I Haven't Felt My Grief by Bleh 👅

Isn’t it funny, the words ring in your head relentlessly incessant, like a child sobbing loudly nearby whose wails you cannot ignore, you cannot ignore, I have felt your grief... but not my own. The way it spoke so casually, ladened heavily with humanity’s sadness, had you struggling to grip to the sense of your own virtues, on your self-righteousness, a rigid belief that you are, in fact, a good person. Isn’t it funny?

It isn’t funny. Its words were so humbly soft. But not my own. Dulor didn’t even complain about having to carry such a burden, it did not bitterly declare that because it has to feel everyone’s pain, everyone should feel its or be thankful to it or pray to it or worship to it, simply just a claim that it wanted to feel its own—have time for grief, have time to feel for itself.

Dulor is not without a sentience or a conscience or a consciousness—it probably feels the injustice too but doesn’t complain. Dulor is an entity that has been burdened with processing the grief for others’ while they’re too occupied with life. All that unfelt misery… had to be caught somewhere. Dulor was just unlucky enough to be that entity. I’m going to call Dulor she, you think quietly to yourself, because shes never complain.

I have felt your grief but not my own. When you bite your lip and bleed, you taste your mother’s grief. It runs in the blood in your veins & arteries and all you’d like is to wash it off, wash everything off yourself. These are words you could say to your mother as well. You never had time to cry for yourself when there were so many reasons to cry for mom. Her grief was incomparable, nothing in front of yours of course, but you’ve started to think that it’s absurd for an eight-year-old to carry her mother’s misery. Once you’ve walked too far in life, you will never have a chance to return to eight and pick up your left grief. And when you don’t do that, when you ignore a piece of grief in the past, it seeps in too deeply & spreads too widely into the path you carve for your future.

Your grief is little but it is all you can carry for yourself as a child. You don’t have siblings to share either. And ‘Dukh baatne se kam hota hai’ which translates to ‘If you share your grief, it lightens’ is such a selfish statement. Why should others carry your grief? Why should others be burdened with your sorrows when they have their own problems with which they must deal? The answer always boils down to love and what a complex thing love is! Has there been anything greater than love which was both excruciatingly selfless & selfish? And that is humanity's flaw perhaps... that we love so inherently twisted & broken that we are beautiful in every single way.

Your mother’s tears are still on your tongue, in your blood, in your sweat, in your love. Pain must also be so sacred. We fear sharing it but not with loved ones, and life’s not the same, not as beautiful when we don’t feel it. Pain must also be so sacred that it's where love is born; pain must be so sacred that you taste an ocean when you cry.

As you look at Dulor, you quietly add as an afterthought: Pain must be so sacred that even Dulor comes to hug you.

END

Bleh 👅

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