I was learning to walk.

 

I was learning to walk.

I’d fallen innumerable times and that made me cry to an unimaginable extent. I cried not because I got injured, but because I was too piqued while attempting to learn the pattern of these falls. I’d questions- “Why do I fall?”, “Will I fall every time I try to walk”, “Why do these adults do not fall?”… But truth be told, I never wanted an answer to any of these. We humans generally pose an array of questions around us and deliberately complicate simple situations because strangely it’s uneasy to face our own desires. This heart had just one dream to walk, and my psyche lent me a thousand excuses not to try the perilous. This was probably not the right age to start walking, I was too young.

So I continued to crawl. There was no other option I had because the world around me had already complemented “mind” with “logic” and “heart” with “emotion”. They’d taught me the meaning of logic till then, labelled as superior in front of me so that I do not cry to understand ‘emotion’ which they could barely explain.

I’d almost made peace with this pace of life until one day you held my hand. The touch of your hand was something new to my sensory information and therefore I drew myself back. The way you looked at me, some rays unknown and indecipherable to sciences stretched out of your eyes to me, transformed this needy into a need and I came in terms with a new fact that not all trembling hands are looking for a steady one. I learnt that I could be of some ‘use’ despite the fact that I couldn’t walk.

All the desires melted away with your unusual burning passion I loved to touch in a childish friskiness. My little, partially developed brain now forgot to chase the dream and it felt exceptionally satisfying to escape. I’d just look at you, you’d do things to make me laugh and I would. That was not new to me because as a little baby, every person wanted to see me smile and that was the most cliched way to do so. They made me smile, appreciated my beauty, blessed me, walked away and faded into a small shrinking part of my negligible infant memory. I hadn’t learnt to speak, but honestly my laughter tried its level best to swing between a zillion notes to let them know that it’s not what I wanted. I was not fond of witnessing their hilarious expressions that were intended to evoke a laughter, I rather wanted a simple smile which I could easily reciprocate. You see, my heart was yet too fragile to be indebted. You knew that. And you did the small but the most significant thing nobody could do to make me happy.

I will not stress upon how you made it all so beautiful, because that can’t be bound into my same old lines. So I’d jump to what shattered me till the inside. One day, you dandled me. I’d been in your arms many times and never did I express any longing for this. But you did. You dandled me high. Being in the air with arms wide open was pure ecstasy I didn’t even imagine could exist. I smiled a smile that was new to my face. While I was exploring the world around me in this moment, I forgot to look at you who brought me up there, for a second. And when I was back into your arms, I really wasn’t back. It was a new place that frightened me. It felt like somebody else had replaced you in that one moment but your occasional hugs felt the same. Something had changed the person who’d changed my life and I could do nothing because I’d simply smile at you and you’d smile back. That’s what it all came down to.

I’d learnt to walk.

I’ve been looking for reasons to stay in the arms.