Splatter Days

Sometimes I just crave a blank canvas to spill out everything that’s bottled up in me. Like a gush of paints and ink splatter. In no order or any sense, yet hoping you will read off your screens and nod your head,barely able to understand what I’m trying to say and still be able to say to me telepathically, ‘Hey, it’s okay, we all have our days’. Splatter days I want to call them.

It’s like waiting, endlessly for something you have no idea about. Like waiting at a curb looking for cars to pass by or in a hospital corridor at 3 AM with just the breeze of doors being pushed around. You don’t see anyone and it gets quiet again. You try to hear something familiar to you or something that holds a faint meaning. But instead, all you see is blank spaces. So blank, they make you feel all eerie inside. You see random people occasionally who’ve seen and dealt with the situation themselves or could be battling their own inner demons, handing you obscure advice. More splatter. You think you don’t need that advice till one day it all begins to resonate. Can you still call it a painting if it isn’t complete? Will it ever be complete?

I see mimes with all the upside down smiles, shaking their heads. No. They pat my head, trying to console me. There, There. They don’t convey anything more than that. They can’t. There is nothing left to be addressed. They know it’s my journey and I’m on my own.

I take a few steps ahead in the name of moving on. For the sake of moving on. Let’s try to collect more splatter – I can’t help look back again and again as I go forth. I move ahead a few steps more till I can actually walk by myself….. steady…….steady…….I look back lesser now…….but I still look. Hoping the deeply missed splatter shade will bloom on my canvas some day.

خُدا حافِظ

Obscure and Unnecessary Drama: Mehreen Shaikh, an Indian writer born and raised in Oman. Although I do visit my country of origin annually, I did spend a few years there studying. Not just academics but our society. Narrowing down further, I observed the relationship it had with women. I was brimming with observations and outrage. It took me a good while to tame my angst and harness it into proper valid arguments. Now I blog, where I feel free to rant about issues that I notice that most people would dismiss as minor but I know how the woman in that instance would feel. So many thoughts and so many incidents take place in a woman’s world that by no means are simple or easy to resolve.