Lost In The World

Authors’ Note : This is for the expectations and the disappointments. Even the silent ones. This is for those who try to find themselves and only delve deeper in a city of souls. This is for uncleared misunderstandings and miscommunication. This is for the unloved and over-loved. This is for the time you gave all you had to give, all you could do is lay there, unfeeling, as they forcefully took it from you. This is for the broken bits, shattered people who have been torn into one, two, many pieces. This is for the emptiness, loneliness, judgement. This is for the people who wander. All those who wander ARE lost, one way or another. And need to be found, one way or another.

#NowPlaying Lost In The World – Kanye West (Album: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy)

His love stays unnoticed each time. He is placed in a corner of abandonment without as much as a misdirected glance in his direction each time she passes. And like a scolded child who sulks in a corner, he sits carefully at the edge of his life willing to be pushed over just so she would hear of him and acknowledge his existence.

Each day he purposely stampedes her vision and orchestrates his steps. He plucks the stray strands of her hair and holds it against his skin and sniffs the deliciousness of her innocence. He dances in her sunlight and perpetrates her darkness. He invades her shadow and pervades her reflections.

He whispers words to himself as he walks past her. Promising himself, if he can somehow dig into his jelly spine and find courage to utter words and construct meanings, he’ll offer her the special kind of safety that he hears his heavyset yellow bellied father punch into his mothers’ mouth till she is black and blue and purple too. He’ll offer her love and kindness in the only ways he has seen around him, by shoving his fingers under her skirt in public places as a demonstration of affection, and singling her out with names like “Sweet-cheeks” or “long legs”. He’ll scream obscenities at her and tell her to never leave the kitchen because it was built for her. He’ll explain to her that she is merely a woman and the only requirement he will have of her is to stand in the kitchen and bend over in the bedroom each night as he plummets his semi-flaccid excuse of masculinity into her.

This is how he has seen to make a woman feel safe, loved, relevant. He promises himself he would make her feel safe.

But he has no voice cascading through his throat when he sees her. So he stays mute. Invisible. He wanders along. Lost.

And on an extra hard day of walking the shadows of his school hallway, he holds a knife to his wrist and cuts slowly. He savours the pain and basks in the beauty of his blood, crimson red. He lets the blood trickle down his fingers and drip on the same floor she steps on. And she walks all over his blood, smears his dreams of togetherness, she remains oblivious to his desires.

And she doesn’t see him because he has chosen to remain paper-clipped to a family ideology of never amounting to anything. His mind is set with a tattoo of self-proclaimed insignificance glued to a dismal self-worth. He is one of those flowers that choose to crawl on walls in gardens so you have to awkwardly pull on them before they can overcome their shyness, and most times nobody bothers or remembers to pull, and sometimes, a few times, not too many times, he prefers to just stand there invisibly, in oblivion. And watch her. And dream. And wonder.

And sometimes, a few times, not too many times, she feels the rays of his eyes scorch her beautiful caramel coloured neck, she turns to search but remains blinded. She sees nobody – except some awkward looking boy with arms too long, over-grown for his sweater, with bandages around his wrists, thick horn-rimmed glasses too big for his face, and a retainer in his mouth that has left dry drooled spit on the side of his cheek. She sees right through him, she sees nobody.

And she, the beautiful, she dances around her popularity in her short skirts and tight tops,bouncy hair and too many friends who laugh too loudly and giggle too much. She believes she holds the world at her manicured pastel pink fingertips; she’ll easily tell you that the whole world is watching her, waiting for her.

But the world is too busy fighting unimportant wars, stigmatising gays and Muslims and blacks and women, to notice the deeply unstable young man, or answer questions he never asked – questions he didn’t even know his heart was pregnant with.

And then she dies. She dies with 23 other students who leave behind families as well as questions of “why did this happen?” and “how did we not see this coming?” and “Could we have stopped this?”. She dies with surprise screaming in her eyes and two bullets lodged in her heart from his father’s M16 assault rifle.

And he, he walks out of the school gate breathing the air of peaceful voices and freedom from his demons. He smiles into the clear skies because she finally saw him. She noticed.

In an array of blue-red lights, size 20 banner news headlines, fear and chaos, the world notices too.

The lost boy has been found.