Devika Soni, one of the JEB members for 2014, writes a moving, fictitious account of a young girl whose fondest memories are attached to her pillow. We love the emotional outpouring in her words and the conviction with which she portrays the character.
THE WITNESS
Covered in stripes of blue, green, red and white, a pillow – half her size – was placed in her cot. 19 years later, this pillow she loves has been with her every night ever since. It has witnessed tears, both of joy and heartbreak, held the dreams she whispers into it and has been a constant through all the nightmares.
To a lot of people, pillows are just another bed time necessity, important for comfort. For her, however, the pillow is what she wishes to take with her to the grave. It’s been through many defining moments of her life. It’s been with her at her lowest, when she sat in a room facing her demons, trying hard to fight back. It’s been an audience for all the speeches she dreaded to make but had to anyway. It’s sometimes also been a canvas for her to mindlessly doodle upon, a release of all held-in emotions. Her pillow has taken in every whispered apology she made to the person she did not go back to. Without judgement, absorbed her tears night after night when she cried of heartbreak. If you see her crying in her sleep, don’t panic, hand her the pillow and she will be taken care of.
It may seem to be made of simple cotton fibres, but for her, it’s a reflection of all she’s been through so far, right from infancy to adulthood, memories old and new. Something she held on to with joy and fear alike. It holds all that she’s lost and all she aspires to become.
Ask her why she loves it so much, and she won’t be able to put it down in words. To know what she feels you have to remove your essence and place it in something similar. Some might find it funny and quite odd to attach so much emotion into something so seemingly insignificant, but the day she realised that her people wouldn’t be around forever and death was sometimes cruel, that pillow was sure to hang in there for an eternity and beyond.
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