To somebody asunder, the call of music is a soothing balm that sashayes across the wounds desperate for obscurity, while in obscurity. It had been the same with Tara for when her world as she knew it began fragmenting and she sought an anchor that wouldn't abandon her to the frenzy, the crafted art of words and melody that pierces understading, empathy and sympathy all in one go was what essentially saved her. That had been when she was merely 8. As she grew though, her relationship to the art that was veritably her panacea and chosen future began to sully in ashen waters of her mother's changed persona and what soon marked the beginning of everything that would go wrong.

It started out subtle at first, when her mother sat on her favorite chair by the window, something breaking in her countenance before the tears flooded down and she would rush to hold her, tiny hands wrapping around her neck to give comfort to the only parent left, for the other was now miles away with only an agreement to meet every 2 months. It started then when her mother leaned into her, sobbing onto her shoulders and she would just hold her because she knew nothing else. It started then, a metamorphosis catalysed early, even as the lake held the banks meant to support it when it should have been the vice versa!

It started then, not with a bang, an enormity of a disaster but with a partial shift in dynamics and a forever altered existence.

_

The picture of it is painted in her mind so vividly that if she were an artist, she would etch it on a canvas just so the ache is transferred to something more tangible. But she isn't so she tries to create it in a melody, tries to write the words that can capture at least something of it.

I could scream the paradoxes but you'll still blame me for it
a fool speaking words she never could have felt
so inconsequential in my own tale
you suffocate my words the way you've muffled in yourself
it's okay, it's okay, it's okay
I try to rise beyond what you've said
you scream your rage, I bury my outrage
we are, after all, surviving our graves!

It's incomplete, inadequate or maybe it is extreme. She will never know for she lets these be the lyrics for the song she is composing. Even when it feels like the closest she's come to letting out what has stayed buried, even when she feels what she has written down to the brim, a familiar guilt still settles within her skin like it always has. She cannot evade it or trample it even if it manages to trample her completely!

_

It has essentially been years but she is back again in the same position on the same chair except her the tears and the grief in her forlorn eyes for now it was just vacant.

It was hauntingly vacant.

So she goes and lays her head in a lap that will always give her comfort even if it shall also be the cepicenter of all things that have broken her and damaged her over time. Even when realizes wordlessly she will always be needed some while never ever being enough!

Her mother pats her head with not much consciousness and there is affection there but still, she is in the same role that she had taken up that very first all those years back! And somehow that is crux of her conflict, how she seems to be something while still being nothing!

It would be a simple thing if it could all be boxed under a singular category of emotions but it isn't. It cannot because to feel is to be human. It cannot. She wishes it could for on some days, she no longer knows if she is human!

Love,
Pratyusha

PS: slightly shorter chapter. Apologies for all mistakes, I was half asleep while writing this one.
Also, the poem has been written by me for the story.

WC: 654 words