In the wake of reality, sometimes life seems hazy. Burnt toast, bitter coffee. Unpredicted rain wetting set hair. Unfocused eyes and eyelids that don’t bat against the rain. Unexplained recognition with songs that don’t rhyme and the faithful accompanist explicit joy proves to be with thoughts of days that are aeons away.
I walked through rain, not feeling it. Not sensing the wind that froze my fingers. I saw my reflection in an icy pond and frowned at the face that refused to smile back at me. I look around and I can see the wind picturesquely twirling auburn leaves in the air, into a beautiful and quaintly attractive mess, and with it, it takes away my sense of clarity. It’s a wonder I’m still standing I think. I continue walking. The rain has not ceased its slanting reminder of that part of reality that is beyond our control, prediction or preparation. I walk ahead. I see smiling faces. They smile at me and I’m not sure why. Our lives haven’t met and our paths haven’t crossed and yet I smile back. The partial curving of my lips up at the corners relays no emotion back to my heart and receives none from it. Smiles used to mean something from the place I came from.
I look up and notice that the sun clocks the day to night though the trembling friends of the sky don’t promise to show their light until much later. I feel this burst of emotion rush through my veins, not warning itself of its force. Without warning I feel something penetrate at my temples. Like “No mercy” personifies itself as nails being screwed in at my temples, but from the inside. I feel a flush warm my face. The cold suddenly slaps my skin. I run. I find an empty field and I cry out to the emptiness and my echo reminds me of how this place is crowded with solitude. A white tulip craves to invite the thought of a lover to anyone whose watery eye mirrors its’ longing. Fresh water ripples over perfectly aligned rocks. But I’m numb again and nothing inspires. The flush is gone. My temples are without pain. I look up at the sky and I find my eyes shutting against the rain. I stretch my arms out towards the sky. Eyes shut but warm and wet. Tears start from my eyes but I don’t feel them down my face. I begin to smile and I confuse my heart in the process. My tears are not that of joy and yet I smile.
I didn’t magically meet a bent old man who looked deep into my eyes and saw a fire melting the pain. I didn’t realize from the lone flower that it is in solitude that one’s beauty is most vividly revealed. The waters ‘dexterity would, in a dreamer’s world, wash one’s life afresh with reason and cause. Reality tears this garment of thought at the seams. But often, we have to feel beyond the pain because there, under the pierced flesh, safe from the bullets of life’s surprises, is peace. Sometimes the only way to reach it is to cut through you and very often, I reach it paying no heed to the crimson price I pay at the turnpike.
Every bird has a song that it sings to the world that sleeps through it. We are never to know if its high pitch resonates from sorrow or happiness. We believe that they are happy because our thirsting souls crave greedily for even the most insignificant sign of existing happiness. Just the same, every voice has a song. But every intonation is a story.
Sometimes my thoughts drive me crazy. I am 19. Will I be somebody someday? Will these thoughts fade into the oblivion of answers and solutions or pretermission? Will I walk without shielding my advance against the tips of the bloody swords that clangour on the battlefield of my mind? Will I have a story worth telling? When will I know, in naked entirety, that every element that constitutes me works towards being more than a representation of a cache of expectations? Will the only sense of unknotting that my clenched metaphysical being gratifies itself with be the extricating of incoherence from the fog of thought to the proof of paper? How much of today can we blame on the past? How much of the past will act as our leverage towards the future? How much of the pain that lace the rims of our chalices actually hurt us? How much of it do we use as indispensable bails from the prison of circumstantial reactions? Which part of me will survive the shaking sieve of time? When does the scaly coat of loss start feeling soft on our skin? How unique can I make my common story?
For so many of us, the entire world lays itself out on the paths that are yet to be marked by our treading. But for most of us, the blinds of regret and reality are too dark to see through. I do not have the answers to these voice craving, common questions. The silk of these expensive thoughts that cost me my peace of mind, weave each slow, deliberate metre of my story.
This reflection and organized domino spiral of my aspirations ironically began when the greatest of my hundred dreams came true. Often since that iconic fulfilment, I have wondered whether the dreams that we will reality to personify, are indeed for ourselves or for the million people in whose eyes we shine as Golden rays of invincible light.
