Dearest Facebook,
You are asking me to click on your button to review how my year went away, a combination of few pictures of passing smiles and their married barred teeth. But to review memories as young as melting glaciers from warmth of my heart, it seems futile and unnecessary act of movement. I cannot review a living memory I’m already breathing in and out of my lungs. Maybe I am asking so much more from you than I have provided. I only communicated to you the day dreams, sunlight, colorfully filtered food and stories of hands wrapped together. But your simplest of request from me has dismantled my hardwork of filling holes with sand. I lost my balance and now I am lying amongst dust that has clouded around me of memories that ameliorate my soul and of memories that exacerbate quality of my sight and breaks my whole body into droplets of tears.
But tell me, can your series of selected pictures show smiles that are painted over frowns, tears, heartaches, demolished dreams and incomplete bridges between people I or other breathing organism failed to complete? Can those barred teeth of mine demonstrate well to others of all breaks and crashes my heart went through this year? Waves of desire tossed me and my limbs everywhere and I gasped for breaths which I took for granted. But seconds before flash of camera hit me, I kept a face as if I won a race on being the more carefree soul than him so when he sees it, he knows how much I have moved on. Can my painted red lips plastered on your screen express how many nights I woke up drenched in sweat pungent with my fear of everything oblivious and shivered myself back to sleep? A simple dab of paint over my lips send me into a temporary amnesia and assured me that maybe, just maybe, I am living my life as justly and as securely as one could. Can you see through my golden glittery foundation that memories of all kinds have left behind their paths and I am becoming more wrinkled as rotating organ we are living on? Behind my makeup are crows with their crooked feet, standing next to my eyes, cawing out aloud, “Where are you lost?”
I have lost my whereabouts but when bubble bursts and glitter falls down on protruding veins on my hand, my artificially waved hair, inside of my blouse I forget that I’m not architecturally sound. But when flash leaves me, I remember that I’m breaking and making walls without any architectural sense hoping maybe all this would lead to something bigger and grander. Oh, a naïve button, I cannot allow you to share pictures that only capture half of a heartbeat. Numbers might shift but I would keep on living those memories as I have been living everyday as a ritual.
– Palak Uppal
