A Fractal Ache

Reading this post by the amazing blogger Asha wounds me every time. I walk around with the memory of the last many hurts and this new hurt, multiplying....to a fractal ache.

Read to me...

"‘The Reader’ was heartbreaking because it was all about reading and being read to. You walked around wounded for a long time after that. 

So great was your need to read to someone once upon a time that you walk into an Old Age home one day, and ask the Mother Superior whether any of the old people there would like to be read to. She says yes, but then they try not to let them interact too much with young people because that would make them remember the children who abandoned them a long time ago, and the 

carefully constructed living-in-the-present would come apart in mindless, endless grief.

While you are talking to her, an old man comes in to ask if his son’s money order has come. His son hasn’t sent anything in years, nor bothered to come to see his father or call him or write to him. But this is a ritual the old man follows every day to retain what is left of his 'sanity', and the kind nuns indulge him.

You walk out, old, abandoned and bent, you do not walk around offering your reading anymore.

You remember the teachers in 'Blackboards', walking around with knowledge that no one wants to learn. What is worse, having riches that no one wants, or having nothing to give?"

We are all either hoping for, or offering something in our own ways. Hercules and the damsel in distress. We alternate between roles...each as unfulfilling. Fortunate are those that discover their calling, and have those around in need of them. 

Like an earnest mother, suckling a wailing infant.