57.

57 is family.

family, where life starts and love 

never ends. 

-

it is a heartbreaking revelation to realise that the monster you have been afraid of your whole life was human. it hurts more perhaps, because it is you now, who is the monster. and a similar little girl looks up to you in anger and confusion.

it is a sick deja vu. you're back in the same room. and you see yourself. so afraid. so unprepared.

i am losing my humanity. in bits. 

-

i have lived at 57 since i was a kid.

i know the rooms by heart.

there's the big room where ma and i used to stay in. it has soft lights and brown curtains and a big sticker of a white and a black dog on the wall. but we don't study in the room. ma says we shouldn't on the bed. the room used to have glowy stars on the side but not anymore. 

she took down the stars when she took down her expectations. her dreams. 

baba used to sleep with us in the big room.

he stopped after a while.

 instead he would sleep in the other room.

and then he stopped sleeping at 57.

finally he stopped coming.

-

i got the room later.

i don't remember how it looked then. if i try really hard i can probably remember it being full of light. with purple walls. 

it seemed empty, begging to be adorned. a solitary white table and a skinny cushioned chair were the only noticeable furniture. 

there used to be a white almari, with a snow white sticker on it. i remember adoring snow white. it is perhaps one of the few things i still remember from my girlhood. 

-

as the people changed, so did the rooms.

the colours of the walls wore off, although baba did insist on repainting it.

ma liked it the way it was.

she liked the blandness, and how it was true to its inhabitants.

baba wanted it white and repainted. he preferred hiding the cracks that had begun to appear.

57 would never be as marketable with all its cracks. 

i lived in them. the cracks. they became an unconscious home i never thought i wanted.

-

i lost my girlhood like i lost all the little things i tried to hold on to. conveniently enough, i became the parent i needed.

i think i was always afraid to say that.

the fact that i had become my parent.

it would, very nonchalantly come off as offensive to my parents, but it was never really their fault.

atleast, i never admitted that to be true.

-

the page starts to whiten.

either that reflects my usurped ideals of perception,

or

the words that i no longer have.

i have come so far running.

leaving tracks of how i am not like my parents.

i will never be,

and ironically

and gruesomely

i am them.

and i can never escape it.

i cry in my holistic room of darkness in a very medical sort of white light that attracts the kali pujo bugs.

 i cry because i look for words i have lost.

i cry perhaps because i am nobody without my words.

just like my father is nobody without his power.

and my mother is nobody without her pain.

-

57 is family.

family, where life begins and love never

 ends.

                                                 1841 Leopold Kupelwieser - The Lössl family