So Not Unlike Me…

As you all know, WordPress has had this brilliant idea to motivate us to actually update our blogs regularly as opposed to simply leaving them to rot away into oblivion via the Post a Day/Post a Week Challenge.

Now, signing up for this challenge is pretty simple. You publish a post on your blog saying what you want to say about the challenge, mainly that you are joining it and then tag your post appropriately with ‘postaday2011’ or ‘postaweek2011’ tags. That being said and me being me, I ended up doing this whole thing backwards.

After three posts I realized I was supposed to post about me joining the challenge and then move onto tagging my other posts. Yes, cue in the light bulbs over my head please!

So, here I am now. And since I am known for my temperamental frequency of writing, I decided to give Post a Week a try from 9th January. I maybe posting almost daily this week but next week could very well be a different story.

Either way, hopefully 2011 will see more of me on my blog than 2010.

Happy blogging people!

In Love. With Love. For Love. By Love.

We seem to forget just how fleeting and beautiful life truly is, for most of our own lives. Image by Pamhule via Flickr.

For Love.

The scent of gunpowder and dried blood makes their way to your nose just as another wave of sand assaults your vision. You clasp the rifle even harder; your jaw tightens as you take in your surroundings through your fingers.

Steve’s crouching over there looking ahead; Jack is right behind him with his rifle positioned, ready to shoot. You don’t know where the others are, you just hope that they are still here.

You wipe the beads of sweat off your forehead; the sand is in your throat now, scratching against the parched walls. A dry gulp and you steady your hand…any minute now…

So you wait.

You wait for death to rain in, for the earth below you to bathe in the blood of nameless people, and sometimes you wonder what it is that you are doing here…

You no longer know…

At the beginning it was about protecting the land that you called home and loved since birth, or about making sure your mother didn’t die in a shopping mall bombing or that your nephew and niece could play in the playground and make it out alive…it was about a lot of things, half of which you can’t remember right now…

You’ve seen your nephew aim a gun at you only to find out that it was just another kid who had the same black mop of hair as little Bruce and you couldn’t stop the tremors from coming that night.

So now you wonder, whether you will make it out alive to see Lily in the isle or if she will still remember you years after you arrive in a casket…

And honestly you don’t know.

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We live in a world where patriotism is often measured in how much you crave the blood of another nation or if you think XYZ deserves to be blown off the face of the earth. And I can’t help but wonder, is this truly what we have dwindled to?

In the last decade we have seen wars that virtually serve no good, greater or lesser, but bring down evil in its most inhumane forms. And I can’t find any difference from the ones history has labeled as barbaric conquerors and us…history repeats itself and we continue to learn nothing from it.

My country has no soldiers employed in the battlefields (as far as I know), but it still doesn’t make this war or any other one different from the one that could plague my own country. Violence is violence; you don’t need to be there to know the damage it causes to the soul so long you have a soul.

The only thing these wars have gifted us is the knowledge that for some of us, love for our fellow human beings regardless of nationality, race, caste, culture, religion, sexual orientations or any thing that is different from us, is a notion that is nonexistent.

I am no diplomat or politician, just a young girl who feels that perhaps we should all practice the sweet words of tolerance, respect and love for mankind that we never seem to get tired of preaching to others, a bit more ourselves.

 

 

In Love. With Love. For Love. By Love.

With Love.

The path to love is treacherous, but that has hardly ever stopped anyone from moving forward. Image by Moshik Gulst via Flickr.

You pull the covers over your ears, your small fists trying to muffle the sounds of voices clashing and words that are too hard for you understand. It’s been like this for weeks, you think and you kind of miss the times when mom would bring you a glass of warm milk in your favorite kitty shaped mug or those times when dad would tuck you in even though you were kind of tucked in already.

But it really doesn’t work all that well, you can still hear them and you don’t feel good all of a sudden.

So you start counting dragons…one dragon…two dragons…three dragons…four…

The dragons aren’t enough, perhaps nothing ever was you realize, a few years down the road.

The accusations aren’t there because they are no longer there. There’s no one to tuck you to bed and mom no longer makes you that delicious glass of milk, you’re a big girl now, she says, and you nod your head, scared what if she leaves too…?

The birthday cards aren’t the same like before; there’s one from mom and one from dad, but there isn’t one from them both.

You keep all of them, looking through them, tracing over their hand writings. It’s when you are a bit older that you notice that they all ended the same, ‘Love Mom. Love, Dad.’ They still love you, and you know that. They just don’t love each other anymore.

And you think, maybe love is like that magical candy that you can split between people and sometimes it lasts forever and sometimes it goes stale over the years.

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What happens with love is that it sometimes becomes nothing. And instead of holding on to that nothingness perhaps it’s better to simply let go, so that years later when you look back, despite the regret you can still remember a time when you loved.

I had hoped to find that little girl a happy ending, but then remembered something someone once said to me, “A happy ending isn’t necessarily happy but rather that fairy tale everyone writes knowing it is just that, a fairy tale.”