It must be a successful year for the poets and wordsmiths, plenty of misery to churn their tears into words, plenty of irony in the world around.
I looked at the dystopian scene around me, the mechanical beast beneath me hummed and roared occasionally, a numbing choir with another five humming of the same kind in different pitches and strength. All around, we looked so impenetrable, with every inch covered in clothes and hidden behind metals. And yet, and yet, when one slows down enough, with a slight relief on the tight twist of my right wrist, holding the reigns of the beast I rode, I saw eyes.
It was a wonder, something I never bothered with before. All that was there, all that could be human, were the eyes and I saw a million difference with each pair of eyes I blurred past. My beasts' fodder was quite expensive, the eyes of strangers weren't worth the cost, as much as I would like to explore the strangeness further. But I did try to see, to let mine be the bait to catch the others. Some were sunken, deep-set and dark. Some, in a blur seemed all but red. A numbness, an apathy that shielded their agony, or maybe their happiness? God knows I'm too pessimistic to hope the majority were happy enough.
It had been quite some while since I had driven this far from home. The last time I had been here, I was tired and anxious to reach home, having been suddenly exiled from what I took to be a life of my own, the wave of the disease lagging behind me by a few months in our race. It feels a little mellow, here I was living the life I had lived better when I was eight. When did I grow too big to live in the only place I had known most of my life?
My eyes flickering between the gravel of the road to the blur of masked faces I sped forth, one boy walked without any mask, kicking a rock as he went. He looked like the kid I had declared I was in love with in forth grade. I shook my head and looked at the potholes again, careful to not drive over his rock.
There has been nothing much to do, so I had turned to my tendency to dream. I could very well paint a familiar face onto every one that I passed by, and in my mind, I swear I almost knew them all.
Dreaming comes with its share of troubles and mine was that I was far too easy to startle. I seemed to be scared of everything, to have reverted back to childhood where tears welled readily in my eyes at the sight of trouble. I would walk two steps and turn around at the sight of men a couple years older than me, standing by the streetlight laughing among themselves. Everything seemed to be painted with a wet brush dipped in sinister. The hue was danger. In the crescent moon horns of the cows walking towards me. In the earnest eyes of the dogs and their open mouths, the way they seemed one heartbeat and a wrong step away from twisting into glares and snarls. I walked away every time, I felt the eyes of the other pedestrians on me, could feel their chuckles as a giant big women turned away at the sight of puny creatures a fifth of her size.
In the shops I made the choice to not be so meek and seek the eyes of ones I spoke to, just to let them know the awkward smile beneath the mask, or the silent frown. We were never raised to be so bold, and most of us speak with our eyes cast down. I wonder why we never learnt it from the whites, their prying gaze and demanding airs. I didn't have it in me to learn, and so I would return to gaze less conversations, my eyes cast anywhere but at their face. But when they do look back, I find a shore in the middle of the numbingly vast ocean, I find a little comfort.
There you are, another pair of eyes, just as lost and confused as I am. Let me now drift back to my line in time that will never touch with yours again.
I never quite liked to describe things as they were. It feels mundane, quite useless. Why would anyone want to go through their daily life and grab a book for a little escape, only to read about the same exhaustion of someone else's life?
Let me tell about the things that don't exist, let us share a sigh of relief, a break from this madness.
Let me tell you about the things I have created in my mind.
There were beings, clueless and innocent, running between the tall untamed grasses in my garden. I painted a picture of their tiny villages and tall towers of intimidating green things and endless stretch of black and brown soil. Did time stretch for their small lives? I didn't know. I decided they would be all women. Rest of the complications ignored. In my world there were never a lack of these creatures to worry about replenishing them. And they would all climb for weeks in their time to reach the buds about to bloom and make an expedition into the mysterious, dark center of hibiscuses.
When I collect my flowers, I look for them, and I lay the flowers gently on the slab of cement - in case their gentle forms slumbered in the scent of the bloom. In the depth of the cave formed by the petals, they'd walk freely. Dark wouldn't scare them. They'd be out and wandering about in the summer to watch in awe as the milky way bridged the void between Alastair and Vega, to watch Jupiter hold hands with Saturn and merrily sail past, with no evil creature to hurt them any time of the day.
When I get quite bored of them and their perfect life, I would shake the flower a little, or pluck a petal away, ruining their home.
I liked to think God, if there was one at all, must have been similarly bored. What entertainment is there to be gained from endlessly happy smiles and happy lives? And then I would sit and write a story in the folds of my mind, about misery and healing, about love and the pain in its wake. The creatures pray to me, or what they think is me. Please, let us be merry, please, let us sleep peacefully in the soft dark warmth of full bloomed flowers.
I would smile at them, and wish they could hear me, quite forgetting I am the one who made them not to be able to hear me or know me. I would tell them, if I could, which I could but I wouldn't - because my own gods never did and why would I, to these creatures?
But if I could I would tell them that I was just as in control as they were. Where my mind goes and so do they. And where my mind goes, it wasn't in my hands. I could never save them from me. And they would begin to wish I never decided that there will always be plenty of them. They would scream to me, end our misery, it is better to be not here than to live with hundreds with the same unshakable misery dragging us and tying us to the ground.
I would laugh - why, my dear little creatures? All I did was pluck your flower and take a petal away. Why must it hurt you so? But hurt they were and never knew how to get back, and by the time I could force myself to stop imagining, the things that were never supposed to be became quite similar to things that were always to be. Misery and loneliness follows, even in imagination. And I would get back on my feet to drink a glass of water, and cry to the paintings of what I had decided was my favorite god, and scream at it to change my life.
Somewhere I knew, I never quite grasped the lesson that came tied with my dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment