sunday june 9 2019

Lately, I have limited impetus to write because the impetus to live life as it is – day by day and moment by moment compels me more so. It’s strange though because I feel much more sociable, though socializing still exhausts me. But lately, I haven’t felt as drained and every conversation with stranger & friend brings gems of insight. Now and then, I still anxiously or flittingly drift into my own world but there is a stronger intent to be present and involved in others’ life. I feel like I can be more myself around people. I suppose, then in the name of growing up and becoming a full-fledged adult, I had slowly inchingly hid parts of myself away. Piece by piece, inch by inch. Be it to protect the child within, or to harden the soft edges… but bit by bit, the motivations meld into a blur and into days and months, and slowly my self-hood and identity disappear into the faint cracks of lost time.

In a way, I was fervently rushing the process of forgiveness because I suppose the road to forgiveness is a long, arduous and a crooked path. Some days, it spirals and turns into a dead end. Other days, you face a detour and you muster all the strength you can to keep walking through this endless journey. The voice inside of you says, “There will be a light out of the tunnel”. I remember the city of Mostar – a picture perfect scene, devastated by war and destruction. The iconic Stari Moist: five centuries and still standing in its reconstructed glory - no longer the same as it was 500 years back. The remnants of gun shots carved into the torn wall; a legacy of the 1992-1995 religious war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Two old men sitting by the winding steps, chitchatting as if it was the good old days in a ghost town filled with nothing but tourists. It was 2013 – nineteen years later and the evening dulls into a still thick whisper and how would a nineteen-year-old girl, born in a faraway continent would have known of the trauma from decades ago. Funny, how she would naively and unassumingly stumble into a Sufi mosque during prayer time to be wrapped in a makeshift hijab. She recalls their eyes and then, she couldn’t make out why their eyes cowered unflinchingly when she casually mentioned she was a Christian. But now she knew – the war that had devastated and torn the city was a war of religious differences. But even so, the girls had led her to the back of the mosque where the women sat and prayed. And amid guided hand gestures, a thick language barrier, she had learnt how to pray to God in their way. In a way, it was a step to forgiveness; a small step to move away from the past and to reconcile the differences because how saddened would God had been if He knew we prayed to the same God in our way but bore so much anger and violence at the other?

I am no longer angered at M. Then, I had coped with the anger by finding outlets to exorcise it. I busied myself with sports, friends and work, but the anger remained because in a way, I was trying to escape it and to rush the forgiveness process. As the anger and pain chewed at me, I kept praying for the moment of forgiveness and yet it felt like it was bouncing off the walls. Why couldn’t He take the anger and terrible pain away? Why? Why?

I realized it was because I wanted to rid the anger and pain through forced forgiveness and it doesn’t work that way, does it? Stuck in a traffic jam, the months of evaded pain took its toil and I broke down in the Bluebird ride from Seminyak to Canggu. What Yan and QS had told me then profoundly and providentially transformed my interlaced web of hurt, pain, anger and longing. There are moments in life where you would remember impression-ably, and to me that was one of those moments. I remember how incredibly cathartic and relieving that sob was. “It’s okay to not have to forgive him now or even in the future. It’s ok to not have to forgive at all.” And it dawned on me that it was ok to not forgive because how could I forgive him if he doesn’t even believe what he did was wrong. I didn’t have to forgive to let go of the anger.

Bali was luscious & healing. The first few days I was in pain because the places we went reminded me so much of the past but the sea, the experience and my fondest friends took the pain and transformed them. It was divine providence that impelled us to book a spontaneous trip to Bali and it was divine providence that made me grieved, but it was also divine providence that showed me that the past and the space didn’t define the new experience and could refashion it in better ways. While clumsily chasing the waves on a surfboard, I had slowly felt the anger and hurt gradually dissipate into the waters. The waves carrying it away and crashing the pain into the shores. And I had never felt so healed and rejuvenated and so joyous to be with the company of my friends and in the sea.

I had felt that we bonded terribly, and we had learnt how much the other had grown and matured and I am so confounded and elated? What is this word to describe this emotion? I think I am slowly learning how to be myself again and how much I took all my friends and loved ones for granted. Maybe the impel to socialize and to keep trying comes from this impel to prioritize people in my life because they were and still am my God’s angels and I want to be a bearer of light to their darkness and pain as much as they were to mine.