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Sandeepan Roy, Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

“Is that a teardrop? Wow, didn’t expect that, or maybe that’s quite natural.”

To see those little kids playing with each other, a game that made no sense whatsoever, and laughing hysterically—which in my opinion could easily be the sweetest sound made since the universe was created—my heart smiled, elated. But then, to realize that you can’t touch them, caress them or even be with them because these are all just images transmitted over the internet, when in reality they are thousands of miles away in another country, across all seas and oceans. It probably makes me the weirdest person alive, who can see such things and not say about how I feel about them. Oh, what I would do to have my own voice and not rely on others to speak for me.

And there she is, their mama. Their sweet and beautiful mama. And yet again I can only look at her like a stoic and say nothing, as always. It takes me back a few years, when she was not yet a mother, but was at the same place as now, halfway across the Earth, where even a direct flight would take half the time taken for the Earth to rotate once. I could see her smiling and crying at the same time and I could only search for words to say how much I missed her. Someone else read my thoughts though, and I was eventually able to put the words in writing to her, and I’m so glad about that. Yeah, that I’m good at, anything non-verbal. Texts, chats, emails—those are my thing, and with the technological boom, I’ve got a few more in my arsenal, like videos, GIFs, memes, snaps and tweets, and the list keeps growing.

I did hear somewhere that when God takes away one of your senses, he makes sure to add a super punch to some of your other ones, or maybe I might’ve read that somewhere. I can sense the mood of someone and change myself accordingly. I’m extremely good at knowing what my loved ones want, though sometimes I feel that I’m not good enough to give them that. I truly believe that true love and care don’t need words to be spelt out, as I could be with my precious trio without a single word being uttered, with my inability to speak and them being happy to just be with me, to talk and smile to me for endless hours, and that is all that matters to me. 

Years have gone by since my relationships began with these three angels in my life, but I remember every moment so vividly, right from dating, marriage, trips and the birth of the first princess, to her many milestones. Continuing on to the second princess being born, everything seemed to have happened in a flash, yet it was all so definitively slow in the moment, like time lapsing during a celestial event. Sometimes, I envy my mind, as I can never seem to forget—not that I want to—I can quite literally teleport myself into the moment just by remembering it and my family loves me for it, even though sometimes it feels like they love this super-memory power more than what I am. But I’m okay with that, not out of my stoicism, but because that’s a good enough life for me, the feeling of being needed for something and the feeling of being loved for something, where both somethings are a part of me.

I seem to miss using words verbally , even though I’ve never really used them. It seems so cool to actually be able to say what you feel, to be able to hear the person and respond normally, to be in an actual conversation instead of relying on keyboards or someone else to say for you. I see the wifey say “I love you” to the kids and them melting like butter, and it guts me to think I’ll never be able to have that impact on them. 

But then I’ve seen the other side as well. I’ve seen the most beautiful of times and the absolute worst of times, and I can’t imagine the excruciating pain one has to go through to put either of these into mere words, as words fall exceedingly short in existence compared to their moments, that can be felt, breathed, suffered and maybe just lived through. I’ve been on top of a snowclad mountain after days of putting in endless walking and surviving against the extreme cold, but once there I could capture the moment without a single word coming to mind to describe it. I’ve seen my partner in long hours of labor twice already and I’m deeply glad that I couldn’t use words to even try comforting her. Instead I just used my existence, unsure how helpful that was anyway. And exactly how I see the moment now, those two little sweet peas jumping on bed, throwing the pillows, and laughing like it’s the most comical thing ever, with their mother chiming in too, to even try to put that moment into words would be absolutely unworthy of the effort. So, I, being myself, just let the time run its course and concentrate on capturing the magic of the moment. 

“Your battery is low!” says the disturbance to the call, and I feel my energy running out quickly.  As much as I would like this to go on forever, I have to stop. The byes and the goodnights are said, kisses exchanged, and once the call is ended, he lays me down on the desk and plugs in the white charger into me. The instant rush of energy is so overwhelming  that I gleam brightly. This will take a while, so I can take a power nap. With that, my screen fades away and everything around me falls silent. 

—

I’m just another human on this planet with abnormal visualizations in my head and I try my best to use language to hold it together. Hopefully, it transforms into something loveable.