It just so happened that I stumbled upon one of the stored USB drives that had photos of 2015. I have not seen these photos for the last so many years, simply because I have somehow not added so many years of photos to my photography collection that I have maintained as close as my fingertips on the cloud storage. Life has just been such a frenzy of activity, work, this and that, that I just haven’t had time to sit and sift through and seek out these photos. There is a pouch full of USB sticks with a few years’ of photography stashed away. I needed a quick USB stick a couple of days ago and grabbed one of them and voila, I am entrenched in this memory lane. Folder after folder of the neatly organized monthly photo captures my camera lens had captured of the world around me, the life around me. The capture of my world as how I was seeing it. And some of them of course are selfies. Those were the early days of the selfie trend. I was not necessarily sharing the selfies with others. But I was capturing selfies nonetheless.

The memory jog hasn’t been easy. It has been a revisit, a rekindle, a dusting of the cobwebs. The sight under those cobwebs are not easy to look at. Those dark days! My heart keeps thud thudding just seeing image after image, bringing a rush of memories. The nervousness of those days. The jitters. The sorrows. The unbelievable dark life I tolerated, I withered, while trying my level best to keep up a facade.

If I can put these feelings into words, what I can describe is the tightness in my ribs that I am feeling, the suffocation that I am feeling within my chest, the soreness I feel in my throat, the brimming withheld tears behind my eyes that cries for that woman which is this woman, the burning behind my eye lids that feels the plateauing pain of the internal cries of suffocation, the pin-drop silence of a world full of people who are invisible to the grieving ‘strong-woman’. Alas, I am exhausted just by seeing 2015 flash across my eyes as 2D images. I inhale and exhale deeply, and yet am frozen realizing how much an auto-mode that woman was on chasing after survival and safety, security and a better future for her children.

I grieve for that women. I am compelled to rejoice that she saw herself to the other side. But my god! the sorrow of it.