The Slap...

Smack!

The impact resounded in every nerve of my body. It forced my head to turn away from the blow, recoiling from the stinging impact…. I felt no sensation whatsoever… yet. I knew the pain would follow soon.

The sense of shock gradually ebbed away. I stopped being in a trance, stopped thinking that this could not happen… I finally woke up.

Angry tears of humiliation and shame began to gather in the corners of my eyes…. I began to feel my cheek begin to grow warm… the redness and heat it induced, the ultimate insult during my moment of shame.

My vision blurred rapidly... my eyes stared at nothing but still managed to capture all that mattered…. The students all looking nervous… cowed by the fact that one of them was being made an example of…. Their gazes avoiding mine, as I sought to avoid theirs…. I felt alone, in the spotlight of my own theater of hurt….

All that was years ago…

Some unremembered misdemeanor in some forgotten school’s small classroom… had earned me the only slap I have ever received in my life.

The only slap I have ever received….

I don’t recall how I earned it… I don’t recall how young I was then… (Certainly young enough to have been in shorts, to have cried my eyes out later, and be angry at the ‘slapper’ for a long time…) I only recall in vivid detail the slap… and the few seconds immediately afterward….

Throughout my childhood and fleeting youth, that one incident, till date, remains my single sharpest recollection of the past….

I have wondered why this is the case…. I certainly have had heaps of far fonder and brighter experiences since then to have left their impressions more deeply embedded in my memory than this… yet somehow, they all fall short….

Puzzling and intriguing I find this….

Once I used to think that the reason for this anomaly being a fact is that… well, it's being a bad memory…. Like a recurring nightmare of our deepest rooted fears that we keep revisiting in our subconscious….

Like a thought of what the worst can be… the perfect companion for my pessimistic mind….

I discarded this particular, for want of a better word, theory in favor of a more probable one.

I felt that this was the only one instance in my entire life where I actually found what we all seek to some varying extent… redemption.

We all have done things that we ourselves know or at least feel were not entirely… right…. And we all feel a tiny bit guilty about these deeds.

How sweet then, would the feeling of being liberated from these… petty, gnawing worries be? How great would it feel to know that your past has been wiped clean and you can now move on free from the fear of some greater judgment awaiting you in some distant time and place? How peaceful to know that the slate has been erased, and you can begin anew, the ghosts of the bygone days… truly bygones at last….

After that one instance, when the clock of my crimes were reset… there have been no other…. I have been reprimanded frequently… but never again, did I have the feeling of everything being over… that I could breathe in peace again… that the worst was behind me….

Make no mistake… I do not fantasize about being slapped in public (or private for that matter…) again…. For one thing the sheer number of them I probably owe the world by now, to atone for my ill-spent life, would be overwhelming….

I merely wish… that I am redeemed… just this once more… by any possible means….