SOLITUDE

This word has been bothering me for quite some time now. How do you explain what solitude is? My friends tell me that I never message them/enquire about them. They say I am a bad friend. So I tell them that I am busy.

Busy. That is the one word with which we can replace ‘solitude’ because like I said its too hard to explain what solitude is, how wonderful it is to have those little moments to yourself, to be cut off from everything around you. Unless you experience it, you never understand the silence or the peace. Of course, why the hell would anyone be bothered about that silent space when you have the constant notification bells, pings and a whole virtual world that keeps you ON-LINE, ALWAYS.

The world demands you to stay online. By online I mean, to be in constant communication. If you fail, you are an outcast. You have to keep up with enquiries, ‘hello’-s and ‘how are you’-s. The good friend always asks for you, texts you regularly, comments on your status and posts and keeps the friendship ‘alive’. Always. In contrast however, there is the bad friend, who fails to be online. She forgets to message, give comments, likes, cute emoticon filled replies, she may even forget that you are there. She is definitely bad. After all, how can you forget a friend, that undeniable part of your soul and life.

What I do know is that, I belong to the latter group. I cannot make sense of the constant messages, talks, costume discussions, gossips, cute emoticon replies and all that cute silly thing we do. I have begun to have this strange feeling that the more we have the social platforms the more demanding we have become. You can be available all the time- when you are sleeping, having food, watching TV, on the toilet, lying down with a fever or in the ICU(if you are there by a misfortune), having sex, even in your grave- you should find time to RESPOND and keep contact with everyone. The break times/ a day off is for you to call up and enquire about your friends. Its not whether you are able to or not, its a mandatory code of relationships now. You miss calls/ forget to respond to messages, you are avoiding them or just absolutely uninterested. The dualism is so real. The online & the offline friend, which equals to the good and the good and the bad friend.

I have never been much of a social person mainly because I am too scared of people. At times I am. But mostly, I often stay to myself, with my little things, my little spaces of solitude and me-time (cooking food, long drives, eating food, just lying down). Of recent, I barely have time for the me- moments with so many other commitments and errands. And of course there has been a major impact on the online- status. I fail to keep up with the contacts. And now I have earned myself a seat among the ‘bad friends’ who are too selfish. The offline friend.

-N.

No Big Deal

This is a revival,

a comeback

at the behest of my mind.

After all,

there are so many many times

we turn back, revive or return to

lost and forgotten chances.

This time

its for those phantoms in my mind

that floats over the brim

and sneaks out through my sighs & tears.

Here

I could perhaps drive a stake through their hearts

and silence them for a while.

Tinted Glass

Look at that worn out glass. The glass with coloumns of colour. Tinted green, red, blue and orange. There, right there. Right at the edge of you nose. Wait. Don’t you see it?It has been there. All along. Right there before your very eyes. Colouring everything that you see.

Right at the edge of our noses, perches  a metamorphic glass. Projected from within the  sludgy marshes of the mind. Marshes that run deep. Deadly. And you are already caught deep within its slimy hold. From their depths they sent out hues of poisonous fumes and paint the glass: anger with red, envy with orange. And perching upon the nose they change the coloumns of colours, colours with which we see the world.

That tinted glass is Perspective.

We see the world in colours. No. Let me correct. We see the world through colours. A woman in red, and her friend in blue. A family in yellow, the colour of happiness. A colleague in orange, and yet another one in white, for you like her a lot. My friend tells me the day is a breathtaking  golden, as I wonder how the world looks like the white shroud of death bearing down upon me by inch. Look around you. You see. Look again. You start seeing the colours. We paint everything in colours. Like you mark your pills: deadly, daily, only if necessary. That mirage of colours.  Colours all around. Colours with which you see the world.

And then there are the cracked glasses where the shards of colour hangs precariously onto the frames. And through the cracks there peeks a world unblemished by colours.

Perspectives. That is how the world is created. Painted in hues of joy, love, gratitude, dissapointment, regret, anger, despondency.

The world has no colour.

The Burial

How do you bury happiness?

Safe and deep from where it won’t escape again, with the earth’s sigh. Or leak into to the waters below and poison each drop that you are to drink. So that they don’t creep up on you, from the shadows, from around the corners. Cloaked in a deadly white, they follow you, breathing upon you echoes from the past. They put words and lines from the past in front of you unawares, catching you around the feet and bringing you tumbling down on the floor. Before you know it, you are a mess. Shame, regret and anger mingles with pain and march their way down along the cheek, leaving a trail on your brittle mask. There! Behind you, you can hear it cackling loudly at  your fall.

That ghost of a happiness, long lost. The vengeance it seeks will do only with death.

Bury it!! Bury it alive!

As it did me.

 

The Ceaseless and The Evanescent

27th August, 2013

Today has been a day of rediscoveries; the discovery of the reader and the writer in me after years of feigning ignorance to both. The feeling, however, is far from happiness or contentment; rather there is a feeling of a change with a bit of determination that is to last longer this time than the last.

I was musing today, how the word ‘tomorrow’ has the power to imprison and paralyze today. The unchanted mantra of ‘tomorrow’ unknowingly occlude us. The word is a symbol of ceaseless hope that makes us blind to the to the wisdom of the moment. Hopes and expectations are the two blinds that man has drawn over his eyes; obscuring both his sight and insight. They say that, its our choices that make our life. But, what is the choice between? Good or bad? Fair or unfair? Its neither. The choice is between the permanent and the transient. The ones that last and those that don’t. The ones that ensure happiness or success or existence forever and the ones that challenge these. Life is an interplay between choosing the ceaseless and the evanescent. But, the permanent is only an illusion. There is nothing that is permanent. The permanent, in fact, is made of  the brief moments. Listen to our heartbeats; they never cease from the time of our birth till the last breath. Listen to them closely; they are made of brief alternating beats and pauses. They are perhaps, the most evanescent of all, with the time period of half a second. If the beat lasts more than a second, it becomes the pause; and if the pause persists, we cease to be.

Man is constantly in pursuit of the mirage called permanence in everything- happiness, contentment, emotions, satisfaction, love,  fame; all of which eventually cease to be the ceaseless that we are hunting. The mirage is never ending; like the Grecian puzzle where the closer you get to the door the farther it seems be.

Well, the genius, the prankster and the deceiver, are all the same- our own mind. Follow the genius, beware of the prankster and control the deceiver before it does!

my resignation

it was one of my greatest dreams to stand in front of a tsunami wave, to bask in the might of the towering wave, to drink in that fierce pleasure of the moment when you see death before you with all its vigor to take you in its hands. today i felt that might, the might of  43 fingers pointing at you, the vigor to decimate you, i felt it, i felt the towering power of accusation. yes today with all its strength and might it came down upon me crushing me beneath it, crushing out the last bit of confidence i had in me. it send me into a darkness, an oblivion like the Lethe. from every side, their words pierced me like a dart of cocaine, spreading a numbness all through my body, their stares like a chill that froze me to my core. my tears congealed, my words broke, my fingers trembled noticed by none, but them, the ones who stood beside me, with me. they asked me to explain, but how could i explain something that i couldn’t explain to myself. they asked me to vent it all out, but how can i when they were locked with grief and guilt. they kept on asking me what solution i had for this, the situation i made. i had no solution, no answer and no voice. it was all silent around and within, like the silence that surrounds the eye of hurricane. i was the eye; the silence was my death, and the gale raged around me, pointing its fingers, sending arrows of words. it poked me, it burned me, it killed me, but yet it was all silence within me. i had lost the hope, the courage, the strength and the confidence in me. the dark silence decimated me. i had only one solution to it all- my resignation. for them and for me. for their complaints and for my ‘self ‘. i had no other option, no other resolution, but to end that long dream of mine, a dream i had always cherished and prayed for.

Today, i resign with all my willingness from the post of the prefect of the class.

the animal within us.

how many of us realise that hidden animal within ourselves.?not many. they seldom come out. it remains so silent in many, that we call them the most calm and serene. in some others it comes out at times, but they silently tighten the chains around it. some lock them in innermost cellars of their mind, that we blame them of being silent and introverts. and in some, the animal springs out at times in a wild fury, blinding the person. the people around him call him mad, they mock at him for being delirious. but none of them try to understand him, to soothe him, to let him calm down, to tell him its okay, its all a part of  living in this world of the crazy. no one explains it to him. he is left alone, all alone to fight with that terrible monster inside him that drives him out of his senses into darkness, into the darkness of hopelessness.  finally to be dragged into the  abyss of death which he chooses with his own hands, to break away from the hands of the animal within him and the ones around him. there he is blamed for ending his own life. but then who should be blamed? he or the beast or the world????????????

black & white

in every sphere of our lives we are surrounded by people and we categorize them according to who they are for us, how important they are for us. we have our most dearest dearest ones (like my sister says), our dear ones, our okay dear ones, then our okay ones. and then there the not so okay ones, not at all okay ones, the hated ones and the most hated ones. we divide them all into groups and we behave with them on how we have rated them on our relation with him or her.  but seldom it seems, we think of those we hate as the ones who teach us the most, as the ones who show us the value of our dear ones. its them who teach us how special those special ones are. had it been not for them we wouldn’t have known how beautiful it is being with our dear ones. after all had it not been for the color black, would we ever know the  beauty of the color white. ???

back again to blogging!

it was a cruelly forced one, this return to blogging. i almost forgot that i had a ‘date ‘ with my blog today, but here i am finally with my keypad under my fingers, by pc screen leering at me, and my empty brain yet rummaging for ideas to put down in here. so lets hope to see the best of  me. hopefully!!

the ‘S’ trauma

now, before starting my next attempt in blogging, let me tell you, dont misunderstand ‘S’ with anything else, coz its definitely not what you infer from the title [sorry about that remark, couldnt help it]. it is something you might have never experienced, not even once. and the person whom am describing by this title, does indeed know about this, but again she might have never experienced it. afterall, knowing is not experiencing, and by experiencing does not mean you know about it know about it. now that idea may seem somewhat complicated, but this idea of complicating things infact arose from this trauma i am talking about.

when she started being a trauma, i don know. she was close to me, i know. she was special to me, i know. she was something priceless for me, i know. but when did she start being a trauma, a condition in which i lived, i don know.  was she that close to me that, in her absence i forgot to live?? was she a part of  me, that got separated from me as she went away?? did i live through her?? i don know, or i never knew. never even once i thought, when she was with me, when i  made her my closest companion, my best friend, that one day she will be gone, one day she will have people she cherishes  being with and never did i think that then i will have no more place in her life. this why did i make her a trauma for me. i dont know. now when she is far away from me, now when she can no longer give me company, now when she cant be with me, i miss her, or i thought so, coz i now wonder whether it is just missing, coz like i said it is trauma, now that i realise it, like i said – the ‘S’ trauma….or as she says  the soumya trauma…..