screams.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
♥ Sunday, March 23, 2008
The metal tractor moved towards the fire. On it is a wooden casket and flowers laid down from the ceremony held fifteen minutes ago. And about 20 metres away, behind the safe confines of an airconditioned hall stands a crowd. The mechanical slide towards the fire displays a complete nonchalance to the screams that echo not in the halls, but an individual's soul. The choir sings "Oh God you search me and you know me" a song meant to comfort, but what comfort can there possibly be. The unfathomable depths of grief is not shared, but witnessed. There may be about 50 individuals there..but perhaps 1 bleeding heart. And that is the paradoxical nature of loss- tears that of your own, but the grief that of everyone's. Time does not stand still. It moves backwards- the screams are of memories, of a love perhaps never uttered, a relationship maybe never explicitly acknowledged. For the rest of the crowd, with each second that passes and inch made towards the fiery grave is a speechless farewell, for who can say anything. What words would suffice. But the crowd does speak- they utter a language of hugs and tears, of hands over shoulders and of heads bowed, of hymns and prayers.
Someone asks, "where did she go...where did she go". There are no answers. Only screams. The crowd is deafeningly loud as if to drown out the equally deafening silence of sorrow, the unanswerably silent "whys" and "who" and "where". Like a roller coaster, the crowd screams to exculpate that plunge into the void-for where there used to be a person on a chair joking and nagging, jovial and playful, there is now only that chair.