a plea

Shades of hesitant conversation, and fiery eyes, angry, yet sad: I don’t want to lose sight of these visions in the dark night of penitence that has come upon me. So listen, listen to this feeble voice, before the vulgar waves of the oceans separating us drown it out. My life begins in death; wailing, sobbing, trying to find for itself a face in a mirror of horrors. Radiant visages, muted, motionless, lie concealed in their unreachable homes of impenetrable darkness, shimmering away their eternal grace. I try and steal their glow, just to find my own way. But I do not always succeed. I stumble, I fall. Silver-tongued wraiths appear to me in friendly forms, leading me astray with dishonest enticements. I follow blindly; I let greed and desire be my guides. Until I reach a crossroads where all the world is hostile to me, and I myself am my biggest enemy. I fight these demons, individually, and all at once. I fight them with all I’ve got. I fight them until my sanity dangles by a hair from the edge of oblivion. It is a bitter fight; it is an unending fight. It is a fight that leads me to unfamiliar places; places where nobody recognizes me, and I struggle to recognize myself. It becomes a strange imprisonment where polite nods and soft smiles define the parameters of my solitary confinement; it becomes a strange exile where amidst the cacophony of a thousand voices, there is every opportunity to carry on uninterrupted conversations with the self. I crane my neck above the crowd to try and steal a peek at the familiarity left so far behind. I see brilliant flashes of color and light; I see two souls fusing; I hear the music of joyful celebration. But the odes to love and happiness that the flute sings reach my ears only as tunes of lament and mourning. They evoke times that were simple, and magical; unchanging and absolute. Times when we did not have to scour a thousand strangers’ faces in hopes of finding a faint glimmer of lost familiarity. But remember, you: the custodian of my blood; the keeper of my soul. I will come back for it; I will come back to them. And you. And you will have the power to decide whether when I look my soul in the eyes again, it stares back at me with a stranger’s empty gaze, or embraces me with the warm ease of a long lost friend. Be just, you; be merciful. A weary pilgrim come home deserves not to be castaway as driftwood on the seas of self-loathing and regret; a broken man deserves a chance to be one again with fragments of his soul.

twelve years & 99 minutes

It’s like this. You go get something, seemingly out of the ordinary, actually, not so much, and the world trips over itself showering praise. Amid the thunderous applause however, you yourself do not know what to make of your achievement. So you flounder about, doing one thing, then another, recklessly exercising the only tangible element of your personality: a bloated ego. And one day, without even knowing it, you fall in line, a line of sheep more like, mindlessly trying to do what every Bum, Dick and Hairy in the world is doing. But then you fail, completely, miserably, falling flat and hard on your face. And you just can’t deal with that. So it becomes a silent obsession, gnawing away at the back of your mind as your body feigns patrician swagger, eating away at your soul as it sinks deeper in the quicksand of its own poverty. Your ego becomes the stone wall behind which you yourself are the guinea pig in the experiments of your own psyche.

In time, you find distractions. You drown yourself in indulgences that often have your entrails hanging at your mouth. You tumble down culs-de-sac of love, always mistaking the heat of the moment for a promise of a lifetime. You delude yourself into believing that you, of all people, have a handle on the Truth. And despite all that, the fixation remains, biding its time in some remote corner of your brain, awaiting the perfect moment to grasp you by the nape. And then it happens. You are weighed, measured and found wanting in comparison to wild, alien enticements. Your sun-burnt patch of irises does not match up to the red and the gold of the other side. And just like that, a dormant ambition becomes a burning need screaming for gratification.

You align your entire existence in aid of your self-centered motives. You let life take its course, ordained by higher powers, acquiesced in by you. But secretly, you load every dice in your favor. In the public eye, you are the epitome of blissful sangfroid. In private, you’re a madman with a grudge, an insecure freak dying to prove yourself. You work hard, you plug all holes, and this time, you don’t take yourself prisoner. And you have it. The world once again is up in clamorous applause. Accolades filter in from far and wide. You are king of your world one more time. And just as before, there is emptiness, cluelessness, but mixed with unconscionable amounts of guilt. For in your journey from crest to trough to crest again on the sinusoid that is your life, you have created nodes, old and new, that are the basis of all that you are. Tears glisten in some innocent, unsuspecting eyes and endear all the world’s tears to you. Silenced voices lecture you on sanity, and you hear them better than the noise around you. Faces forever interred in darkness are your beacons to the meaning of life, and you prefer those visages to the light of day.

Hindsight constructs a reality that is impossible to disengage from. The Truth now appears different from what it used to be. The Truth now redefines your conceptions of priority. The Truth demands confrontation with all your well-concealed dualities. The Truth resides in a life-force far greater, far more valuable than yours. The Truth, however, retains its surreal volatility. The Truth, nonetheless, must be listened to.