The ever present

I can feel chaos is coming, in fact I know chaos is coming. I’ve learned the pattern, known the rhythm by heart. It is the only constant, the ever present. Dreading every September, fearful of the new year which has nothing new by the way, just another revolution of the earth. It has been nine years, that is half of my age, since I’ve gotten acquainted with chaos. Pain, grief, destruction and loss became the new normal. Peace has become an anomaly, alien, a stranger.

The unknown is the cause of the coming chaos not the chaos. When you grow up hearing the sound of gunshot in your neighborhood, when you don’t go to school some days just because they are having a fit and things didn’t go their way, when some days you can’t go back home because roads are closed and they are having one of their rebellions, chaos becomes just another incidence. There is always something that just doesn’t sit well with them, they are like a ticking bomb waiting to explode. At least they don’t have a bomb they just burn tires on the roads or homes.

Lives should never be forgotten. Lives should be cherished. Even after death, the lives once lived are highlighted, dully noted. Existence is never a mere appearance for the time being. Existence is a lifelong presence on other’s mind, heart. But seeing so many lives seizing to exist, so many hearts just disappearing as if they were not there to begin with, it messes with your mind and change the way you perceive the world. Life becomes a mere appearance.

The chaos I grew up with twisted my mind into thinking that death means nothing, that sacrifices are made to get anything and those sacrifices may or may not be lives. Lives that do not matter to us, lives that mean the world to others.

 I have been training myself to live and love life, not to be bitter but better. I was training myself to love others, to love deep which is a hard task considering the fact that people in my world do not last long they are like leaves and  they are bound to leave. But trying to be a better person seems pointless now that I think about it, trying to love and live life is setting yourself up for disaster, letting yourself be vulnerable for a fire that would burn you to ashes. And I was doing well on keeping myself sane the best way I know  until I saw him, the twinkle in his eyes that sparked life in me, I saw a smile, a beautiful smile that made my heart miss a beat. The look in his eyes dared me to rethink my life, my wishes, my fears, my inhibitions, my decisions. I know life is too short but as I stand in front of him, his giant figure towering over me, I realized my life is also too short to live in inhibitions. I looked in to the eyes that brought me to life and blinked. He is not there. He disappeared. I am in chaos.