How much can 3 seconds really betray?

Flicker of recognition.

Amusement.

Confirmation… as her eyes hastily dart away.

An inward smile, a word to the woman standing familiarly next to him, and taking the little girl from her arms, he looks towards the crowd yet again to see if she will steal yet another furtive glance at him.

She does. Silly girl.

He’s grown a moustache and yes, that’s his wife standing with him in the green outfit and of course that’s their little girl. She had spotted him long before she had caught his eye. Many infatuations had piqued and faded since she was that shy, little girl of 11 and yet, there was something particularly hurtful about encountering him in this way and being reduced to vulnerability in seconds. She was at his sister’s wedding, and was the only one of her friends to not be married.

Given the choice now, would she marry him? Probably not. She couldn’t have found in him the measures of pleasurable requitement that had sufficed her elsewhere. It only stung that in that one instant, of three brief seconds, she was still not spoken for while he had a wife and a child. And she stood, nose pressed on to the window of his picture-perfect life.

Reminiscence

I just read the MS Word version of my old blog which I wrote all through my last year in the US.  I miss the abilities of thinking intelligently and writing inventively.  I had made myself believe that skills of critical thought and reason when acquired could not erase themselves from one’s pallette.  I was wrong.  It is indeed possible to hold on to those skills provided they get an environment where they find room to flex their feelers.  I was wrong also to think that I could create for myself such an environment if I didn’t find it.  Many of us who returned have been smothered and stifled into silence long enough to have forgotten how to get on the way we used to, the way we enjoyed doing things, many of us have forgotten to be ourselves.

I can barely talk articulately any more and I have no more stories to write.  I am tired of pretending everything is fine and I am tired of cribbing and yet there’s no reconciliation to the status quo.  The status quo may be described as: “ungainfully” employed, social outcast, stagnant.  In less literary terms, a loser.  Loser by the definition of those around me because they have no idea of the fact that I’m running on low-oxygen and because they have no clue of the limited oxygen supply to their own brains!   Loser by the definition of those who stayed abroad because in all American-positivity, if that is not working for you, why don’t you just come back?  Now who is to explain why I can’t come back!

I wish I could just figure out how to deal with this rut.  The residues of American positivity in me say, there are solutions which I have not yet discovered and yet, I can’t seem to find them.  Resignation is too far from my leonine spirit for me to suck all this up and yet .. and yet…