Madness

What to do when you are sad? 

Define sad, she said.

I couldn’t. I knew for sure it was sadness that I was feeling.

Do you feel empty? She asked.

No, not empty, Maa. I feel full. It’s like my thoughts won’t rest even for a minute, they keep coming and coming. My head is filled with all kinds of ideas, wild and tame, with notions, dreams, hopes, and love and heartbreak scenes playing over and over a thousand different times. I’m scared I am going mad, Maa.

But how do you know its madness? She asked.

Because aren’t normal people quiet? Aren’t their minds at peace? My head has an argument with my heart every time it beats. I am not even close to normal. People say I don’t talk much. But that’s only because if I speak my mind out, I’m afraid my words will expose the rattling roar of madness that my mind holds.

I’m not sure where the boundaries of our morals end, where the horizon of our ground meets the sky. I can’t see the walls that limit our lands, the colour of our skins that makes us one different from another; I don’t understand religions and the trouble people go through because of them.  I don’t understand love, let alone war. Am I not mad?

If you were mad, I’d have loved you the same, she said.

But no, she said, no you are not mad. Your mind is a flowing river of thoughts and it’ll be a crime to hold it, to bind it.

Sure you don’t understand religion, you don’t understand war. But it doesn’t mean you’ll have to. We’re all ephemeral; into the dust we will one day mix. The only thing that will matter then is how fiercely you loved and how much more differently you used the same amount of time given to each of us. Because that is the only thing we are given, time. Everything else is temporary; nothing is truly ours but our time. The time we are living now is the greatest thing we could ask for. Maybe that is why it is called the present.

And all things chaotic doesn’t necessarily mean messy. There’s beauty in chaos, a kind of beauty only people with wildfires and obscene boldness inside them would understand. We are all messy, stupid, brave souls holding forest fires, comets and entire galaxies inside of us, but not everybody realises it.

So, if this called madness, then I’d rather that you be it.