“I cannot perceive beyond the shadows I live in, I cannot seek
beyond what I cannot see; I cannot live beyond what I cannot choose. When
you walk past me I am merely a thought that shan’t linger beyond the
next vision you encounter, may be a bird, a falling leaf, or just a
musing, but I shall not live that long, for you to look back and wonder.
But that does not mean I am not there, that I do not breathe, or that I
do not exist.”
Lost in my reverie I could hear all this ringing in my head, throbbing like a bickering thought, incessant and belligerent. It troubled me, like the sight of a dead bird, or a diseased stray dog. But it wasn’t a dog, a bird, or a pile of uncouth, unsavory entrails in an abattoir. Staring into the oblivion with a deeply entrenched vision, wrinkled skin, emaciated and hopeless, she sat there in the middle of the road. Her eyes had dried up; not that I expected them to rain like that of a dryad on a famished earth.
Staring at her I could very well picture a fading black and white painting, her eyes glistening in light and I could see the minute shadows between undulations on her skin. The silence on her mien travelled down her back to her feet in a vibrant way, leaving out all the worldly noises in their pitiable places. Was this some meditation, or some trance that made her an unperturbed and an undisturbed monolithic idol?
A part of her clothing covering her head would move a bit in the malaise breeze barely revealing her hellishly black yet bleak hairline. Her chapped lips, her parched cheeks and her inundated thoughts were like a painting in the Louvre. Just that here there was no one to draw interpretations from her eyes, the color and hue of her skin, and the unending impossibilities of her dilapidated life. This epic seemed like it would stay this way for eternity, but it did not. Amidst all the burst of colours she moved her knee a bit revealing something. All I could sense was a fettering stone in the continuum of sanity, of the self-proclaimed normalcy of one’s existence. Whatever she had on her lap just lay there in peace. Was it a child, an animal, a toy, or an apparition of a thought so strong and resilient that it took the shape of a vision I could not wipe off the parchment of my mind? She seemed to cherish the presence of that object a lot, she held on to it for a long time, longer than time; maybe she grew this old holding onto it for this long, a thought, a mere lifelessness in one’s lap. Did she just turn her head, did she just nod, in dismay, in despair, or was it an illusion of my overly hopeful hope trying to mend the retardation created by her in my mind’s sanctum?
Pondering on all this I kept observing her. She looked down; I could see her eyes fade into a cascade of disbelief coupled with realization. I saw her hand move, the veins sticking out of her skin, as if they had relinquished their duty as the bearers of her blood. Her frail fingers twirled a bit, perhaps to feel the thing on her lap. I could imagine the immense pain she had to undergo to make her move from her current poise. But, how could I imagine something I could never feel? She moved her hand to and fro, in a way of reassuring herself of something. But she abruptly retracted; for once I saw the tiniest spec of life in those eyes, teardrops waiting to dry off like a thousand such before. It was strange how people walked past her without looking at her, without looking at those eyes and those lips, and that thing on her lap.
My reverie had turned into a trance, a limbo where sanity, logic, and all ideation collapsed into one singularity; a metaphysical singularity, synesthetic and bright. Suddenly there was a question that flashed in my mind. What was so amazing about her? Was she beautiful, was she holy, did she achieve something great, feed millions out of an empty bowl, walk on fire, or spoke to God? No! The only thing she did was to dissociate me from my perception of reality, from my version of starkness and brought me to a world of cogitations that I had never seen before. Some bystander might pity her, throw some money at her. Some writer might pen down the apparent miseries into a journal on human sufferings, or some social worker might want to “rehabilitate” her into a popular world. I wouldn’t do anything of that sort. I would just sit at a distance and witness reality unfurling all its colours as it did then.
In such moments of illusion imagination is like fungus, it shall grow wherever it can. I would imagine her dancing and singing. I would imagine her in a beautiful red dress. However, my imagination would fall in the colourless pits of her darkened eyes that would swallow every thought beyond her current state. I turned blind to the dancing, deaf to the singing, and the redness of the dress turned to a shade of grey like a wilting leaf in scorching sun. Her presence was profound like an Event Horizon where nothing could escape, eventually collapse to nothingness. What remained was a mangled perception, a tangled up motley coloured realization of everything, carnality, happiness, serenity, anger, lust, humour, melancholy, and eventually a stupor.
I looked at my watch, five minutes had passed. Strange, all it takes is a look and the passage of banality stops, the entropic world halts, giving way to a stoic and controlled dystopia where everything happens slowly, in our knowledge and with our consent, even if it may destroy us.
I was possessed by a realization, an understanding of the situation I was in. What importance did she bear, that I was so captivated by her existence, an existence that resembled that of a billion others? Her presence was as important as her absence. It never mattered to me whether she was there or not, but till she was, I was tethered to her.
“I do not intend to be you, to see the world as you may, to feel the world as you would, but I would be you, to feel what it feels like, not to be you, not to feel what I felt not being you. I shall be you, just to celebrate not being you. But I fear, what if being you is better, is more fulfilling, or, what if being you is no different. What if I can never give up being you?”
Her presence, her sheer existence made me sick, made me feel that the lack of starkness, the lack of truth is an easier life. She did not have a life, she had clockwork. What was happening to me, why was her absoluteness in truth giving way to doubt? I had started to sympathize with her, with her condition, her solitude, and her burden. I wanted her to feel better; I wanted her to be better. The standards of morality would mark me as immoral, but it was true, what generally stood out as her misery, was her beauty, the reality that she carried with her embellished her all the more. She was devoid of any wants and desires then, she did not know riches or comfort, and that is how I wanted her to be because she made me feel nice. I was feeding onto her being. I do not care! She shall die like that, she shall perish in want. How does it matter to me? It shall be a glorious death, quintessentially true, how death should be, without people to mourn, without people to glorify. I wanted her to be there for a little while longer. She made me pity myself. Yes! Self-pity is the opium of life. Why was I there, staring at her for this long? Because she made me realize how foolish I was in desiring all that I desired. I could have been her, living for those few minutes and then dying; only to be thrown away like the carcass of a road kill. I knew she had no qualms in dying; it would not have made a difference to her. I guess it was the thing on her lap that forced her to live. Why did she bear it? May be she never wanted to, may be fate had its way with her on a weak and feeble night. I do not care for her miseries, they are not mine. However, the more miserable she is, the more I pity myself, and hence, the more I opiate. After all, I am immoral by the standards of what gives meaning to my life. Does it take immorality to see real beauty? Perhaps it does, perhaps it takes a sick man to know what it is not to be sick. How can I feel what she is, unless I am what she is not, and become what she is?
I walked away, my Catharsis was done, and maybe she died, or grew older to die one day. I do not care, the Catharsis shall not last that long for me to care. What shall last is a memory, of a day when I saw what it is not to be me, to be something worse, and realizing how worthless being me was, but how necessary worthlessness was.
____________________________________________________________________________
Lost in my reverie I could hear all this ringing in my head, throbbing like a bickering thought, incessant and belligerent. It troubled me, like the sight of a dead bird, or a diseased stray dog. But it wasn’t a dog, a bird, or a pile of uncouth, unsavory entrails in an abattoir. Staring into the oblivion with a deeply entrenched vision, wrinkled skin, emaciated and hopeless, she sat there in the middle of the road. Her eyes had dried up; not that I expected them to rain like that of a dryad on a famished earth.
Staring at her I could very well picture a fading black and white painting, her eyes glistening in light and I could see the minute shadows between undulations on her skin. The silence on her mien travelled down her back to her feet in a vibrant way, leaving out all the worldly noises in their pitiable places. Was this some meditation, or some trance that made her an unperturbed and an undisturbed monolithic idol?
A part of her clothing covering her head would move a bit in the malaise breeze barely revealing her hellishly black yet bleak hairline. Her chapped lips, her parched cheeks and her inundated thoughts were like a painting in the Louvre. Just that here there was no one to draw interpretations from her eyes, the color and hue of her skin, and the unending impossibilities of her dilapidated life. This epic seemed like it would stay this way for eternity, but it did not. Amidst all the burst of colours she moved her knee a bit revealing something. All I could sense was a fettering stone in the continuum of sanity, of the self-proclaimed normalcy of one’s existence. Whatever she had on her lap just lay there in peace. Was it a child, an animal, a toy, or an apparition of a thought so strong and resilient that it took the shape of a vision I could not wipe off the parchment of my mind? She seemed to cherish the presence of that object a lot, she held on to it for a long time, longer than time; maybe she grew this old holding onto it for this long, a thought, a mere lifelessness in one’s lap. Did she just turn her head, did she just nod, in dismay, in despair, or was it an illusion of my overly hopeful hope trying to mend the retardation created by her in my mind’s sanctum?
Pondering on all this I kept observing her. She looked down; I could see her eyes fade into a cascade of disbelief coupled with realization. I saw her hand move, the veins sticking out of her skin, as if they had relinquished their duty as the bearers of her blood. Her frail fingers twirled a bit, perhaps to feel the thing on her lap. I could imagine the immense pain she had to undergo to make her move from her current poise. But, how could I imagine something I could never feel? She moved her hand to and fro, in a way of reassuring herself of something. But she abruptly retracted; for once I saw the tiniest spec of life in those eyes, teardrops waiting to dry off like a thousand such before. It was strange how people walked past her without looking at her, without looking at those eyes and those lips, and that thing on her lap.
My reverie had turned into a trance, a limbo where sanity, logic, and all ideation collapsed into one singularity; a metaphysical singularity, synesthetic and bright. Suddenly there was a question that flashed in my mind. What was so amazing about her? Was she beautiful, was she holy, did she achieve something great, feed millions out of an empty bowl, walk on fire, or spoke to God? No! The only thing she did was to dissociate me from my perception of reality, from my version of starkness and brought me to a world of cogitations that I had never seen before. Some bystander might pity her, throw some money at her. Some writer might pen down the apparent miseries into a journal on human sufferings, or some social worker might want to “rehabilitate” her into a popular world. I wouldn’t do anything of that sort. I would just sit at a distance and witness reality unfurling all its colours as it did then.
In such moments of illusion imagination is like fungus, it shall grow wherever it can. I would imagine her dancing and singing. I would imagine her in a beautiful red dress. However, my imagination would fall in the colourless pits of her darkened eyes that would swallow every thought beyond her current state. I turned blind to the dancing, deaf to the singing, and the redness of the dress turned to a shade of grey like a wilting leaf in scorching sun. Her presence was profound like an Event Horizon where nothing could escape, eventually collapse to nothingness. What remained was a mangled perception, a tangled up motley coloured realization of everything, carnality, happiness, serenity, anger, lust, humour, melancholy, and eventually a stupor.
I looked at my watch, five minutes had passed. Strange, all it takes is a look and the passage of banality stops, the entropic world halts, giving way to a stoic and controlled dystopia where everything happens slowly, in our knowledge and with our consent, even if it may destroy us.
I was possessed by a realization, an understanding of the situation I was in. What importance did she bear, that I was so captivated by her existence, an existence that resembled that of a billion others? Her presence was as important as her absence. It never mattered to me whether she was there or not, but till she was, I was tethered to her.
“I do not intend to be you, to see the world as you may, to feel the world as you would, but I would be you, to feel what it feels like, not to be you, not to feel what I felt not being you. I shall be you, just to celebrate not being you. But I fear, what if being you is better, is more fulfilling, or, what if being you is no different. What if I can never give up being you?”
Her presence, her sheer existence made me sick, made me feel that the lack of starkness, the lack of truth is an easier life. She did not have a life, she had clockwork. What was happening to me, why was her absoluteness in truth giving way to doubt? I had started to sympathize with her, with her condition, her solitude, and her burden. I wanted her to feel better; I wanted her to be better. The standards of morality would mark me as immoral, but it was true, what generally stood out as her misery, was her beauty, the reality that she carried with her embellished her all the more. She was devoid of any wants and desires then, she did not know riches or comfort, and that is how I wanted her to be because she made me feel nice. I was feeding onto her being. I do not care! She shall die like that, she shall perish in want. How does it matter to me? It shall be a glorious death, quintessentially true, how death should be, without people to mourn, without people to glorify. I wanted her to be there for a little while longer. She made me pity myself. Yes! Self-pity is the opium of life. Why was I there, staring at her for this long? Because she made me realize how foolish I was in desiring all that I desired. I could have been her, living for those few minutes and then dying; only to be thrown away like the carcass of a road kill. I knew she had no qualms in dying; it would not have made a difference to her. I guess it was the thing on her lap that forced her to live. Why did she bear it? May be she never wanted to, may be fate had its way with her on a weak and feeble night. I do not care for her miseries, they are not mine. However, the more miserable she is, the more I pity myself, and hence, the more I opiate. After all, I am immoral by the standards of what gives meaning to my life. Does it take immorality to see real beauty? Perhaps it does, perhaps it takes a sick man to know what it is not to be sick. How can I feel what she is, unless I am what she is not, and become what she is?
I walked away, my Catharsis was done, and maybe she died, or grew older to die one day. I do not care, the Catharsis shall not last that long for me to care. What shall last is a memory, of a day when I saw what it is not to be me, to be something worse, and realizing how worthless being me was, but how necessary worthlessness was.
____________________________________________________________________________
