"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. 


A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. 


Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."


- Michael Cunningham, The Hours

i was drawn back to this excerpt from The Hours after a quarrel with my mom.. the quarrel terminated with what could be considered a pyrrhic victory? if only because she started crying in that wheezing, wounded way of hers. i felt horrid; it's one of those hand-wringing moments when your mom cries.  pyrrhic - victory at a terrible cost to the victor. it is a hysterically beautiful word, both in aesthetics and in meaning.

the moment her voice turned wobbly, i knew it was a lost cause and the light would shine against me. i'd not cried visibly but my feelings were hurt as well. "A liquid ache spread under her skin", wrote Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things. it remains one of my favourite phrases, the notion that pain flows where it cannot be seen, curdling deep inside - a vat of insidious sludge, boiling, bubbles slowly but surely bloating, the promised moment of explosion drawn out most languidly, all the more to devastate.  

i wonder how she would react if she knew the secret i was carrying. no one knows, not a single soul. i bear this secret around every day, though it was welded upon my person without permission. but not even i dare to put a name to this secret. i'm afraid to. the secret is that there is no secret? it's all in the mind? until i take the plunge to find out, i'll never know. like a visit to the dentist, one tries his best to put it off though its invisible presence weighs more heavily on the soul than what is opaque.