That feeling, when you look back and
realise just how many things (and even people) you have left behind.
Nothing, and no one, is ever indispensable,
is it?
However, thrown in the eye of a raging
storm, grappling for anchors that are yet unreliable, you hanker for the lost
times, the transient comfort that sheltered life offered you – friends,
confidantes…all yet to step beyond that point of no return, prepared to shake
off those shackles that bound them to their volatile, vulnerable selves.
Not knowing that those sides will raise
their ugly heads at the most inopportune of moments.
And you choose to blind yourself – hide behind
the countless avenues of escape, driven to the point of maddening laughter,
masking the involuntary cries of desolation as you get buried beneath a
convenient façade, refusing to slip away even within the confines of your
solitude. Those mindless pursuits, those numbing recreations – you give in to
them, as does everyone else, each present moment postponed to another time.
You envisage a future unencumbered by
narrow beliefs and constricting relations. A life carved on your terms and your
terms alone. And yet the enormity of achieving that vision overwhelms you to
submission.
It’s the same story day in and day out. You
know the way, but it takes all of your courage to maintain the status quo, let
alone break it and bear its ramifications.
And yet, things will change. People will
come, people will go. You are left stranded in the middle of it all, watching
it happen, living as if suspended from motion, dimly aware of how everything
else moves ahead, except you.
So you retreat to your high-held composure;
that infallible assurance that you were meant for things beyond the band-wagon
and for you, time and space does not exist. That spiritualistic viewpoint,
killing the tearing hurry of all human endeavours, the lowly outlooks of achievement
and possession…reinforces your disillusionment in this worldly life and you
give up even more.
You had two paths laid out before you and
you can’t choose either. And yet, you have walked on both.
Would you ever be able to blaze your own
trail?
Or will you run ahead, regardless of the
path, only to be forced to look back?
Perhaps, you will have the last laugh
anyhow – either at your own incompetence or your steadfast zeal to break all conventions. And then, nothing would matter.
