The old souls’ chronicles 6 : the great calm restored 15 November 2025
Courtesy freepik.com
Tony caught Aron’s body just before it hit the ground. He had not thought it would be a good idea to leave Aron all alone but he had had to agree to give him the possibility of processing his grief fully on his own. Although most of the youngsters after his generation had foregone their right to experience fully emotions, especially the negative ones, he had felt that Aron was different and deserved a chance to process his feelings fully even though it was grief. Tony had never thought that the chancellor’s suggestion of a new world without too many emotions was a good solution. The chancellor had made it seem like it was the heightened feelings, especially the negative ones that caused all the problems in the world like wars, distorted enactments of feelings such as with psychopaths or sociopaths, all the terrible things that criminals would do, animated by anger, hatred and all other negative feelings.
With the first generation, it had been a mass administration of drugs coupled with lobotomy-like procedures in order to dull the new generation’s feelings and reduce their emotional responses. A generation later, it was mainly drugs and after that, it was through processes akin to eugenics. Tony and his wife Hegat were one of the couples that had chosen to stay the way they were, able to emote freely and increasingly getting a select status of being called “the old souls” because they were the last of the old generation that was able to freely feel and express their feelings. They never gave in to all the solicitations of lobotomy or drug use to make their emotions softer, but preferred to stay the way they were, capable of feeling the whole range of emotions up to their most extreme levels. In fact, not only did they retain their feelings but they also developed the skill of conveying such feelings to others through touch and worded expressions.
Tony looked at Aron. So much for creating a generation of youngsters who did not feel too much or seek to have negative feelings he thought. Here was one of those youngsters, one of the first generation that had had negative emotions removed both by procedures and drugs, yet he had some of those negative feelings left and wanted to experience one of the stronger more negative ones such as grief. The remainder of his generation only felt a sense of justice and equanimity and the chancellor had created generations of obedient fun-loving youngsters who only lived for the mild fun of a certain series of acts but did not care for what was happening at the top nor ever want to contest any of its rulings. This was how you governed easily a population, he thought, by creating them incapable of strong feelings.
Tony pressed his palms against Aron’s temples and started massaging them while speaking to him soothingly about love and how it alleviated all negative emotions. He told him that even though his wife had died, the love she had for him had never died and was present all throughout their home. He told him to try to gain access to these feelings. With a small swipe of his hands around the room, Tony collected the feelings of love that were still present throughout it and passed them onto Aron’s temples and his occipital region. Aron reacted with a shiver and a smile started spreading across his lips before he opened his eyes, slowly gathering the scene around him. His eyes met Tony’s eyes and tears welled in them as he realised Tony had saved him. He felt the love swarm into his chest and fill him with a sense of relief and happiness. This was not the fun feeling that most of his generation experienced but a full blown sensation of happiness. Inside him a great calm was now replacing the relief and happiness he had felt. It was as if nothing could ever break him again and he felt like he had evolved in such a short time into a different kind of being, stronger, more resilient, more capable of feeling things almost like the old souls.
"Once again" - Short Dance Film / Stefano Terrazzino & Paulina Biernat / Music: Abel Korzeniowski
The old souls’ chronicles 5 : grief’s stronghold 2 November 2025
Courtesy freepik.com
When Aron reaches his house, he feels that strange foreboding though laced with excitement. He had not spoken about the foreboding with Tony as they had only worked on the initial feelings of grief together but he could recognise it from the scriptures of it that he had got on the black market. Tony did not know it but he and Hegat were not the only ones who carried the forbidden feelings that were not to use with the youngsters. There were other old souls that did not abide by the rules because they lived in between the old and the new worlds. They did not go completely against the system like he had attempted to do by aging and actually resorting to real food. They just lived in between, got sustenance from the transformation of energy and slowing their aging process but without keeping the chancellor’s prescribed liquid in their veins to remain young forever.
Aron opened the door and once again the preternatural form of his wife came to greet him at the door. He took the pulse tube and shot the grief into his veins. The sorrow that ensued was unsurmountable, and he caved in like a wick abandoning its flame, dragged under by the liquid released by the candle. All life seemed to have escaped his body and there was no healing to come from Tony’s hands like when he had first administered grief to him through his hands, mind and heart. His eyes searing with pain, Aron looked around the room wondering where the ethereal form of his wife had gone. All of a sudden, it seemed like she was darting in and out all over the room, jumping from one place to another. Each time he saw her, it was like his heart was yanked out of his body and the tears were like flames dousing his cheeks, his throat and his heart just below.
He winced and tried clearing his eyesight each time but the searing was back every time he saw her. He tried to rise from where he had fallen but to no avail. It was like he did not have legs anymore but was just a mass of grief, flames and a jellylike body. He wished he had not given in to his folly of experimenting such a strong sensation on his own and what more in the house where his wife had died, as she no longer wanted to continue living. It was strange that his wife, such a young one who was much younger than him, had given in to the same troubles that Tony had been going through. She was no old soul so why had this nostalgia and desire to die befallen her? Aron had thought that through the knowledge of grief he could understand what she had gone through but it was all too debilitating for him. He felt his heart burn with the grief until he could stand it no more. I am going to die here all alone, he thought before he fainted….
I decided to draw a picture of my mother after some grief work I had been doing in relation with the fact that I had not been much present at her side when she was alive. I had done some grief work earlier, closer to when she had passed, but that was in relation to my sorrow of losing her. What had not been achieved earlier, as I had not yet come to terms with it, was overcoming the grief that when she had been ill, I had not been present as I was busy raising my three children alone and had to overcome several hurdles, both financial and time-based. That special grief that had its roots in guilt, was much more complicated to overcome.
When I was doing this latest grief work, I had a very sharp sense of my mother talking to me, using my pet name, and felt her presence very vividly to the extent that I could feel her around me. It was just like how she would hug us when we were children or teenagers and I could feel her tangible presence around me like during those times. I remember now with nostalgia those moments and am irked by the fact that I would just tell her to stop squeezing me and would wriggle out of her tight hug then. As a teenager, I did, however, adore my mother and would always run to the shops to purchase what she asked me to and do all kinds of other errands for her.
My mother was my hero and throughout my life, even when I was not by her side, it was always her example that would lead me to make important decisions in my life. I never stopped working whether pregnant or taking care of my children while juggling a part-time then full-time job together with my higher studies. She always told us to never give up our jobs, to never give our partners control over our stipend and to always privilege the children over the partner because it was the children who needed protection.
She was a nurse and a wonderful one at that. Whenever I went to the hospital where she worked, countless patients would tell me what a great nurse she was. At some point she was taking care of burn victims and I wondered how she could stomach day after day all the difficult images she had to see and the wounds she had to tend to. She was a beautiful person both outside and inside. I hope this portrait gives just an inkling of how beautiful she was.
And as always, mixing the visual, sometimes the spoken but always an audio of the moment, I give you a song which I was listening to when I got the inspiration to draw the portrait.
The old souls chronicles 4 : pulsing grief 29 April 2024
Courtesy freepik.com
Tony wonders whether Aron is aware that he has now fully become a different being from the other youngsters and young adults. Aron sees in his searching eyes the unspoken interrogation.
- I always was different and even wondered if I was a freak because I had these stronger feelings that were considered as undesirable within my community.
- You are not a freak, Aron. You feel more than others although nothing as near to what we old timers felt, the feelings that all of the world had before strong negative emotions were frowned upon. We never imagined that things would go as far as to stop us even from grieving the death of our loved ones. Now we are just relegated to the role of donors of “funny feels”, “happy feels”, “quirky feels”. In brief anything that is more on the happiness scale and nothing that can touch the extreme sadness scale
- I know what you mean. I have been studying you and your wife for some time now before you went rogue and disappeared. It was a godsend when I learnt of your presence in that restaurant. What an opportunity to finally meet you and make the request for the deeper emotions.
- Why did you want to access this range of emotions?
- Ever since my wife died, I have been having this strange bubbling of emotions that felt like nothing I ever experienced before. Sometimes it’s like a rock was laid on my chest while I was sleeping. I could barely breathe and felt like a pit in my stomach but nothing near what I felt when you gave me the pulse.
- We normally don’t give that range of emotions to youngsters like you because they have a very strong effect on your psyche. With the seclusion of the deeper range of sad emotions, there aren’t many psychologists left so it is difficult to get regular appointments with one.
- I don’t need a psychologist. I can handle my emotions
- Very well. Here is the pulse tube which I have filled with the energetic imprint of the grief I pulsed through to you. Make sure nobody else puts their hands on it and call me if you are in too much pain. I will come as quickly as I can to grant you the solace.
Aron takes the tube containing the precious pulse and bids Tony farewell before leaving the library. As he is on his way back to his home, he thinks about his wife that he might see again in her preternatural form. He decides that he will let himself feel the full extent of the grief as experienced with the help of Tony. This time, he would be using the pulser and would not have Tony’s rapid intervention with soothing solace but he knows he needs to do this for his own sanity. No more half-lived emotions dragging him into a recurring downward spiral. It is now the time to experience it fully within his own house, while looking upon the ethereal form of his wife and put this behind him forever.
Months had gone by since she passed away yet the memory of her wane face was still imprinted in my mind. I was in Egypt when she died and my brother and I were by coincidence in the same neighbourhood in Cairo when we got the news. We both tried desperately to get back to her to be in time for the funeral but I was only able to catch the evening flight the day after she had passed away. Our family members had delayed the funeral so that we could attend. I arrived almost the morning of her funeral, weary and still in shock. I was still unable to face the reality of her demise. Later in the morning, I sat by her side still numb with the shock of the news of her death. She looked so frail wrapped in her light green and white saree that she used to like. The lady who tended to her had wrapped her in it and it was tightly secured in a few knots over her head.
I asked my aunt if we could unwrap the top as I wanted to kiss her goodbye and my aunt unsecured the knots uncovering her face. It was pale, thin and drawn. I kneeled and put my lips to her forehead and the moment I did so it felt like a dam had opened up in my heart and the pain seared through. The tears flowed down my cheeks uncontrollably as I kissed her forehead and held her. After a while I regained composure and sat beside her as other members of the family moved around arranging everything for the funeral. People came and went offering their condolences and asking me if I remembered them but I recognised none, my mind blank to any memory of their faces. I don’t recall much in the days that followed, except for the aching sense of grief that would not leave. I could not believe that she was gone and I would see her no more.
She was an ordinary yet extraordinary woman. She had lived a difficult life after she had married my father and joined him when he had wanted to return to his home country. Ostracised, unable to speak the language and to adapt to the surroundings she was not used to, she had concentrated all of her attention on us, her children. Later, when she had returned to her home country, it was always visible that the experiences she had lived during that period away from her home had significantly marked her. She remained despite all the hostility she had faced a woman with a positive heart and a desire to always help. I remembered warmly now – although it would drive us crazy when she used to do it while we were young, how she used to gather all the stray cats that had been tortured by some awful kids in the neighbourhood and slowly nurse them back to a healthy state.
She was a beautiful woman, not just outside but also inside and her thoughts were always about how one should be a better person and make the world a better world. She believed in the virtues of kindness, respect, caring, independence and equanimity. She lived her vocation in all aspects of her life. A nurse by profession, tending alternately to children with severe diseases or to third degree burn victims, I remember how the patients would talk of her with praise and gratitude. It was not that she was a soft woman as she could be really tough on us sometimes, having spent several years taking care of us on her own. It was that she truly cared about others and was a nurturing human being. It was not by accident that she had become a nurse, she had always wanted to help others hence her choice of the medical field.
I returned to my daily routine but felt listless as if something had been broken. I realised that it was because with the death of my mother a whole aspect of my life was disappearing. When we lose our mother, it is almost as if the last link to our childhood is broken. Mothers are so emblematic of those times of innocence when we could huddle up closer to them and feel comforted and safe. I had spent many a night tucked underneath her arm when I was raving with fever and waking up tightly held by her had always given me the feeling that everything would always be alright. Somehow, the fact that she was no longer there made me feel like I had lost the possibility of feeling that comfort again. There is something unique about the comfort a mother can bestow and that nothing else can replace.
One day, I was feeling particularly destitute and thinking about my mother. It pained me to think that a woman like her who had cared so much for others had died all alone. Indeed, by a rare coincidence, my sister-in-law had not returned before her carer left and in the thirty minutes or so between the leaving of the carer and the return of my sister-in-law, my mother had breathed her last. I was thinking about how I had been planning for my children to visit their grandmother again that summer and how this would no longer be possible. My thoughts were focused on my mother and I could feel the grief well inside me again. I had stopped writing as I could not bring myself to pen anything and the weeks were turning into months.
As I walked, cloaked in my grief, a shrill call from above caught my attention. There, just a few meters above my head, a seagull flew with its arms alternating between stretching and flapping. It seemed to fly in a criss-cross pattern, right above my head, all the while calling shrilly. I stopped and looked at it and it stopped on the rooftop to the right of my head. I moved onward and the seagull called out and flew over my head again. From the entrance to the compound where I lived until the building where my apartment was, it continued to follow me calling shrilly all the while flying above my head in that curious criss-cross pattern. As I reached my building and looked up at it again, it turned its head one way and the other almost as if it were sizing me up. I felt as if it were a messenger from above as it called again shrilly. I thought of my mother again and as I smiled up at it, I could feel a weight lift off my heart. I looked around me and noticed the intense purple of the lavender in the pot and the bright yellow of the fallen leaves. That sense of comfort would always be there. Her body may have disappeared but she was still there, in every bird that flew, in every leaf that fluttered, in every beautiful thing that shone on in this world around me. I smiled up again and the seagull flew.
Mother (in Arabic) and Woman (in English) both dedicated to my mother – Geetha Balvannanathan
The Old Souls Chronicles 3 : Aron’s trip to the extreme and the Superim Library’s forbidden data
22 August 2017
Courtesy twinflame1111.com
Tony looks back at Aron and Hemshaw as Hegat’s cube takes off slowly from the point where it had been hovering, waiting for them. He realises his wife is guiding the cube to drive slowly as he had lost the capacity to sustain balance within the cube. It was indeed a while that he had not used it to avoid being discovered through the cube’s biometric data tester.
Hegat turns and smiles at him reassuringly and he feels his love for her well up inside him. It strikes him as strange that he could pass so easily from a point of wishing with all his being to die to a diametrically opposed point where he wishes he could live forever together with his beloved wife. Hegat can sense what is going through her husband’s mind. She lays a hand on his forearm and squeezes his hand with the other.
Don’t beat yourself about it my Love, she says in her soft though grave voice
I am so sorry to have made you waste all those years, says Tony
It is okay now. We just need to forget the past, says Hegat
I love you so much, says Tony. I don’t want to ever lose you again
We will live together forever, says Hegat.
Tony looks back at Aron. He realises that he has a huge responsibility in communicating the vital emotional scale. He also realises that Aron is going to have to apply for a special permit to experience the full scale of emotions and that he, Tony, would need to endorse that request. The youngsters have only known mild emotions and have never experienced passionate feelings. It was the new way of being and none of the newborns had ever wanted to live the full scale of emotions that would include grief and other painful emotions. When they came to the Old Souls, it was merely for the positive experiences emotions. The youngsters had coined the series of emotions that one could experience through the simulation pods at the Superim library or through direct contact with the Old Souls the « feels ».
Youngsters often refer to the Old Souls with an endearment term such as Paps Feels or Mama Feels depending on the gender of the Old Soul in question. Tony and Hegat had taken into their ethical custody a large number of youngsters and most of the youngsters had been very promising and willing to share the knowledge they acquired to other youngsters. This multiplying effect had made Tony and Hegat the most popular and respect Old Souls so it had been a bad surprise for the health facilities authorities and the Library when Tony had stopped coming in to help youngsters.
Hegat looks back again at her husband and smiles as she sees his face resume the appearance it had just before he had left. She embraces him fully and can feel the peace restored within him flowing through her. Tony holds his wife tightly cursing himself for having been so foolish to have made her leave and praising himself at the same time for having had the insight to give in instead of making a dash for the door when Aron and Hemshaw released him as his earlier egotistical instinct had guided him to do.
Back at their home, Hegat goes through the documents they have to send to the health facilities and streamlines all the data through her’s and her husband’s retinas. Tony lets Hegat pull him and center him as he has lost his knack to get the image straight enough in front of the retina reader. At the same time that they are going through the papers, Aron reaches home, his heart beating as he opens the door and expects his wife to be there again in her preternatural form. He has never told anyone about this nor about the fact that he experiences high levels of emotions including those of what he is taught is called sadness and grief as per the Superim library. The first time he had logged in with his official id but as soon as he had realised that the emotions he felt were considered undesirable, he had only connected to off the net data to learn more about his emotions. He felt that Tony could help him but was not sure whether he could trust him fully. Something tells him however that because of what Tony had gone through he was probably the best to help him out.
The next day, after some insistance of his wife to go ahead with it, Tony heads towards the Superim library where he has been restated as Old Soul tutor of feels. At the door of the library he finds an impatient Aron who tugs at his sleeve and almost pulls him into the library.
You seem to be very eager, says Tony. I have not seen someone so eager among any of the youngsters. Your emotions appear to be rawer and stronger than anything I have seen in decades
Yes, answers Aron. I feel a lot of things stronger and I also feel things that seem to be undesirable as per the data condensers in the Superim
That is a standard labeling for anything that goes beyond what is in the greatest good of the group of young ones. If one is granted special access then the sky is the limit to what can be experienced
Can I have access to emotions that are not happiness emotions ?
You can have access to anything that is authorised once you make a request and I endorse it
Would you do that for me ?
Of course, I would.
Aron ponders this and then proceeds to the counter where he fills out the form through his thought process jacked into the Superim’s authorisations virtual plug. Once it is ready, he signals to Tony who adds his thought of endorsement of the request. Shortly after this the Superim library opens up a section that was hidden until then and Aron and Tony are requested to go ahead and enter the section. Tony knows for a fact that it does not need to be closed because not only nobody would venture without endorsement but also the section is walled off etherically and does not show as existing anymore for the youngsters.
Tony picks out a data condenser and puts it in Aron’s hands. It has on it a skull and two roses. When questioned by Aron, Tony mentions that it is the effect of the crossover on people in love as he has sensed that Aron’s quest is connected to that. When Aron had first touched him, Tony had felt something that resembled grief and had dismissed it at the time because Aron was a youngster but now, with Aron’s insistance, he realised that what he had felt was true. Aron looks at the data condenser and then back at Tony.
Not only do I feel a lot more than others but I also feel emotions that the Superim pod could not describe, says Aron
That is because you were only looking at data condensers from the general section. Here you will find an explanation to your feelings, says Tony
I am not sure how to deal with this
You need to just go ahead and process the data condenser and I will then upload you the related emotions so that you can then download the related feels into your body
Will I become a freak if I do this ?
I know you think of it as freakish but back before the Time you were born or that which is available in data condensers of the general section it used to be the standard feeling of everyone. We had not only the happy emotions but also the sad ones and both types could be light or extremely strong
I wonder how you went through all of that. I can barely endure what I am feeling these days
I think I have a solution for you but please download what you need to download
As soon as Aron signals to Tony that he has finished downloading, Tony summons within him all the grief felt for the loss of his wife and communicates portions of it to Tony. At the same time, he takes great care to also quickly communicate the feelings of joy that he had experienced when his wife had come back into his life. Even though barely few minutes have separated the two feels, Tony feels Aron cave in under the pressure of the grief so he quickly puts him in a chair and infuses him with solace through direct physical touch. Aron who had passed off regains consciousness and slowly smiles at Tony. I feel he says and in his eyes Tony can read the birth of a new sort of being, neither the Old Souls nor the youngsters but a blend of both…
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