Is it a cage or is it a maze?

There is a notepad on my table. It has a picture of me from the Manali trip that I took with my friends 2 years ago. Around the picture, the white cover has black illustration of icons of a thousand different things that are to be dealt with when you are working into digital marketing and copywriting. The book is spiral bind and the quality of the pages inside is pretty darn good. On the back cover, the same illustration like feel is there but only with the significant personalities at the previous company I used to work at. The DViO lingo and the nuances that might happen everyday in that office. It's a pretty good notepad, not only to look at but feel the pages and actually write in it. On the front cover it says, Ankita's Thinkpad.

Every morning when I would open my laptop, the thinkpad, sitting in the corner, would stare at me, not saying anything at all. But the other day when I was about to punch out, the illustrations of the thinkpad came to life and started yelling at me for ignoring it for far too long. It was as though they could not bare it any longer. I know, it sounds filmy, cheesy, delusional and oh yes, I wanted it to be an illusion, except it wasn't. "Don't forget to breath, you shallow, keypad stomping, robot" they yelled. They called out on me, cornered me, and wore me down. I was compelled to shut the laptop and heed some attention to the thinkpad. I picked it up, wiped the dust, smeared my fingers on the cover and opened it. The emptiness of the pages was far more riveting than I thought. I picked up the pen to write, but my mind was a lost track. I exasperated loudly, shut the book and thunk it on the desk. It was as though my wordless writer life caught up to me in that brief moment. 

Is it a writer's block or a lack of will to pen it all down? Am I thoughtless or in fact have too many to juggle? Not talking about our feelings seems far easier than encountering the emotions that you wouldn't in a lifetime think to exist. Opening up draws heavy breaths whereas shutting off is a cage of comfort. How do we learn to attach ourselves to it? A cage in itself is free of any shape, size or color. It has no fundamentals, no principles, no judgements, no desires. All that it has is a lock, which isn't the one that can't be broken, yet somehow we spend our lives making sure its fully secure and tight. Million different people with their million different prisons. In a world where vulnerability should be a virtue, we are all scared of it like an infectious disease. 

What would it take, I thought to myself, to open the cage that one builds for oneself. Because it's been casted with an enormous amount of self-loathing, second thoughts, anxiety, and all the other things that yes, you reader are experiencing right now. Closures and therapies might come and go but what's that one thing that would make sure that the cage always remains open. Will the key of friendship work? Can it overpower the intensity of not letting go? I opened my WhatsApp, scrolled down till the end where the people who were once a hero of my life, their chats were still there. I scanned through a few, seemed I had a heck of free time to be chatting that much. Then I opened the chats of people who have been there since I was 16 years old. Those chats were brief, full of screenshots of course, but no miss you and love you, no hugs and kisses. Those chats seemed like a PowerPoint presentation of our lives together, strictly sticking to the points and moving on. As I kept reading, even now, I could feel the cage creaking, opening slowly, and then shattering my hidden self to a million pieces. No, the cage doesn't break, it never breaks, it's indestructible. However, it can be opened, remained opened, and closed yet once again.

As long as we have people in our lives who don't wish you Happy Friendship Day but have been celebrating the hell of it throughout your journey together, the cage doesn't hold power over you, it's always going to be otherwise. Are you really that friend, I asked myself. Have you really been there to catch your falling best friend? Have you ever taken a portion of her grief that she had been processing? Have you really been there to hold her when she couldn't hold her legs straight up due to the overburdening weight of trauma? Have you celebrated her joys when she couldn't see the happiness in them? Have you just let her cry unabashedly, have you broken her cage and made her deal with the pain that she was trying to lock away? Have you ever provided the safe space for her to completely, 100% be herself? Are you in fact that person to be called someone's friend?

I couldn't stop these questions forming a storm in my head. They were out to get me. I felt attacked as being too hard on myself have seemed to be in my way quite often. I could feel the cage trying to trap me once again. Because I kept feeling that your words are as unworthy as the essence of your physical presence. The warmth of your positivity is as futile as the melting sorrow in a tight embrace. So, I asked myself again, are you really a friend in being or just wearing an armour of one? Are you the key to open your friend's cage or are you the reason she's already inside one?