Beyond the basic autonomy
Before numbers. Before letters.
Before sun, moon and colours.
Before everything I could’ve learnt about.
I learnt about my body.
Show us your eyes and nose, beta.
And I like a robot used to point.
And just like that
I got to know about the parts of my body.
And then I grew up a little.
And they taught me more.
How a human heart functions and how my stomach digests.
How my senses work and how my body reproduces.
And that’s when I thought, ‘oh this is all I need to know about my body’.
And then I did some more growing up.
Took life heads on.
Moved cities.
Did jobs and did travel.
Did groceries and did laundry.
Did crying and laughing.
Did running and pausing.
And in all that growing up.
I found that there is so much more to my body than what meets my eye.
Somewhere in between the lines of my feet, lives my freedom.
My heart may still be binded by a lot.
My feet not so much.
My mother made sure that
I drink a lot milk for my bones.
God knows when I drank some conditioned guilt.
And well now I find it deeply seeped into my bones.
And I have a certain sense of pride,
which resides in my backbone.
And I love it.
My backbone more than my sense of pride.
There is some fear in my mouth.
And don’t know how and when it will brim upto my lips.
But it is there and I can feel it.
If there’s hope somewhere in my body
it must be in my ears
whispering some magic time to time.
Oh my my!
How can i forget that i am a storehouse of pain too.
and call it a cliche or not
I believe it’s there in my stomach.
Oh and adding to the autonomy of my heart
Their is gratitude somewhere between atriums and ventricles of it.
And yes there’s love too!
The reason why I smile too much.
Because that too much of love resides in my smile.
And all the anger in me is safe in the drawers of my palm.
God! They are always burning.
There’s so much that my body is made of.
That has found space to seep-in between my cells.
There is so much that needs to move.
And every time I move and stretch,
I can feel the displacement of these emotions.
At this point I don’t want any of it.
The good, the bad, nothing.
I just want to empty my entire being into this universe.
I want to surrender and I want nothingness.
I want my body to come back to its basic autonomy.
Or may be all the new discoveries are also a part of basic autonomy.
Who decides?
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Originally published at https://shivalisharma.substack.com on August 18, 2022.