I was 23 and I had never suffered an absolute crisis for words.

“Fuck! “  And “Shit!” came to my rescue.

You say these two phrases in varying tones of voice and you put everything you feel into them and believe me, they can be almost as good as shouting or bawling out loud. The pain alleviates and you transcend from one word to two words.

“Fuck you!”, “Oh fuck!”, “Oh shit!” and yours sincerely “Fucking shit!!!” lend you a hand.

I keep talking because I know that at this moment staying quiet can very realistically make me stroke or or send me into a comma or can give me a cardiac arrest. I tell A, “I think I’m going to die.” A smiles, staring into the dark road ahead of us .He asks me what would I like to drink. I say I need pain killers.I was in something like pain and my mind was logically offering solutions.

”We are not doping sweetheart, so tell me what you will drink???”I tell him I don’t think I’m going to be able to drink, eat or sleep for the rest of my life. He gets out of the car and is back with three cans of beer.

I can feel the air entering my lungs struggling to make me feel better, I realize my head is pounding, it is so loud, I wonder how the city can sleep when my head is making sounds of these bloody proportions. The pounding is becoming louder and threatens to explode my brains to tiny pieces. I start talking again. This time it is a merciless hail of questions.

“How the hell??”, “Why is this happening to me???”, “How did I get here?”, ”What the hell just happened??”,”What is this I’m feeling??” “Is this ever going to go away???”, ”how could I have not seen this”, “how could I have not known???”,”what the hell was I thinking???”

Questions, my brain reflexly answers by connecting the dots so fast. The split second muted answers leave me exhausted and turn down the volume of the pounding.

I can feel the confusion of my tear glands in the form of a stretching pain in the corners of my dry eyes. I want to cry but my mind tells me not to. The conditioning of years does not fail me, even though for once, right then, right there I could have really used a good cry. Then come the lucid conclusions.

“Dude, this is so wrong.”,  “I am so screwed”, ”This is the worst ”

The ,”I should have never done this and I should have done this” rant. Realizations. “This is why I did this and this is why I could never do that” rant. Suddenly you have one of the clearest moments of your life. It is like a whole new dimensional upgrade. Like someone giving you the 3D glasses in a movie theater and now everything that was hazy for reasons you could never understand suddenly becomes magically beautiful and real beyond your imagination.

You stand on a line between who you were till that moment and who are going to be beyond this moment. You look into the eyes of each other and you understand each other perfectly. You exchange that look of the eye that sworn enemies who have finally found their peace exchange with each other. You promise that you’ll keep these secrets between you and you and no one shall ever know the war you’ve seen, and the things you’ve been through.

“I’m going to be okay.”

A smiles.

I laugh. A tear finally escapes the corner of my right eye.

“One tear, I guess that’s all this deserves.” I say.

A smiles.