Familiarity breeds contempt. I was more or less someone that ardently believed in that. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I questioned if that belief stemmed from experience or fear. Was it the people I grew close to who disappointed me, or was it my inability to reconcile who they truly were with who I wanted them to be? In all those brief as well as long lasting associations of mine I always wondered if contempt was just a façade that shrouded my own skewed perception that failed to accept the imperfections and flaws that are associated with being a human being. 

Maybe deep down, it wasn’t the familiarity that disconcerted me, maybe it ran deeper than that, maybe it was my own fantastical expectations built on a rickety foundation that were crumbling under the weight of reality, like a feeble breeze bringing down a house of cards. I have always been someone that likes building castles in the air whether it’s about a person or about a happy future. The idea of which I so closely guard in the innermost parts of my heart, I nurture it with some highly romanticised and farfetched additions like a bee building a nest, each hope and each thought adding a tiny layer to the grand design. Each imaginary structure that I build are carefully collected fragments of small moments, fleeting images. 

When I say I guard these, I mean obsessively almost tethering on the verge of madness, I feed these fragments with so much pretense that I end up creating something that is utterly absurd - something much larger than reality itself. And as it is fabricated entirely with make believe nonsense, it is built on utterly delicate threads that could unravel with the slightest disruption. And as the grand castle chips and cracks, everything turns to smithereens, leaving in its wake nothing but dregs of despair, death of dreams, —a funeral of hope from where there is no coming back. With each fragment whispering a sorrow so deep, a true loss that no one but me can mourn. 

And although I fail to grasp the gravity of it all for a fleeting moment, eventually my mind corners me in the most brutal way. And it is in those moments that I see myself standing in front of vast, limitless void, a feeling so haunting that it threatens to suffocate me. Finally, the weight of everything that I have been ignoring for so long comes crashing down all at once. An epiphany. The problem wasn’t them. It was me. 

It has been me all along. My plain mind that likes to segregate things into stark contrasts leaving no room for diluted parts leaving me at a loss for comprehending the complexity of their humanity. All this makes me wonder how often I have judged someone harshly which doesn’t always stem from who they are, but because they fell short of the pedestal I had knowingly and unknowingly placed them on. 

If I were to draw an inference, the sense of betrayal that I smeared my mind and heart with wasn’t theirs, but mine. The illusion of glory and civility that I created was nothing but a travesty- a farce. So now, I must sit with the weight of it all, the mute cries of my own truths, the ones that I have ignored for far too long.