- Kurt Cobain

He sits in silence in an unending void, pitch black, the black that haunted you at night when you were thirsty but didn’t have the courage to walk those twenty steps towards the kitchen, it haunts you still. He is transfixed into a numbing stillness. He wants to understand his purpose. He has read every word that claimed to offer him gratification for surviving thus far. The Upanishads, the Old Testament and the new, the Sutras and Confucianism. He tossed it all until it hit every surface inside his head, yet, it failed to make any sense. 

These were the kind of revelations that have caused thrashing waves of torment to millions, if not all. He was sure of one indisputable fact- that loneliness was comforting because it assured insolubility, not being responsible to answer another query about an existence that had never made sense to him. Whatever he would say would be another lie, a lie he was conditioned to think was the true nature of his morality. It is times like these every living entity dreads, the questions of morality, existence, purpose and an inescapable end to all of it. He is not sure. He never has been.

How do you know when you are alive? Does breathing entail the existence of life or we are confusing the process of being alive with the idea of having a purpose? Are we alive only when we are creating or the mere actuality of persisting on earth qualifies us as alive? These are things that keep him up into the wee hours; it is becoming an addictive routine, this meditation of sorts. It’s a chance for him to bloat his despicable human frailty- his id, him pathetically believing that he matters in this savage wasteland. His miniscule breathing in this prodigious world makes a difference to the cosmic clockwork.

He knows it all too well. He thinks about dinner now. Did the last piece of pie rot out in the fridge or he’ll need to wake her up. She tells him every day that he needs to learn the basics. He gets up and refills his coffee mug with the surviving vestiges of whiskey. It burns his insides, the whiskey, he doesn’t remember the last time he had a full meal, and she will kill him.

He grazes a look on the sleeping form under the sheets, just a wild mess of mahogany hair and creamy skin. He imagines them together in a few years into the future and immediately becomes aware of the crease settling in between his eyes. He is not sure, as is she. He then realises, if human affairs are not riding the same wave towards their conclusion then how can a messed up web of outcomes, ruled by unfixed decisions, have a definite finality. He will never be sure of the future, simply because he will write a new one every day.

He mounts the Muddy waters onto his vintage record player  and resumes the soft tapping on his macbook. He tried to maintain a journal, but “they weren’t meant to be”, he remembers it in her raspy sexed up voice. It’s three in the morning- the time for artists, loners and lovers. He smiles, realising we are all a little bit of all three.

The tapping reaches a fever pitch, the pages bound by magical realism, this is a new thing that has got him intrigued, and he’s is good at it, or so, she says. The page numbers are ascending. He is writing the epilogue, more for the benefit of the reader and the publishers than his own, he doesn’t care for subjecting an ending to another ending, kind of defeats the whole purpose of a conclusion. He never understood the usefulness of a post- script.

The sky is becoming lighter like soaked chalk on the wall, slowly, making you aware with every second that you are alive if you can feel it change from midnight blue to a violent violet. She floats over the floor without making a single sound, her hair in an untamed mess and the huge glasses sliding off her nose, her eyes still dreaming up poetry. She rests her elbows on the table and stares at him intently. He looks at her fleetingly, he can’t afford to ruin his perfect ending, those eyes are lethal for coherence and alcohol isn’t the only substance that causes intoxication.

He types - This incompleteness is all we have, when we are not sure, we are alive.

“You are one glorious mindfuck”, he utters, not meeting her eye, bidding farewell to the keys.

P.S. credits to Graham Greene and Charles Bukowski for being the real glorious mindfucks. My second semester exams have finally ended, I really need to find a new sad playlist. I hope everyone is happy in their lives. I wrote this because we all have our messed up days. Thanks for reading, I won't bite if you leave a comment, I swear.

INFINITY OF SIGHS, RISING TIDES

ALL WE DO IS HIDE, ALL WE DID WAS HIDE. - Me.

 Dear you,

I was prepared for the preordained status of this letter as a rhetorical statement for my benefit than yours.

You remember all ‘those times’ when all you want for yourself is an Advil and sleep. (In that order) The day that marked your vanishing act till this day, have been ‘those times’.

 That ‘swell’ time when we rode the carousel with Graham Nash blasting our eardrums, telling us that, “The entire world was love” and, we sang along till our throats were parched for another shot from our ‘secret’ whiskey flask.

You had forced me to take up that ‘stupid’ job at the banned books club, enunciating every sentence from their beat up pamphlet. “Don’t sweat it, Woolfy”, you’d told me in the waiting room, before ruffling my hair (it took me an hour to look like that). And you popped a cigarette, your feet tapping with nervous energy. You were bad at faking it.

I force myself to remember the times before you had ever existed in my universe, before you dismantled my ‘guarded and cagey emotional-fortress’, as you called it. It’s like seeing through tar, everything glistening with a vortex of a technicolor on bitter charcoal.

Do you remember the playlist you had compiled over the long and bitter winter? The one you’d titled, “Black hole of a heart”, I’d burst into a riot of a million ugly chuckles and you’d whispered, and I heard, “mission accomplished”. We spent the whole night talking about the man on the moon with the playlist on its hundredth loop and the water sprinklers in the morning couldn’t erase the quiet understanding we felt in our hearts. ‘Simple’ is a foreign word for me now.

When you left for Dublin and sent me pictures of the Book of Kells .I recall you calling me on New Year’s and slurring with all the alcohol in your veins, “I put you before Art”, as clearly as my volition to keep you in my heart for as long as I shall live.

 I can imagine you daydreaming about a certain colour that’s gotten you into a trance, beckoning you to jog back to your studio and immerse the canvas in it. You, sitting in a coffee shop with a friend (whom I don’t know); sketching the face of the attractive waitress on a paper napkin, I just hope you don’t give it to her.

You always had that old-world charm about you, you know? The ink black,  long hair- always in an unmanageable mess. The ocher-brown irises under those hooded eyes which were always in a state of contemplation, those lips that seemed to always be smirking at an inside joke. You looked the part too, the Art major with the silver easel. But I realised belatedly that, I wasn’t your Art.

WE wished, we wished but all we did was hide. Hide from what we truly felt and meant. I know I’d be the moth around your flame, the 70’s never left me; the hopeful believer in the goodness of Love. I would quote Byron and you’d be the Eliot. You were the black hole that blinded my world and hurled me into the raging whirlpools of the hollow land, the real one. I used to tell you that it isn’t love if doesn’t feel like the 70’s and you’d quote Erich Segal and I was naive enough to think that a Love like ours was meant for movie screens.
We kept running in circles, always shy of the horizon, where we would actually meet. We never realised what we truly were, we never ventured to explore.

You hid behind your Artistic freedom that dictated you to disconnect from fixation of the romantic kind; you were a traveler, a vanishing act. I was the dreamer who stood on the horizon, waiting for you to join me and watch us become. I hid in the waiting, all the illusions slowly dissipating into an inferno of flames, until there was only me and the burning sky, so much for becoming.

I have lost too much love to fear, doubt and distrust. So I offer you a final secret: my hiding place.

I wrote this, not in hopes of finding a riposte but, to finally find a restful slumber in knowing that I can finally come out of hiding.

With hope at last

-Me.

P.S.  I woke up from my seemingly indefinite Odin sleep. I wrote this while listening to daughter and Nada Surf. I have been neglectful. Sorry. You guys are Love. And Love should be treasured. This equals to a Peace offering?