A Place of No Return
Photo: Karan Madhok
Personal Essay by Bharti Bansal: ‘The only way light can bend with no escape is by entering a black hole. You grow old enough to realize that whatever happened to you wasn’t the universe communicating. It breaks you in the worst possible ways.’
Is there a better way to define how inadequate you feel for this world? You enter without any hopes and aspirations, your lungs still pink from the protected environment of your mother's womb, kicking already as you cry, open your eyes, cry even louder. And then as life takes its course: not like the damned rollercoaster, but like a plane taking off, and never quite reaching the height it needs to maintain its flight.
You grow around people your age, some better at kicking a football, some already winning the musical chairs, while some dancing with flowers in their hair on annual day of your school. Yet there you are, sitting in the crowd, clapping aloud, while never once questioning your place on this earth.
Who teaches a child to be aware of their shortcomings? You grow up like a vine around anything that gives it support, never once finding the courage to stand on your own, and when life stops making sense in the ruthless teenage years, you think to yourself: ‘If it is supposed to be so chaotic, why do I feel so silent, almost dormant in my heart?’
You look around. Girls experiment with their hair, the music they like, the movies they want to watch, never once paying attention to what Einstein said (or didn’t). But there you are, writing your first science essay in class five, on Black holes, drawing figures to represent the event horizon. Suddenly, your classmates and teachers shocked by your supposed genius, praise you, almost worship you. But you never realize that, in Class 5, almost every other kid is doing something out of their reach.
This sense of self was honed solely from this essay you wrote: your knowledge gleaned from your favourite encyclopaedia, but giving gives you solace in knowing that you are more than ordinary. How could you be? The universe chooses someone for the invisibility it carries, to make it visible to the world.
Didn’t you recently find your initials on the star-studded sky?
It has to mean something. You navigate through life, almost floating on this belief invested by others in you. Special kids meant for special discoveries of this special universe. Carl Sagan must be right, mustn’t he?
You also learn that black holes bend the space time fabric, sending out gravitational waves. It then becomes clear that length just becomes a relativistic concept. You have surrendered six years of your life to a disease which keeps changing its name: Depression. Bpd. Ocd. Anxiety. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt.
We can’t be alone in this wide emptiness, defined by some variables. Does someone out there share this fear of being wiped away, suddenly, and forever?
It isn’t a bad thing to be so invested in stars that you start talking to them. Yet this is the only way a lonely child could communicate. A dark-skinned child, with bright-enough eyes, and an air of self-realization. One doesn’t usually see such acceptance at young age like this.
But what you don’t know is that every kid is sure about themselves, as long as they watch a bud bloom, and asks their parents if it will ever reverse back to its original state. The sense of loss that a child feels—almost inexplicable to be carried in words—makes them draw their first painting. A tree with a lonely house. Mountains nearby and a river flowing carelessly through it. You learn to make the slant lines around the sun. The warmth spreads evenly.
Yet, when this sense of loss never stops chasing you, you start saying to yourself this is how everyone must feel. Your normal is not a normal for someone else. Those developing breasts, now meant to be hidden, give you a sense of womanhood. Ah! What a delight to be like our mothers!
But this voice, never silent in your brain, keeps telling you about the event horizon. A place of no return from a black hole. Pulsars, quasars, supernova; these fancy words dancing in your head, like the grasshopper you saw yesterday, making you believe that everything beautiful must be unattainable. Or at least, unpronounceable.
At this age, you have suddenly started calculating the idea of love. The boy is surely looking at you, and feeling the butterflies in his stomach, too. Not all butterflies, however, are meant for love; some are out of pure hunger or the thrill of experimentation. You keep this supposed probability of love suppressed, for the rest of your school years.
Now, girls around you have become prettier. They are your only definition of beauty. You don’t know what sapiosexual means, until it is the only reason you convince yourself why nobody looks at you with a gaze of love, attraction, infatuation. You convince yourself that something must be wrong in the way your body has developed.
Now, the knowledge of black holes recedes back like widow’s peak, and gets substituted by something vague, with no answers or variables. You learn about Fibonacci series, the golden ratio for beauty, and find yourself looking for games that can calculate it for you. Numbers don’t mean much to a kid who has just realized that it is so human to desire and be desired. But you can’t express yourself to anyone, when you are supposed to be learning why Newton’s laws aren’t as effective for situations that depend on perspective.
Somebody must find you accelerating in your frame of reference, but wouldn’t that mean instability for another? You keep sliding through these doors which are supposed to be stop signs. Of course, you bang your head against them. You bleed. But what is growth if not a little destruction? Did nobody tell you that you are allowed to grow ordinarily? That you could merely smile through your days, merely grateful to occupy this space gifted to you by your parents, however unwilling you may feel within?
You learn about Large Hadron Collider and search for the Higgs Boson online. You learn everything you can about how the human imagination can inspire creation. You are fascinated by the theory of a black hole developing to be big enough to consume Earth.
The black hole never seems to leave you. It was as if you invited a wolf in your cave, and he is hell-bent to both love and destroy you.
All around you, kids grow in ways deemed normal, but who are you to judge? They play cricket, and you try to make your timid hands good enough to play volleyball. Of course, you fail. And this is new, this failure. This rejection that starts with a momentary, ‘Oh she doesn't even know how to play’ until it resides in your heart forever, a disclaimer of everything wrong with you. The same old universe with its same foolish signs.
Isn’t ordinary a way to normalcy? Why are you supposed to be tortured to be deemed a person worthy of attention? You aspire to be like the boy in your class who can make anyone laugh. You don’t realize that he has grown, too, in ways you know nothing about. But nothing stops you from overturning rejections. You will learn how a kid develops into a person, how trauma unfolds itself as emotional instability, and your old desires to be anything but ordinary convinces you that you could be a healer, too.
A black hole has a region called accretion disk, where all the particles that were lost to its massive gravity now orbit around, losing what once held them, spiralling and spiralling into this dense ordinary dead star that was once convinced of its own light. Now, everything that orbits in your mind is lost, tattered parts of your own self, your ordinarily special, foolishly optimistic self.
Nobody sets a linear path for growth as your parents may have once expected. There are setbacks, rejections, neglects, and abandonments. You tell a therapist how this circle of your little life has contorted to fit itself inside a box. He almost says that this is normal.
Ah! So, you aren’t special in your suffering as well.
Your pain doesn’t ease because of the memory of that essay, marked in permanent ink. Your heart doesn’t hurt any less, merely because this was destined for you. Genetics don’t console you for everything that went wrong.
Then, what is the point at all. To grow invisible, to have yourself pass through bodies of people who claim to love you, to be obsessed with rejections so much so that you make it your mission to be worthy of the acceptance you never received, to have the power to leave people just how they left you? What is the point of that first heartbreak after you confessed something akin to love to that person, or the rejections that followed, never once stopping after somebody told you how you were almost good enough, but not quite the exact match?
Black holes radiate high energy quasars. The moment you learned this word, you believed you had come closer to another hint from the universe. Years later, you also learn that black holes bend the space time fabric, sending out gravitational waves. It then becomes clear that length just becomes a relativistic concept. You have surrendered six years of your life to a disease which keeps changing its name: Depression. Bpd. Ocd. Anxiety. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Hurt.
But try telling that to a person fresh out of college, who believes they can still win the world. So what? he says. But nobody tells that I am ready to conquer the world kid that some of us can see the grains of time fall in hourglass. One by one. Drop. Drop. Drop. Six years don’t pass by in a blink of an eye. They pass so slowly that you believe breathing is how you calculate the time—or the gaps between it.
The science essay in class five has never left you. It keeps returning like a shape shifter. But you haven’t yet found the language to make another person understand your hurt. The only way light can bend with no escape is by entering a black hole. You grow old enough to realize that whatever happened to you wasn’t the universe communicating. It breaks you in the worst possible ways.
A child thinking about universe is poetic, until the child grows up to finally see how they are consumed by their own mind in same way. It is easy, perhaps, to say that all the neural connections in our brain mimic the patterns of distributions of galaxies. These are a desperate woman’s hope to claim her own bit of stardust.
But you see the beauty of annihilation, listen to the sound recorded by scientists of black holes. It sounds like Doom. Your heart flutters. A butterfly, is it? But this is not love. This is nothing even close to it. There is a faint beat in your heart which has been telling you your story the whole time. It becomes poetry for some. Language for others. Literature for some. Research for others.
You chose the black hole in class five because the idea of engulfing light thrilled you. Even at an age when kids make tents out of their umbrellas in their homes, pretending to be seated on a high mountain, you think about the weightlessness of the jump off the cliff.
You were always an ordinary kid, aching to stand out, somehow. So, you let the pain find you, again and again and again, choosing people who will never reciprocate your love, falling for people who will never see you in a way a bird sees a flower. You believe it to be a sign.
Your despair haunts you. It ghosts you, too. And then finds you again.
You are just an uncanny resemblance of whatever runs in your family, hidden from the outside world. You say it’s an inheritance: your grandmother had it when she almost wanted to embrace the abyss, when she lost her child aged thirteen. It has always seeped in your blood, like alcohol. It makes you dizzy, awake but disoriented.
You say to yourself that, perhaps, we all bear the curse of our blood. This is a naive way to say that all of this planned, a bond to assure your place in your family. But this thought provides you with no solace. Your pain doesn’t ease because of the memory of that essay, marked in permanent ink. Your heart doesn’t hurt any less, merely because this was destined for you. Genetics don’t console you for everything that went wrong. It rather makes you realize that every hydrogen atom in the stars is bonded within your body, so that no atom could rebel against the fate transcribed by some lonely proteins, no amount of passion could have led your parents to know that some of us are born that way.
You weren’t aware of it then, but your essay lacked symbolism. After all, you were just a child. A black hole didn’t always mean a celestial consequence; sometimes it is merely a drop in the heartbeat, when somebody wanted to know how you were, and you were ready to break open—only if they had stayed after your smile.
***
Bharti Bansal is a 24-year-old student from India currently pursuing Data Science. She lives in a small village called Hatkoti. You can find her on Instagram: @bharti_b42.
