Being an Onion

Being beautiful was never indispensable. It could be done without. Obviously I have lived and cherished life, so far wherein anything that doesn't outstand is left alone to quietly merge with the background. Yet, if one goes about where I happen to live, rubber bands of all possibly imaginable colors would be found, half of them bought and lost. There would be tubes of scrub, some unused, some run out of, on the shelf beside my mirror. Creams, kidnapped from showrooms when sales girls gave me that tough look hinting arrival of wrinkles in a few months. Combs, all breadths and lengths, trashed in a discarded pen stand. More than the clothes I wear, the volume of those that I long stopped wearing and had not the heart to discard, stuns me sometimes. Still don't quite figure why is it that I cant give them away. What comfort in their caged smell of bygone monsoons do I get. And there's nail paint in my fridge. Dozens of bottles stacked from years to keep distance from adolescent despair. Even today. Cotton swabs. Nail paint removers. There's patches of this color on the window ledge where I sit and look outside and play with my whatever hair. Callously shifting from shampoo to shampoo hoping something good will happen with me someday.

I know nothing has ever worked nor will ever do. But what scares me and as well as leaves me in ridiculous splits is that I don't give up the process of trying. Trying to be pleasing to the obvious eye. Trying to be outrightly beautiful.

All these years, all these lessons of life that I have picked up couldn't change my one prejudice, you know. That nobody can judge me from my square inches of skin. The idea is obscene. Yet, I can never get rid of it. Appearances make so much difference. Of much more severity than they deserve.

Someone once told me that I am an onion. You can't say for sure what I am, there's always something beneath what is right before your eyes. Secrets behind the obvious. And the joy lies in peeling off layer after layer. Until you probably reach thin air? The empty center of my being.

4 comments:

Writefully Yours said...

If someone is peeling layer searching for that point where "the onion" is a shallow person caring about physical appearances with a fractured intellect, then in the hindsight, its not the onion reaching its "empty center of being", but the person trying to reach that center!

wildflower said...

@Krish
Do you get word verification still? Totally sucks man!

Hopelessly Flawed said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Hopelessly Flawed said...

I'm just glad that you are still trying...and that you are not being lazy.

"The empty center of being"..come on lady...you're awesome and we know it ...too late ;-P