tales of Suchita

Once upon a time when I didn’t know what time meant, I arrived on mother Earth as a young sapling. Young could mean many things so let me clarify: I was a seed inside a sealed incubation chamber. I was lab made with the hope that if the mothership didn’t survive, I would. And I would find a womb that would germinate me to life.

I did and I was born into a world that made very little sense to me. I didn’t cry. I was fascinated with everything and afraid of almost nothing. My parents worried for me as I grew, more interested in talking and singing to the trees than I was in classrooms or homework. I told my parents the trees were my friends and while that was okay for a four-year-old, it was alarming once I became a teenager.

That’s when I learned to create masks for myself. There was the me who pleased my parents because I was taking interest in all the things girls my age were taking interest in. And then there was the me who wandered through the woods like a wild child.

I would pick up flowers and say to them, “little wonder of the woods, sing me your song.”

I would hug a tree and say, “great grandmother of the northern shores, what wisdom do you bring?”

I would stand in the rain, arms spread wide, mouth open to drink it in. I would say, “wash away my tears for I am far away from home and I know not the way back.”

They would always answer me. The flowers would sing, “pretty girl, wild girl, you are just like us, full of colours and bursting with life.”

The trees would say, in a creaky voice, “ho hum, ho hum, keep your roots strong so you can fly as far and wide as you want.”

But what the rains said broke my heart the most. It said, “This is your new home. Embrace it so you may find roots and bear fruits.”

It felt inevitable. It seemed I would have to make this my home and no mothership was coming to take me back.

I have now spent eons and eons away from home and made peace with this one. It’s no longer new and I am no longer young. I have no memory of my home and yet a thread connects me to it, an angst that I can never fully explain or extract.

I have found many such as me. We are weird and we try to be kind to each other and hold onto each other a little harder. For only we know that there is no cure for this loneliness.

And anytime the loneliness gets too bad, I go back to the woods, close my eyes and imagine the phantom hug of home.

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For Letter H, written as part of #BlogchatterA2Z