Salt Water Baths

| 2 minute read | on the cleansing quietness of empathy

I sit across him
this longstanding widower, and now grieving father twice over

We talk about the brief arc of every life
the certain end to all its aches

He takes me to a room
shows me a 3D printer under assembly by his son
before he drowned while swimming in the canal two weeks ago

He had offered to sell their small home
and help him raise a further loan
for his plans to travel overseas for post graduate studies

His son demurred
went through the Indian competitive exam filter
crossed only by the tenacious and hungry
and secured a seat at a city university

Was on a paid internship at a local firm
drawn by his promise
to help them design and build a prototype

He was hoping to see him married soon
to revive and rebuild their constricted family

His sorrow expands to engulf me

-x-

Walking across the shop floor
filled with men grinding at weld seams
rigging shells into place, with a crane hook lingering near
a swinging hammer and a steady lug

He was a cog in a wheel in constant motion
nearing retirement, approaching the terminus of his productive life

In the kinetic activity of an assembled crowd
what escapes us is
that each one of us hold in the hovering grasp of our hearts
our own private fears and tragedies

Like a permanent juxtaposition

The path of our immersive vocations and fickle destinies
colliding, intermingling
wiping their traces onto each other

Erasing half of who we are
~ the unseen vulnerability, the unsaid lament ~
to arm ourselves with what is functional

-x-

On an evening like this I stop to mourn
over all that I am afraid of
before my heart is entirely forgotten
by the tug of more quotidian matters

I return home and bathe in salt water
listen to ‘Om Mane Padme Hum’
and embrace my quietness
where every remorse is allowed to surface
from a dream awash with hope and expectations
from an ocean bed littered with human restraint
for a breath of air and a touch of light

An ephemeral balance
where being free and uncertain
can sit beside each other like old friends
acknowledge that both belong
as an aspect
of this moment

Inexorably steadied
by the salt on my skin
and a comforting hum
that submerges me

-x-

This stemmed from an encounter with a colleague’s grief, an acknowledgement of the heart often being obscured in the ordinary course of our days and an abiding in the quietness that arises from a deeply felt empathy