YOU ARE MY ARSENAL, MY ONLY ARSENAL

 

"It's not easy to be a football fan, it take years.
But if you put in the hours, you're welcomed, without question into a new family.
Except in this family, you care about the same people and hope for the same things.
What's childish about that"

They tell you, if you want to be a football fan, you gotta be careful whom to follow. It's like the connections you make, that one random conversation you have and you know.  This is special and you are bounded for lifetime with a silent vow, till death do us part. I was only a boy, and I had found mine in red and white.

We don't see eye to eye nowadays, not that I don't love any less or stopped caring, it's just out of my pure will to lead a less miserable life. One where your week isn't determined by what happened over the weekend. Your success  and failure not linked with the fate of something you gladly call yours. Yet, you feel it because you are part of that extended family which hopes for the same things.

I remember Arsene saying, every defeat felt like bereavement. I thought it's true until I felt what bereavement is, it's not the same but it does stings, you know it's the hope that kills eventually. The stubborn hope that things will fall in place, that this too shall pass.

The trouble for the passer-by who laughs at you is they only see what's happening outside, the passionate cries on social media or how this man-child has the audacity to walk in jerseys which hardly suits him. But there's an inside, believe me when I say there's an inside to what's going on. And we have our own reasons for loving things we care for. Sometime you can't understand, unless you belong.

It is terrible being that miserable, sitting in a corner with a phone in your hand scrolling through the twitter feed pretending to care about only football results, because the world is a terrible place and what's point of it anyway. 

I always wondered how did the brightest mind of Solomon go from "In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths" to "Everything is meaningless". I'm sure he wrote it after coming back from watching his favorite horse fail to win at the Jerusalem Derby or something. I don't know, maybe. No amount of royal wine would suffice his pain, so he went about took a new scroll and wrote the best one liner ever. "Everything is meaningless" (എല്ലാം മായാ ) The failure of your favorite club/player hits differently, and it does feel real.

It's a blessing that we are on this break in our relationship, I can't but imagine the ache otherwise I would have inflicted on myself. The narrative has been same for me, push away everything and get attached to one thing finally and fret about it for the rest of the days.

And yet something inside says, all is not lost. You could salvage something, things would work out. It would have been easier if I let it go completely rather than holding onto a possibility of favorable result. That's what hurts.

It's crazy to think how it's been, to live out life in seasons and not in years. Winter has dragged far too long, yet the seasons have shut still. You wait like the young boy who once enjoyed spring but couldn't hold it for long. That boy has long gone, he is not here to be found again. Yet, the tales he told about spring makes you wait, for the next season to come.

So you hold onto that thin thread, hoping for a better result. You do feel disdained for all this. But then you remember the words of the great man again; If you do not believe that you can do it, you have no chance at all. 

Hope shouldn't be a bad thing, it is a gentle whisper that says this moment isn't good enough. There can be a better day, a better season. No matter what, the season that doesn't end in May will always begin again in August. 

It's not easy to walk away from something that felt like home, if you try hard things might change but somehow the feeling of a home will always stay. And you still wish them success deep inside and every day you pray to be back home when spring arrives.