We took the Christmas decorations down today- wrapped them in old newspapers, sealing them off until the next. More than just the post-festivities-triggered feeling of nostalgia, doing this year after year always makes me a little sad. And think about death. Of people who may not live to see another. Some years proved me wrong, some have proven me right. It’s a morbid feeling, a fear that lurks and one that renders death reminded. Obituaries in the newspapers, remembrances of someone’s dearly departed being casually used to wrap the decorations seemed to make that which loomed large make its presence starker.
Sleep’s been acting coy lately. I lay awake in bed long into the wee hours, long after the neighbours’ noisy kids have been silenced into slumber, when dogs howl in packs and roosters begin to crow. I like to watch something to sleep- usually something that doesn’t require much mind-engagement. But going through the folders last night, I decided to watch Revolutionary Road again. The first time we ever watched it was in Lohit 230. We watched it over and over again, finding much to talk about. Most times it ended with most of us feeling depressed and looking out the window. When April Wheeler says, ‘For years I thought we've shared this secret that we would be wonderful in the world. I don't know exactly how, but just the possibility kept me hoping. How pathetic is that?’ it made us wonder about our own dreams. Hinging on possibilities, hopes of possibilities. Or when she tells Frank, ‘Our whole existence here is based on this great premise that we're special. That we're superior to the whole thing. But we're not. We're just like everyone else! We bought into the same, ridiculous delusion.’ It made us wonder if we had based ours on a similar premise- living in a bubble and wondered what would happen when one day that bubble burst, pushing us dangerously close to experiencing mid-life crisis a decade early.
I want to say, ‘To everything there’s a time, a season…’ shrug it off and live a happy life, at least until the dreaded hits. But maybe being happy isn’t exactly my forte. Once a thought like this clings, it’s a hard thing to shrug off as though it were a weather prediction. I hate being morbid but the certainty of our mortality and the temporality of our existence just makes me so. Reading a mail which bore a profound message of a reminder of this inevitability has made these musings more than just a winter night’s reverie.
The weather isn’t helping much though. January! Having Fun.’s ‘We are Young’ stuck on repeat, I sang along until it made me feel like a phoney in a state of denial. April Wheeler’s angst as she screams to her husband, ‘Tell me the truth, Frank, remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what's so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they've lived without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying’ gets hard to forget. For April and Frank Wheeler ‘truth’ had meant ‘living life as if it matters’, being a cut above the rest- that sort of thing. One wonders if going to Paris would have been it for them- their panacea. Or maybe it wasn’t about going to Paris at all. I don’t know. I wonder what Paris meant for them and what my/ our versions of Paris are. If one could speak of truths, maybe this is one. A most certain one- the transience, the temporality, the imminence of the impending end. Or maybe these musings of mine are actually just a winter night’s reverie. A very morbid one at that.
