The wise old man's advice

Today while taking a train home I noticed this old, frail woman confined to a wheelchair. Even though her body seemed to decay with each fleeting moment, there still seemed some light in her eyes. Nevertheless, I felt this strange sense of pity, for she seemed to be travelling alone, even in her delicate state. A deep sense of trepidation then, seemed to have engulfed me.
We go through the motions of life every single day, building relationships, mending some, and sometimes, breaking a few. In our entire journey as human beings, our life knowingly or unknowingly pivots around these relationships.
No matter how far you go in life, it doesn't matter if the people you care about are not there with you to see it. This is what I was told one day by an old man. Now old age is positively correlated with wisdom; which funnily enough, was something again told to me by another old person. So I believed the old man and tried to, if not nurture, but at least not screw up my relationships.
But seeing that small woman, sitting in a wheelchair all alone, in a metro filled with strangers, with not even a single loved one, or at least liked one to care for her made me question this entire labyrinth of life we make ourselves fall into. This process of construction, destruction, nurturing and dismantling of our relationships, if the outcome at the end is to be sitting in a wheelchair all alone with no one but strangers to fall onto.
But then, we began each of our relationships with 'strangers', strangers who became integral to our lives, sometimes the favourite hue in our lives and sometimes the core to which our sense of purpose gravitates.
 Childhood buds who have shared everything with you from broken teeth to skinned knees, from homework to first crushes. Those friends, no matter how old and implicit they seem in our lives right now were actually strangers before that first hello or the first let's play together.
Lovers, who you can do anything for, who possibly know you even better than you know yourself once had to peel all the layers to your soul one by one, to reach depths even you were afraid to swim in. Lovers, who make the word 'home' mean much more than just a place were once strangers before that first smile.
College friends, school friends, work buddies, gym buds, spouses, ex spouses, ex girlfriends, ex boyfriends, ex best friends, and so on.
From strangers to 'your people' to sometimes strangers again.
Ex lovers, whose name once made your head rush to now just making your fingers curl up with contempt.
Former best friends, who drifted apart for no apparent reason, or sometimes for reasons.
School friends, college friends, work buds, gym friends, ex spouses,  ex lovers, siblings you haven't seen in years.
Doesn't it seem futile to build so many intangible treasures, when in the long run the only one you could fall back on is you alone?
Doesn't it seem wiser to not let people around you affect you, no matter what the old wise man said?
But giving it a second thought, in the long run we are also dead.
So not forming relationships with people might be akin to not breathing because after all you have to die one day. And that even though is as certain as anything else, still doesn't account for all the days that you don't die.
So, even though I might have lost some people, and would lose some others even still, it would still be better than not knowing them at all. So I brave the possibility of being cut to pieces and even being left in that wheelchair alone, to fend for myself on my own.
But today is the day I live in, and let me say hello to you, with a smile on my face and a gentle thudding in my heart. 

Of finding the unknown, and knowing what to find

A lot of times I question myself, why do I write? Why am I drawn to blank sheets of paper and a good old pen time and again? What is it, that keeps me going to it like a moth moves to a flame? For it is my destruction and my resurrection. My means of abandon and my means of salvation. How I stay afloat on this thin glacier that life seems and how I drown each time, losing all hope to come up to the surface again.

 For a long time, I believed I write for applaud. After all who doesn’t love all the love that comes their way, that feeling when someone gets it, gets what you have been trying to say, no matter how long ago you felt it, how long ago you wrote it. But at that one moment, you both are on the same page. Literally and metaphorically. At that one moment, it doesn’t matter how different your cultures are, how old or young or poor or rich or dark or light skinned ambitious or lax or a dancer or an accountant, whoever you are, wherever you come from. At that one moment, your connection transcends all those differences and you are one.

 And this is what I believed, I write for the reader, for the sheer want of being understood, to connect to another human on a spiritual level. But it has taken me some while to realize this in fact, I write for the luxury of understanding, of forming a connection to myself. Of understanding these swirls of emotions that engulf me, the seldom tides of happiness as high as the as the ones reached by seas on nights of the full moon, and the more prevalent lows, the ones in which you feel like you’re drowning into a bottomless pit, with no escape, no relief; for what can even relieve you from the prison of your own thoughts, from the self inflicted pains you so masochistically are drawn to.

So I write this time, not to be understood, but to understand. To look at myself from a peeping hole when it is too difficult to look in a mirror. For being an unattached distant observer to my self orchestrated catastrophy.

 I write, when it is too difficult to fathom what exactly is it that doesn’t let me come up to the surface; and even more difficult to find the right words to describe that feeling of being pulled down. I write, to not paint myself a pretty picture but to unhinge this mask of superficies that we all our forced to wear. Not to laminate the ugliness behind a rosy tint but to shatter the glass and revel in its brokenness.

I write not to understand the world because I finally know I never can, but to understand my perception of it. I write, not to cheer myself up. Not to shroud this feeling of decay, of being lost, and not the good kind, but to lay bare each thread of discontent, to lose myself deeper still into this tornado of thoughts.

 Just hoping I am thrown off to a better place.

A little bird's bellow

A soft pinch. A demure cry.

Enters a bundle of joy.

So precious, so chaste,

That one might fear.

It is too dear

To enter this world, 

a world so full of hate.

A world, which not unlike the little one

Was once, itself unaware of the worldly ways.

Just like the little one's face,

the world once too was a blank slate.

When the only cuts it knew were the ones made by rivers

Meandering through the lush plains,

Where birds wandered freely, not bound by nations

Maybe they wander still, and maybe they always will

But what about this little one?

The one who is much too small to fly yet,

And much too human to take a free flight.

The one who is trapped in the world as we know it,

The one who will never know about the world as we got it.

The world as we got it, much too precious, much too pure,

A clean slate. With mountains the only borders there ever were,

perpetual and infallible. God's precious monuments.

The world, in which the only tussles known were

between the shore and the sea waves.

The little one might not know it yet,

But it has got a lot to see.

Perhaps some deep wounds, 

God forbid, some deeper still.

But god left this place a long time ago, they say.

Otherwise, how could we have made these deep incisions

To this earth anyway?

For although we see wires, these borders are wrought with blood.

Blood, which reeks of malice, greed and fallacious passions,

Passions, to reason the wrongs, to suppress the rights;

But I do hope some day, the little one might get to take a free flight.

Because even though it has been a long time that God left this place,

A little hope still remains.

For although the cuts are too deep, 

A smile, some warmth,

A pinch of kindness; might still seep.