In Old Age

Do you know when people need companionship most? In old age.
Do you know when people suffer the most crushing loneliness? In old age.
Do you know when people need friends most desperately? In old age.

Yet how strange — it is precisely in old age that this society imposes all manner of invisible prohibitions on choosing companions, and spending time with friends in one's twilight years is deemed the height of frivolity. Isn't that bizarre?

Those elderly who, after enduring prolonged loneliness and despair, take their own lives — that isn't suicide, it's essentially murder. Our society and its rules force them down that path. This society may not stand by your side, but it certainly knows how to kick you from behind. In this world, there is no disease more terrible than loneliness.

In youth, we can easily fill our time with work, busyness, or chatting and hanging out with friends whenever we choose. During the time we can somehow manage to pass in one way or another, we're told: find a companion, make friends, be joyful. Yet during the time when a person bows under the weight of age, drowns in solitude, dies horribly from isolation every single moment — precisely then, society almost makes it a rule to say: your choice of companion is wrong, seeking joy is unreasonable. Aren't these rules absurd?

The older people get, the more they lose life's colors; the more aged they become, the more alone they grow, loved ones drift away, friends disappear, even beloved children become busy; no one wants to give them time, or can. It is precisely at this time that a person desperately needs to bury their face in a beloved's chest and remain quietly there, to fall laughing against friends while chattering nonsense and giggling.
Yes, at this very age one needs boundless love, endless friendship, or so-called unreasonable joy. Yet at this very time, everything somehow becomes terribly wrong!

Those whose skin we strip with the "inappropriate" tag on the barbed wire of our own making — one day, as time rolls on, our own skin too will be torn on that same barbed wire, just like theirs.

I want there to be no age limit for love, no age boundary for choosing companions, no one to consider rolling around laughing heartily in old age as rudeness; let our perspectives change.

Let no one call wanting to marry at eighty a folly, let no one call wearing a bindi, blue saree, or matching bangles after fifty unseemly. Let no one call wearing red sarees after a husband's death pretentious. Let no one mock the widowed person who, after their children's marriages, remarries to ease their loneliness.

Come, let us save them. For some people, a companion is not at all an object for fulfilling sexual desires; at some point, people need companions simply to exchange a few words, to sit side by side and share a quiet laugh. Believe me, at a certain time companions are needed for nothing else but to gaze steadily into each other's eyes, to live in the sight of a beloved pair of eyes. Truly nothing more!

Come, let us change. Day by day, we too are joining their ranks, aren't we?