I want to play. I want to play like there’s no tomorrow. Like I can just collect
every ounce of happiness and joy, pack it in a suitcase and carry it with me
forever across lifetimes, till that becomes a baggage, and then I shed it and I
create another suitcase, but with a different set of joy and happiness. Why do
I want to do this? Because I don’t know how it feels to be truly happy and
childlike.

How I wish I never felt anxiety again; it brings out the worst in me –
cravings for food and alcohol, all the bitter nostalgia and then the yearning
for a mother, whom I’ve always had and yet never did. How I wish I was loved
differently. How I wish I had felt the anxiety of not having a mother and then
having had one, having realized the value of having one. It’s a fucked-up cycle – to find value of something or someone only while losing it or them. But maybe
this is the kind of love my soul agreed to from the soul of my current Earthly
mother – a masculine and absolutely unfeminine love. There were no “I Love
You”s. Just a pressure to perform better – be it sports, music, studies or
being responsible for my brother and to everyone else who became concerned with
us. I remember, just a while ago, after a fight with my current wife, I yearned
for a lori (lullaby) and God, it made me cry. I realized if I am so fucked up,
how bad it must be for people who have never questioned themselves.

I was in 1st standard when I first took my brother and his classmate friend
to school in a public bus, 8 kms from my home. I think I lost all my innocence
that very day. Ever since then I was always worried for him. He shouldn’t be
hurt. He shouldn’t face any agony. I gave so much to him at such a young age
that, as I now realize, I never stayed a child. It was as if, one day my mother
was picking up strewn tiffin and bottle from my school bus as I would be
sleeping and the next day, I was paying bus conductors and rationing money so
that I could get my brother some borkut, gatagat (made of dried red berries and
pomegranates) or colorful mint spirals from the corner pan shop. I refrained
from crying ‘coz he had to see me strong. I had to be the role model, all when
I never had a masculine, male role model, not even in fantasy.

I was hit so much, that I forgot what it felt to be loved without it. I
still don’t know what it feels like to be loved without physical beatings.
Maybe I started finding love within those beatings and hence, this masochistic
BDSM loving self. I crave female domination because that’s where I hope, I’ll
probably find love – isn’t that fucked up!

I wonder how many inner children are buried in this story because I feel
them rearing their heads in need for attention from time to time, each time
wearing different shirts and those cute shorts. I still feel their innocence when
I hold their hands and tell them that it’s time we feared less and loved more,
for its only with giving more love that we’ll attract more love. I still feel
that I’m taking children to school albeit, this time they are all me and my
past carrying the baggage of the trauma they suffered and now carry in those
cute and colorful vinyl/petrol smelling school bags packed along with those
notebooks that they covered in covers with those He-Man stickers.

I recently met 2 children at a gap of a few months. They took immediate shine to me. They wanted nothing more than my attention because I feel, somewhere I was validating their fantasies and their imaginary worlds with 6-foot-high purple plants. While my interaction with one of them was curt and yet very revealing of my own true nature, the other brought out my fatherly instincts. She played with me like she would play with her father, asking stupid questions, seeking answers that didn’t thwart her ego and yet showed her the true nature of the world around her. She was very hesitant to come to me in the beginning and even though I wanted her to embrace me, she didn’t. It was right at the end of my journey when she was told I was leaving that she ran to me, held up her arms and asked me to pick her up and hug her. She said she loves me and will miss me. I feel somewhere, I feel validated about my fatherly instincts and more comfortable with the thought of fatherhood and a plan to someday have my own daughter.