Sifting Through Ashes
Through grief, uncertainty, and a pandemic, I navigate
what remains of life as I have known it and discover
that storytelling is one thing worth saving.
It was sometime in early March when I awoke from a dream, breathless and in shock. My bedroom door flung open to reveal the oven jammed with giant wood logs in the nightmare-like episode, flaming like a massive bonfire. While contemplating how to extricate me from this frightening scenario, I succumbed to my death. But I didn't just die the way I did in most dreams--waking up before I hit the ground from a perilous fall or struggling for breath underwater before abruptly waking. This time, I died all the way. On the other side, I watched the flames unsympathetically devour my entire life and felt the pain of not saying goodbye to my husband.
Suddenly, I awoke with a desperate gasp for air. I was still entangled with my dream's imprints as my rational mind tried to push it away, but somewhere inside of me, I knew it was a prophecy of sorts. Around this time, Canada had diagnosed thirty-three cases of the novel coronavirus. And soon after, we went into lockdown, with one confirmed death. So, when I saw that kitchen fire destroy my life and then take me,
I understood that it wasn't about losing my belongings, body, or even my loved ones. It was about the symbolic death of life as I had known it.
At the supermarket where I work, lines of panicked shoppers got longer, and carts larger. Toilet paper wars broke out across the Americas. I earned a couple of extra bucks an hour because I was now considered a frontline hero (not just a person who deserved a decent living wage). I was in relative safety while watching the horrifying scenes of migrant workers in India marching home like an exodus of castaways. I could scarcely imagine the pain of those who watched their loved ones die through a window instead of holding their hands at their bedside. It wasn't until the media censorship began that a sense of alarm rang through every cell of my body. Facebook's third-party fact-checkers were suddenly deemed a credible authority on material reality with their "false news" stickers. Videos of the ancient Ayurvedic tradition of eating turmeric and ginger for immunity-boosting were removed from Youtube in the interest of public safety. Even doctors turned whistleblowers were silenced and denounced. I felt as though I was living in the middle ages with public floggings and digital executions on the regular. Very quickly, the idea of freedom of speech began to look more like the freedom to speak only the popular opinion with no common sense questions allowed.
I reached my final straw when mandatory masking became policy at my workplace. The thought of covering my mouth when I had so many things to protest made my insides boil with rage. I needed to get far away from a world that appeared utterly absurd, and so I took a leave of absence from work. The volcanic anger I felt eventually turned to despair. I'd cry before bed and wake up in tears, uncertain of the source of my crushing grief. Each time I wished to share something, I'd shrink away in fear of being the latest victim of "cancel culture." So, I quit social media too. The fires of isolation, doubt, and uncertainty were raging through me, and I was throwing everything into their merciless flames. I questioned my marriage, my life path, my artistic work, and the purpose of my existence.
As a person who has spent her life celebrating the beauty of the human spirit, I felt ashamed to have slipped into a dark abyss just when the world needed voices of hope.
Truthfully, I needed them too. The last six months have been like living inside a whistling pressure cooker with nowhere to release the steam. No faraway trips to disappear on or new adventures to distract me from feeling lost. I was stuck in a 500 square foot apartment sitting in the dark spaces with myself, trying to figure out what would be left when the fire turned to ash.
A couple of months after my dream, I had another one. Like the one before, my house was on fire, but this time I walked through a wall and retrieved something of great importance: My laptop. As a writer and photographer, there is perhaps no other tool that holds as much data of my thoughts and ideas and enables me to tell stories. Creative expression has always been the primary pillar of my existence.
Any force that limits our self-expression in the interest of the common good is like convincing a flower that staying a seed is better for the garden.
I refuse to stop my ideas from blossoming and live in a society where fear is the dictator, and I, its loyal servant.
Though the future of the world we live in is still unclear, a vital part of me has finally awakened after a long hibernation. Words are once again collecting like raindrops and begging to be spilled onto the page. Fire can cause catastrophic destruction, but it also has the power to activate the life force of a seed. An inferno of conviction rises within as I reclaim the strength in my voice. What I choose to say might be unpopular or, at times, offensive to differing opinions. Still, I would put everything on the line for my right to say it. Because if we lose our self-expression, we deny our storytelling nature--the very thing that makes us human.
And that is certainly worth walking through flames to save.
Yamuna x
