The Deluge

The mind falters as he struggles to keep pace with the deluge of information from his surroundings. In one sweep he attempts to comprehend the article on the laptop screen, conjure a reply to the message on the phone & absorb the songs on the playlist.

In that one second the cacophony seems exhausting simply by its presence, without any active attempt to draw attention to itself, and he wonders why he refuses to walk out of it. He narrows down the scope of his vision for a few minutes and it hits him -  the scarcity of minutes. The tunnel vision morphs back into the ever widening, blinding glare of information overload. He takes a moment to wallow in self-pity & longs for the simpler times.

We have definitely progressed backwards, away from us.

The Bridge across Time

I feel I've grown up too fast. Not because I feel old. [I don’t know how to describe “old” anymore. Time & Perception seem so amorphous & vague; I will never be able to refer to them with any certainty.] It is because my life has flashed by and I’m trapped in an illusion chasing after Time with a frantic desperation.

I’m standing at the edge of a rickety bridge connecting my Now to my Future and all I can see is a maddening medley of rediscovered wants & desires vanishing into a haze. There is no horizon and no pathway leading up to where I am standing or who I am today. I try to piece together what could have led me to be the person I am today and led the others to a different shade of humanity. But the harder I struggle with the answers, the faster the pieces crumble in my hands. The bridge appears more & more to be a pier leading into a whirlpool of shimmering mirages & it is unsettling that I’m alone in each of them. Any alteration to the lone figure dissolves them into gaping holes & the bridge turns into a chasm.

I suppose I would like to reach a point in my life where I don’t want things to change anymore, where I’m content with the firm ground beneath my feet and I no longer want to cross shaky bridges across the yawning gaps between my dreams &  my reality. That I would love to settle down in the quietude of that point & rest my anxiety.

But would I still be alive if there were no bridges to cross & no mirages to congeal? Would I love to exist?

The Night

She enters the room and settles down in one corner of her bed. The laptop flickers to life and her universe shrinks to the size of her laptop screen.

She starts rummaging the bottomless pit of information for the irrelevant, unproductive bits – the ones she finds interesting. She finds a page on a theory binding the characters of a movie studio, a list of books and a video on swords. She makes a mental note to share all of these. She moves on to the bits that make her real life more interesting for her – movies, books, plays, concerts – anything that charms her for a few hours. She shortlists a few of them and starts planning for these months ahead.

She finds a list of exotic destinations and picks out the ones that she will add to her bucket list. She selects one to plan her next trip and looks up flights & hotels. She appraises her bank balance and sobers up.

She moves on to YouTube and streams the videos for the first 5 songs that come to her head. She continues to stream songs in batches of 5 and stumbles upon one she hasn’t heard in years. The initial euphoria of rediscovering the song quickly gives way to a mild pang of loss. How did she lose the song in the first place? She wants to carry her music with her, all of it, everywhere.

The hours pass by as the night weaves a spell around her – of a life which awkwardly and abruptly blends in with the one she lives by day. It paints her universe in myriad colours that stand out against the inky blackness in which the world sleeps around her. She finds the songs have more soul and the books more wisdom. And so she clings on to the stillness of the night and tries to stretch the inky blackness a little wider.

But it slips out of her hands to give way to the dull bustle of the morning.

The myriad colours dissolve in the sunlight and the spell wears off.

It hurts.
I don't know what it is or where it came from.

There is no regret, no longing, no fear and no love.
And yet, it really hurts.

It haunts me in rushes and goes away.
It doesn't go away for long,
just long enough for me to hide it
- to pretend it's not there.

But it is.

Write or Not

“Why don’t you write any more?”

“I guess I’m just lazy”

“But you write well…”

Is that why I should write?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

“Why don’t you put all your articles online?”

“I don’t like discussing what I write about.”

“You don’t have to justify what you write.”

“That’s why I don’t put them online.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Why should I write?

I have been writing since I was seven. Or at least I have been composing prose in my head with the intent of putting it on paper at some point. Sometimes I managed to turn it into a word document and post it online. At times I just put it on a paper and threw it away. Most of the times I just left those words swirling in my head.

I’ve heard women never stop thinking. I think about the same things over and over again, from different angles and perspectives; build a train of thoughts, one linked to the other until I am thinking about something completely unrelated. And after a while I’m back to where I started. The questions remain unanswered and the dilemmas unresolved. But the words keep swirling in my head.

I think that is why I write - to stop those words from churning in my head.

That is why I should write.