India played cricket, and Pakistan came to watch – at least that’s our takeaway from yesterday’s match. The mind wanders while experiencing trauma, and ours wandered to things that are definitely less painful than watching cricket matches like the ‘historic’ one on June 4, 2017. Feel free to add your own thoughts!
1. Running into a table, the corner shooting pain right into the junction between your abdomen and thigh. The sensation is so intense, that your first reaction is to yell an obscenity at the lifeless piece of furniture and kick it where it would hurt most (nowhere, as it happens). We’d rather feel that painful frustration than the rage during yesterday’s match.
If these corners could talk, they’d say, ‘walk right into me!’
2. The sinking feeling of dread when your smart phone lands face-down on a hard surface, like concrete, or the congealed-to-toxic-waste remains of your dreams for Pakistani cricket. It’s an instant dive into despair; and that undeniable feeling of fear is more comforting when compared to last night’s score.
It’s almost calming.
3. Stubbing your toe: You feel good, positive even, at the top of the morning and your game, ready to take on the world, and BAM! Toe to table. BAM! Toe to door. BAM! Toe to other oddly-placed hard objects, and suddenly the world seems devoid of any good. That pain, that betrayal by your own possessions – STILL better than the treachery of yesterday’s match.
Embrace this burn to forget the burn of the match we will never speak of again.
4. Speaking of a burn, staring at the sun for extended periods of time would be significantly more enjoyable than spending precious hours of your life to watch yesterday’s match. The retinal damage from direct exposure to sunlight would land like butterfly kisses on the eyeballs in comparison to last night’s slap of disappointment.
Totally worth it.
5. Having to speak to your relatives living abroad on the phone. Remember the olden days when our only mode of communication was the landline? Remember when someone from across the seas called and your parents wrenched you by the collar to make you speak to them for an uncomfortable, sweat-inducing five minutes of pure torture? THAT feeling you just felt in your gut, I’d take tenfold over to erase yesterday’s memory.
Relic of simpler times: when cricket games were played to win, and khalas existed solely as a voice screaming over the phone, inquiring about your grades.
6. Hot beverage burns: fans of tea, coffee, cocoa, green tea, hot water, what have you, come in all shapes and sizes and have one thing in common: they have all made the mistake of diving in too quickly. Going in for that first enthusiastic sip, scalding their tongue, and only tasting regret. That OUCH-inducing moment of molten liquid meeting tongue is exquisite when balanced against yesterday’s kick in the gut.
Hot, mean, and ready to melt off a layer of taste buds; yet still more rewarding than Pakistan’s fielding.
7. A literal slap in the face. Have a friend reel their arm way back, and snap one right onto your cheekbone. Ask mum to take put years of frustration behind one humiliating open-palmed smack to the face. Tell that dude at work what you really think of him and prepare to turn the other cheek. The pain will seem dull in comparison to the rude slaps of reality the Pakistan cricket team dealt us yesterday over and over, over by over, until the game was finally over.
Actual shot of the Pakistan team and every cricket fan watching yesterday’s match.
Sigh.
