The timeless journey

What do I write with a pen which fades away after etching a few thousand words on a piece of paper? How do I keep a paper as a memento of remembrance when it reaches the bottoms of the dustbin in no time? Leaves die with the adagio of time; flowers wither in the storm of ignorance. What then do I hold on to, when the world is full of things which are compelled to leave some day?

An encumbering weight burdens my chest, the pain is intense. But why do I have to be the only one to feel this pain? Why is everyone rejecting me like a bad organ transplant? Why does the feeling of obscurity sting my conscience day and night? I have no clue. The answers seem blurred in a mist of ignorance.

They say expectations hurt. They’re wrong. Expectations kill you slowly, making you realize how little you mean to the people who mean a lot to you.

Life has taken an unknown turn, and I don’t know where to go. I’m standing at a crossroad, with so many untaken roads ahead of me, having no clue which one to choose. The only way I want to walk is walk back, to the place where I could make some repairs. But that road behind me is closed. There’s no looking back now. Gone are the days of ecstasy, and gone are those shades of freewheeling.

A new morning awaits me, as I duel to get past the shackles of abandonment. It’s not about the things now that my heart could do; it’s all about the things that it refuses to do. And I have to go on, until the scars of treachery are healed by the ointment of affection. I have to wait with stretched hands till the gaps between my fingers are filled by a soft caring hand. There’s so much to do and so much to get, I’m tired of walking this aimless journey. But I have to go on, because giving up is never an option.

The future is scary, but I can’t just run back to the past because it’s familiar. Yes, it’s tempting, but it’s a mistake. It’s more than time that I get a move on, try to negotiate with the shadows and still keep my own light burning.

The past was wet with tears of seclusion, but they have all dried up now. I am a hundred years older than yesterday, and time has camouflaged every wound in my heart. But sometimes, on a sleepless silent night, when her thoughts creep in stealthily in my mind, a tiny drop of tear walks out of my eyes and vanishes into an air of indifference. Yes, I cry in solitude, and my tears are the only friends that I’ve managed to hold on to. But in between the sniffles, when the cool night breeze ruffles up my hair gently, I drift along towards an age-old dream, a dream that is in my eyes since I had known to feel.

I sit and sigh as the euphoric scenes flash in front of my eyes, where I see her staring out of the window with her deep blue eyes, and sing to her in my black guitar. She listens intently to each word of my song and when I’m done, comes closer to me and places a moist kiss on my forehead.

All of this I want to be real, but for now, everything seems blurred in a mist of imagination.

No promise stands firm, no trust remains unbroken, only the dreams lay scattered like dead leaves of the autumn. And I drag my tired feet along, waiting for my time. Praying for today and dreaming for tomorrow, I keep walking, chasing the light at the end of the tunnel. I do not know where destiny has planned to end this journey, but my feet our suffering with the wounds of deception. I have walked a long way in hope for resurrection, and I have to walk on, until I reach the place which yet remains unrevealed.

And so I walk, on and on and on…..

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how difficult my life is, I guess its time to spare a thought on how impossible it is…  

The other side of me

                                   

How often has it happened to you that your life hasn’t cared to walk on the decisions you’ve taken for it? How often has your heart refused to go through the routine you’ve penned down for it? Surrendering to the urges and fighting the oppositions of your mind, how often have you repeated the same mistake which made you cry your heart out once? You’re right, it happens to you all the time.

True love, they say, happens just once. Fools they are, because love is not a variable to be determined. Instead, it is the only root which satisfies all complicated equations of life. How strange it is that love can only be accepted and not resisted. But it is even stranger that resistance to it makes you terribly vulnerable, a state where all your explanations to yourself do not seem to be a part of the answer.

It took me some time to free myself from the tentacles of affection. In fact not some, a lot of time. And during this time, I kept telling myself one thing and one thing only:

‘I’m not falling in love again.’

And I succeeded too. For the moment, my heart had stopped responding to the stimulations of love, my mind had shut itself to the forced awkward situation called dating. I had managed to turn into a perfect embodiment of abstinence. But no matter how permanent I wanted my resistance to be, it just faded away like the colors of an old painting.

I don’t remember the day, but I remember everything about it. I saw her. One flash, and there were streaks of lightening in the darkness I’d chosen for myself. She came like the winter sun and spread herself in my life like the rays of autumn. I began to smile again, my heart started to feel again, and my mind, my mind hassled to refresh the bitter experiences of past to stop me, but failed against her constant temptations.

Her skin glowed on a coating of velvet; her eyes stared at me with a promise of healing all my wounds. I looked at her and couldn’t look away. I tried not to fall in love with her, but couldn’t bear her distances. It took me a while to decipher the reason for all my anomalies, but now I know what it is. I’m in love again.

All resistance failed, the ignorance faded off. She entered my life without knocking on the door, and now I couldn’t get her out. She kept telling me that she wasn’t pretty, but I could never tell her that she was the prettiest thing I ever saw. I could never tell her that her eyes stared at me like daylight and narrowed like a golden deer when she smiled. Of all the things I could’ve told her, there was one thing which I never wanted to ask. But fate does not give us a chance to choose, it only gives time to regret.

‘You can never be mine, can you?’ was the only thing I managed to say to her.

And even though I could bet my life on what her answer could be, I swear that my heart skipped a beat at that one moment. The leaves stopped swaying, people stopped moving, everything seemed to be still as I waited desperately for her to lip the words ‘Yes, I can.’

‘No…,’ she said with a sigh, ‘but I love you.’

And I laughed at the addition of the last three words. They all say they love you, don’t they? The only unfortunate thing about their ‘I love you’s’ is that there’s always a ‘but’, either in the beginning or at the end.

‘Yes, she loves me,’ I tell myself, ‘but I’m just like the teddy bear she wants to cuddle.’ Its true, isn’t it? She couldn’t throw me away, but then, I’m not something which she wants forever.

But why am I so upset about this? It happened the last time too, only with a different girl! And the fool that I am, I let it happen to me again.

Why me? Why does it always have to be me? Why do I always have to let go of something I desperately want to hold on to? I have no clue.

But strangely, there’s a positive side to all of this. And that side of me makes me what I am. I felt again, I loved again, and if my fate would have pushed a little further, I could well have been loved again. I see this as a sign of hope, of happiness, of contentment. In spite of the invincible shields of obscurity I had pulled over myself, it took her just a smile to get through my defenses. Maybe it’s good that this happened to me. Because it told me that I’m probably not what I’m trying to become. I’m perhaps the self which I’m trying to run from. Maybe I’m made to love, to care, to expect. Maybe I haven’t changed at all; rather, I never really knew who I was.

They say everything’s beautiful if it ends well, and if it’s not beautiful, it’s not the end. Maybe there’s more to my love story. Maybe fate is too busy arranging for a perfect setting for me to walk into the perfect girl. And so, I’ll wait for that day. Because if being with the wrong girl was such a beautiful feeling, I wanna feel what it would be like to be with the right one.

And so I’ll wait, wait for that beautiful day. When the gaps between my fingers would be filled with that one hand I’ve been longing to hold. But till then, I’ve only one thing to say to myself:

‘I’m not falling in love again…!’