How long is a decade? Does it have to be 10 years? Time was supposed to have a reference, was it not? Because I don’t see decade in years, or the word in itself. I don’t find it in months that pass, or in neighbourhoods pushing my childhood hide and seek trees deeper into the forest. I don’t even sense it in spaces that are now trees turned into stumps to revel the beautiful deodars that stand for our pleasure. I wish a decade for me was that warning by IPCC regarding the planet’s future- 2 years ago. But no… that’s not how I feel a decade.
I feel a decade passing each day as I sit on my bed processing everything that is happening around me. I feel the voices thumping in my head, the faces weighing me down. I feel the air as steady as the suffocating summer day, and me standing before an itchy trigger finger. Does a decade pass when you find yourself staring down the barrel of a gun? Is it a decade when yesterday, today and what maybe tomorrow begin to blur before the fuzzy eyes that wake up to familiar faces screaming like they were…
Was life always this way? How did each moment drag itself out to the point where all lines began to fade away into one big blot of confusing mess? Each second of not ‘now’, not ‘this’- a futile chase. Each day- a plunge into the deep end, as fate contemplates whether to bring you up or let you be. How then can it not feel like a decade or even more? As time stretches out, moulds and deforms itself like a language of its own, all I can wish from it is to have enough to forget.