Sunday, September 02, 2007

My Definition of Life... Revisited

Sun and Rain and Smiles and Pain,
Nights and Days and Gloom and Glaze,
Quill of Feather and Edge of Knife,
Yes, my friends, That is Life.

Sitting at the shrine of solitude, at the bottom of my own heart, I was going over these very lines of mine. Pondering, wondering... what made me write these? Is this really what I feel about life? The answer, though hard to find, was sure lurking somewhere in the deep recesses of my heart itself, and I resolved to find it.

I got up and started walking, feeling the walls with my hands... looking for answers... The walls felt all cold and hard, rough... almost bruising my fingers. A chill started taking over me... it was getting difficult to walk. And I started wondering, where is the sun, the smiles, the days, the glaze.... where are they all? Is it that I have never been happy in my soul, that I have never smiled from my heart? Somewhere, there has to be a little warmth, a little softness. But where?

As I kept wondering, forcing myself to go on walking, I stumbled, and fell. I couldn't get up anymore. My body wouldn't respond. It felt like I had been packed with kilos of ice... I tried to keep breathing, to keep my eyes open, to avoid the darkness that was closing in, to stop the blue clouds that were forming all around me, getting denser and heavier. Shadows... dark shadows... darker than the darkness around me, started emerging from the walls and moving towards me... I tried to get up, to run, to keep them away... but I couldn't. I was getting weaker, and weaker. The walls of my own heart were closing in on me, trying to crush me... and I couldn't stop it.

But then it's my heart after all, so why couldn't I? I tried, but then I realized, I had run away from myself long back, my heart was not my own anymore, we were strangers to each other. My own heart was trying to kill me. But why?

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