Eternal Longing

I am thinking about you today. 

And I am trying to write about you today. 

Slowly, the reality of your existence has been eroding away from the soil of my mind, by the misty winds of painful memories. And a fog is gathering on my mind and on my perception of reality. And what is the sense of reality? Only that which is temporal, imperfect, impure and that which will die tomorrow. You will die tomorrow, and then me. 

As the sense of reality erodes away, the surreal fog takes over, and your existence takes on a new form. Detached from a sense of reality, and all its imperfections, it is now pure. You live inside me now, transcended beyond reality, pure and innocent, like the first morning on this earth. You live inside me now, a part of me which is immortal. You will live even after I die. 

You are a sweet pain, a mild heartache which is almost pleasant. The edges of your memoriesare blurred into the incoherence of my sub-consciousness and you become a part of it, present in all and everything behind a thin veil of incoherence. 

I know it’s a dream, a dangerous dream. A downward spiral towards insanity, and then…emptiness. 

But I can’t stop. It’s as if you are calling me. And it’s all painfully beautiful, here inside me, that I can’t break the spell. 

There is no end. Only an eternal longing…

An Ode to Winter

The world has changed. It’s no longer your daily world, full of humdrum, everyday sadness and happiness, lost in the delirium of chaotic over-activity leading to nothingness. It’s nothingness itself, in the deepest sense of the world, anything but that. The winters have come.

The winters have come. And the campus is a cold paradise, an icy heaven of staggering beauty, untethered from the shackles of space and time, existing in the oneness and nothingness of eternity.

It’s evening, and I’m walking in the campus. It’s amazingly beautiful. Everything around me is bathed completely in mist. The fog has conquered the world, conquered the light. The fog floats all around me, it permeates my skin, and reaches down to the very core of my bones. I breathe fog, and its icy smell alters my sense of reality. A hazy, grayish darkness has taken over the evening, a darkness which feels so permanent that it feels that we have been living in this artificial darkness for eternity, a darkness complete in itself, which doesn’t need light to complement its nature.

The street lamps along the road are waging solitary, futile struggles against the all-encompassing fog, disappearing into a dreamy oblivion as one goes along his path. The path itself is blinded by fog, obliterating its past with each footstep and veiling the future with white shadows of uncertainty. It’s like being marooned on a mobile island, which never lets you get away from it, forever stranded amidst the infinite sea of fog.

The trees have become more silent than usual, and every tree, with a few stranded rays of dull light, coursing through it, reminds me of weeping willows. It’s as if they’ve gone to sleep, finally weary of the eternal commotion around them, taking the sound of the birds, and the wind, with them.

The talk of two students passing by me, about coding in android, is blasphemy for my ears. I think, “It’s sacrilege! To talk about technology as you walk around in the enchanted kingdom of winter.” The silence around you admonishes you for your wayward thoughts.

Aahh…winters! Winter evokes in one, the deepest, most primeval of emotions, inexpressible in any languages, existing since ages when language was yet to be invented. The wordless, pristine, other-worldly emotions, which can only be approximated by death, silence, love, sadness and a feeling of profound, eternal loneliness. You are weighed down, crushed by the weight of your emotions which you can’t comprehend, emotions which resonate to something beyond yourself, beyond humanity, beyond God, something which can only be called Nature.

Amen

Blankness, for those who’ve seen too much in this world
Slavery, for those who were given too much freedom
Guilt, for those who thought they were too happy
Self-doubt, for those who achieved everything
Amen

Absolute is the mercy of God
To surrender, to lose oneself in the euphoria
To think, to fight, to survive, to define
Existence, swimming against millenia

God, give me strength to surrender
Shut these eyes, they’ve been open for too long
Close these ears, they listen too much
Sew this mouth, the tool of blasphemy

I just want to sleep
The beautiful sleep of nothingness
Amen.

Notes from the No-Man’s Land: End of the Exile

It’s time to end the exile.

I’ve been here in no-man’s land for quite some time. The arrival was very unexpected. I had always counted upon my ability to find my way back home no matter how badly lost I was. But somehow, it was not to happen this time. I was irrevocably lost this time. Not just in any unfamiliar place, but a place without any characteristics. Basically I had no option but to bide my time in the open cell.

There were a lot of questions to ask, even more kept emerging, but the answers remained vague and not exactly traceable. During the endless days, I lost my secretkeeper, a sparrow who used to perch on my shoulder daily and talk to me. I didn’t stop her, it was better for her to leave a dead place and the other inhabitant which can at best be described as a half-zombie.

But the answers did start to show themselves. Not completely, but in short glimpses of clarity. The vagueness and the mist was still there, but the form could be deciphered. With that the horizons began to appear in this boundlessly finite continuum.

I too have to go from here now. To where I don’t know. For all the heavy rains in August outside, it was dead and dry for me in this no-man’s land. The eerie wall of silence, which reflected back my own thoughts seem to be gradually disappearing and I can sense things around.

But there is no direction home now. No destination to go anymore. Just the pathways. Will have to walk along with the journey, wherever it takes me. As of now, the No-Man’s Land is slowly fading away.

I hope no sleep for me this September.
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P.S.- This is the last post of the series. I hope I won’t bother you with my baffling mindless abstract twaddle anymore. Can’t be really sure though.

Notes from the No-Man’s Land – I

I don’t exactly remember the particulars of that journey. It started way back in time. Before that unknown, unnoticeable point, past, present and future used to connect quite distinctly with each other, and travelling from one to the other on the imaginary plane was not accompanied by the loss of clarity of vision(or, put in a different manner, was accompanied by an illusion of clarity of vision). But soon after starting, the train started to run very fast, and I had not even found my seat in the compartment. The clutter all came down with great bustle and clamor. Disoriented and confused in the darkness, there was no hope of clearing up the rubble, and I was too tired from trying to catch the train. So I just slept in the rubble, hoping to clear it up after the daybreak. The sleep was very disturbed, full of strange dreams and half-awake sensations of sounds coming from around me, and dreams and dark, damp & congested reality melting within each other.

Waking up wasn’t no fun either. By that time, the clamor inside the dreams had reached such a fever pitch, it had taken the form of a headless monster, rumbling and tumbling forward, awkwardly but inexorably, leaving a wake of ruin and chaos behind him. And I was bound in chains to the monster, rolling and tumbling behind him, bumping into everything that came my way, trying unsuccessfully to land on my feet. Then the scene started to clear up. There was nothing but the beast and me. The absence of things to be destroyed seemed to slow the clueless dumb beast down. And then I remembered that I have to wake up, and get my things arranged. It must have been dawn already.

As I woke up confusedly, there was no train, and I was sitting on the ground, in quite a messed up state. Ironically, my stuff was beside me, in fairly good order and unscathed. Someone must have taken great pains to unload my luggage properly after simply tossing me outside, I wryly thought.

But this wasn’t the place I was supposed to reach, my destination (now that I think of it, I can’t even remember where exactly I was supposed to go, that memory been washed out clean from my memory). It was not a place at all, going by the distinct attributes and characteristics we assign to a place. It was colorless, all dull white. And what seemed like a dull prairie, with a hovel at some distance, and nothing conspicuous by its presence, had a strange recurring quality to it, emanating from every side, a world into itself, without boundaries.

That is how I arrived in the no-man’s land.

My luggage was still there, waiting to be unpacked, mocking at me.