As we fade into this life, barefoot and hairless, with just the clinging grasp of the mother, and the topical genetic look of the father gawking in surprise, for better or worse, we don’t know much, do we? We haven’t worked nights, or ballooned across the tracks of time, to a profoundly found place of security. But that is when we actually fall, within stillness. We become collected, and, more accurately, bound. Limited.
As realities beset us, and as dreams occlude us simultaneously in a stringy thread of thoughts, and veils foreshadow the lived life- behind an office desk, sweat dripping because of a dysfunctional AC, or a dysfunctional lifestyle, and stacks of paper wed with woodenly spines of folders, the roping clutch of staplers, just grazing our arms, and lazing around our minds, sinking, and unfurling on the silk-roots of out brain crossing with our moods and feelings, travelling in exasperated coughs, and exaggerated howls in the heat of a dark night. When this person was younger, he had the unwavering faith of becoming an adventurer, now he reads cartoons at newspaper stands, and his shoulders are blanketed not by thick layers of snow, but by Egyptian-cotton blazers. Funny how life works out. In moderation. And in a roomy home, awaiting total aloneness, its seeping pipes, beckoning him to go bathe in waterfalls, and not showers, and climb mountains instead of his bed.
But he fell from his dream, tied to a kingdom of holy architecture, praying every day, to life and not God, about a delivery across the continental plates. Not all falls are from grace, some are just from a perceived unreality. Life is an altered unreality. And what we set out to build with our time and space, we pull apart, one brick, one aspect at a time, unravelling till minimal dressing. And toward the premier of death at the film festival that races in our attentions in our final hour, we see the silhouette of what could have been, dancing with whatever good has actually been. But it’s only direction.
-By Savyasachi Singh, Amity International School, Noida
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