Anniversary...

Ah… anniversaries... The annual commemoration of a past event... both happy and sad ones alike, yet always looked forward to as a day that is… special.

As a twenty year old… still (thankfully) short of the minimum age required to have other events that are celebrated year after year… the anniversaries I celebrate are simple. Parent’s marriage, birthdays… and those occurrences highlighting the teenage years that are just impossible to forget… even if one were inclined to make an effort.

It doesn’t matter if you are aware of the approach of the concerned D-Day, or if it catches you totally off guard… it never fails to inspire the feeling, at least for me, that I would otherwise associate with a golden sunset… and a soft burning anxiety that whispers of a lack of completion... how things still lie unfinished.

Every time I see people celebrating anniversaries… I always wonder if it has the same magnitude of feelings involved as say reminiscing a day of sadness or loss.

Marriages… are celebrated recurrently every year… tending to get grander as larger milestones roll past. Yet the occasion of a death… tends to get more pushed into a corner of the mind as the years go by. Of course it isn’t a event that deserves celebration in any form… but is the remembrance quite the same?

Do we really gradually forget the pangs of our pasts as we plaster over it with a growing list of reasons to spread the joy?

Call me weird… but I always feel more touched by gloom and darkness as compared to revelry.

To be quite honest, I don’t quite see the point of celebrating a birthday when we simultaneously pretend that the day when a close friend passed away is no different from any other.

Any event that sticks to the memory… that we mark down as something major… deserves to be accorded the deferential treatment that we seem to reserve for just the ‘happy stuff’.

At least that’s what I generally find myself doing….

June, August and October… three alternating months near the middle of the year somehow seem to contain almost all the high water marks of my past that I keep going back to. A lot happens in these few days… almost every year. Some spawned by the memories of the past themselves.

These days, almost entirely see me drifting in and out of attention to my surroundings. No matter what I may be doing… a part of me always dwells in the past… reliving the day when the thing really happened. Analyzing every thing I did… wondering what I might have done wrong… how things might have been different… for better or for worse.

Remembering the day and its incidents with a faint longing… that just cannot be quenched.

A day spent with the memories of the past… unforgotten… still remembered as vividly as though it had happened mere hours past. The pain and the laughter… The sorrow and the joy… all preserved in a crystal case… polished once a year. That… is an anniversary… not an empty show of grandeur. Not a selective highlighting of only the joy, glossing over the melancholy… but equally focusing on all those things that mark us and make us.

On this particular anniversary too… I shall be doing exactly the same.

While my physical body goes about a regular day… my mind shall retrace the same circuitous steps I had taken a year back…. I shall hear the same voices echo in my head and feel the same myriad of emotions that had racked me then. I shall see those faces and think those thoughts… all as I go about having an ordinary day.

The occasion was neither happy nor sad… bittersweet and unforgettable. Yet… all that can be said of it is… Happy anniversary….