, I slowly inch my way towards my destination without looking around me much. I don’t care about the man who shoves me or bumps into me purposely in the crowd or even the lady who stamps my foot unknowingly in a crowded local train. At normal times I might have reacted, glared angrily, or picked up a fight. In these abnormal times, I do not even haggle with the rickshaw wala and I agree to pay him Rs 2 extra in the fare.

At these abnormal times, I feel like I do not belong here on this plane- with the crowd, with the people around me. Most of it just feels like hazy noise happening outside my head. I know my way to the destination- taking a rickshaw to the railway station, then boarding a local train to the next station, walking through that circuitous alley which I have walked through many times before, to reach the ferry ghat, to board a ferry and to cross this narrow band of river, to take an auto when I reach the other side to finally reach my destination. I recall the numerous times I have gone from point A to point B, but today it’s different, something has changed, something is off.

On this abnormal day I’m standing here at my destination, with a million questions, thoughts
swarming in my head, still the outside is just the “noise”. I’m doing things I would not have done at the normal times. I’m waiting for a person to show up. She comes at last and says, “hello”, and I reply back with another “hello”. It has been a long time. At normal times I wouldn’t have bothered to catch up with a childhood friend after seven years without any contact, but this isn’t me at the normal times. This is a me who has been hurt so badly, that she has given up acting in her normal ways. She has given up feeling normal things or reacting in normal ways. She’s possessed with an abnormal urge to do things she hasn’t for a long, long time.

She meets up with her childhood friend, whom she hasn’t thought about for a long time. Why today? Why now? Why not anytime in these intervening 7 years? Because in these abnormal times, she is not herself. But what about Ruthi who agrees to meet her after 7 years? She has changed beyond the narrator's remembrance. She recalls things that I have forgotten long time back. Details of events from their school. She doesn’t even remember why they became friends anyway. But Ruthi does.
This “noise” is not new, I realize. It has always been there. I had been always satisfied with
myself- selfish, egotistical and the outside world has always been the “noise”. Anything which didn’t serve me has been the “noise”. A childhood friend is easily forgotten after one moves away from her hometown and later to another state and makes new acquaintances. She doesn’t need to remember anyone in her happy days, only at abnormal times such as these- when she’s more depressed than she can remember herself ever being, she needs those people whom she has purposely forgotten.
However amongst this “noise” people like Ruthi exists who doesn’t ask any questions, and only says, “I won’t let this sunshiny face be dark for long”.

(Name changed. Originally written on the 13th of January 2018 for a competition where it failed to win any prize.)