All for a Drop of Love

 One day, I caught her off-guard.

“What the heck do you think you’re doing? Plunging the nib of your pen into your wrists like that!” I cried.

She looked at me as if I had popped out of the earth just yesterday, and continued to scratch her almond skin with the pen till blood spouted. I looked on with horror, too stupefied to do anything.

For a long time, I waited. I waited for her to open to me. I waited to win her trust.

Then she told me the story behind her scars. A story of a dark childhood, a reign of terror and neglect, abusive love affairs and chronic depression.

“Sometimes, you know, my eyes itch for blood.” She said, “Rich red of blood. I feel as if the incandescent beauty of this warm liquid flowing out of myself outshines my drab life. It renews my hope to live. The pain, the pangs of the cuts,” she panted as adrenaline rushed all through her, “they revive in me the will to live, when I don’t wish to live anymore.”

That was my first encounter with them. The Shadow-Riders.

The world may call them crazy but to me they are the Shadow-Riders. Riding through blood and hell, destruction and defeat, these intrepid fighters move on through the Valley of Death.

With time, I came to understand them better and with more and more compassion especially when my world too, turned helter-skelter and I found myself at the same bay.

 

Some said Smita did that as an attempt to kill herself but it was just the opposite. She hurt herself to remind herself that she had to live.

We do this. Not once. Not twice – but time and again.

We question ourselves, “What is there to live for, anyway?” We try to find something to live for. When all fails, we find solace in blood.

Some nights seem too dark. It’s then that I feel this urge to see blood. Fresh red blood.

Blood is something. It has an aura of resplendence, a beauty of its own, that strikes a chord in our innermost chambers and arouses feelings in numbed souls. Whenever you hurt yourself, and pain lounges through, you feel alive. Once more.

 

That pain brings pleasure and contentment that you have never had in your life, at least in your charred memories. You are driven pell-mell into addiction – the addiction of self-harm.

It is relieving. Better than contemplating on suicide, isn’t it?

Alok, another friend of mine, punches the wall furiously whenever things go out of his control. He punches and punches till his hands bleed and have to be bandaged. That is his way to tackle his anger. He has to live and burn his way through all of that.

Deepa had to be hospitalized, when she cut her wrist, because of excessive loss of blood. The doctors said – attempt of suicide, but of course, we knew better. “Trust me”, I could feel the entreaty in her tear-choked voice. “I didn’t want to kill myself!”

Smita, Alok, Deepa – all of them are struggling. Struggling in their own ways. Digging their paths with sweat and tears – fighting, crying, bleeding but walking all the while. And they are not alone in their walk. Millions across this world are walking with them, coping with their heartbreaks, wading through salty miles and trying to smile.

What for? What do they crave for? Why do they believe that the crimson of blood outshines everything in their life, that all of their lives are worth this farce?

At the end of the day, it’s all but a pinch of love. A handful of compassion. A touch. A smile. A person to hug tightly and a person who would hug you back warmly, like you have never been hugged before. A shoulder to rest your head upon, and cry and cry.

Isn’t it shocking, huh? Isn’t it so despicably shocking that in this huge overpopulated world of suffocating crowds and deafening noise, thousands are dying every day, every second, only for want of a bit of love? Isn’t it horrifying, that each moment draws in more and more of death into our miserable lives only for penury of compassion and understanding? For just one spell of rain in this desert of nothingness?

 

Every time I think of ourselves, it tears my heart apart to think that how lonely it is to live in this populous, and miserably gorgeous city.

You gape in horror.

You pity.

You let out a shriek or a gasp of sympathy.

Yet you never peek out of your Smartphone and smile at a sad-looking young girl standing at a bus-stop.

You sip your warm coffee and scroll through your phone but you are too busy to call a friend and ask him/her – “Hey! How are you?”

You close your eyes while your headphone bursts with jazz in the crowded bus but you never care to wave at a lonely old man sitting at a tea-shop, with forlorn eyes.

Well, that’s it then. Close your eyes and dive into your headphones and smart phones.

When you wake up from your dream, you’ll find a deserted earth – shorn of every ounce of humane emotion.

Robust spines. Sandy skies. And an ocean of emptiness to stare at.

I wonder how that will feel.