Stoned
That evening I sat and I wrote and I wrote and a million different ideas would pour into my head. Thoughts about why someone never thought of these ideas. They would be discoveries and inventions never attempted. They were ideas of radical thoughts that would alter the way the humanity lives and thinks about its progeny. They were about love and how the loss of it makes you impassioned. These thoughts kept on gushing at me like the waves of the crimson tide. They washed me with their warmth and healed me with their speed. And then suddenly as the tide subsided I was jolted back to reality and the waves felt like those of the most roguish sea and the thoughts were pulled back with as immense a force as the world cannot reckon with. You become stone headed, mindless, closed and restrained with chains, oh so strong.
Then I thought about the intoxicant and how it leads us all back into the real world as against the popular notion. I would behave differently with people even after I am on a high; people with whom I have different relationships and different realities. And I realized that the "intoxicant" wasn't working to intoxicate you, but it was life - the one big strange miracle of the gods - that was the intoxicant; always pulling you away from the reality.
We felt life rushing by as we walked faster and faster through it. The walk with her today felt like the best walk I ever had with her - silent and calm; it wasn't this good even in those few months when we were lovers. That's the irony of life; the best things happen to you when they are already gone.
Walking along the afternoon roads when you are high on marijuana, you do not narrow your eyes to impede the light filtering through and reaching your soul, but it comes to you as a savior; as a messiah of joy and it gladdens your soul. But when walking in the real world you narrow your eyes to restrain the light because you don't want the joys and the happiness; you want to be miserable and feel the depression ripping your life apart.
Finagle
And that's how you keep going on; through fever, illness, bad health; tired, battered and bruised but still trying to stand tall looking your best. And half the life passes away in this endeavor. But what's left of you then? Nothing but pieces of your past lying along the way; and losing sight of them as you amble along. Scattered hopes and unfinished battles in this stroll through the graveyard until you finally knock at the doors to be let in. And when you walk through that door you realize that it's right where you began as a child with an empty page.
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A lone biker tears off as if in the greatest hurry in the world. The trucks pass by the joint in great lines leaving all the heat and longing behind. Where are they all heading? Truly they must have some destination; some purpose; some aim in life? I stood there without any purpose or hope. The cigarette made the wait and the journey bearable. The winds blew as a harbinger to the impending monsoon which had blessed the towns around. It always makes me sad when I see people hurrying with their luggage for their vacation or their travels. It makes me sad because I'm trapped in a life I don't like. The life I never chose but came to me as a disease that wouldn't cure. It makes me long for the day when I'll be in their shoes packing off my luggage to a place far away. I walked back to my bus with a last sigh as the driver blew the horn indicating that the journey had to be resumed.
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The only thing that doesn't change between places or between people is the distance that separates them.