The Loudest Whisper

This year was pretty damn crazy, and probably, by far the best in my life. Now that said, it’s not because I got everything I wanted, ‘coz first thing, trust me I didn’t and second, it really doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s more about what changed, and still more about why it changed. 


…Too much has changed. Too many minutes have run anticlockwise, skipped seconds, and awaited hours on an incomprehensible clock. Too many things labeled ‘new’, which I would have swore never to crave or cling to, lie untainted in my secret closet. Too many places from “where I’ve been” were unknown, and are unfamiliar. Too many of verbs built up and broken, too many words fluttered half-spoken. Too many seasons shuffled themselves in a day; too many days splashed themselves in a single rain.

I defined, redefined, and re-redefined myself, and am still nowhere to be found in the dictionary. There were times when I made a conscious effort to get distracted from the empty depths of melancholy, and then beat myself up for an inadvertent arrival of an overfed shallow wave of sanguinity. I night-walked the same roads over and over again with friends, with acquaintances, and sometimes, alone. I still am uncertain of the reality behind images that I hold in my head. Do I remember them for what they were? Did I imagine them for what they were going to be? Were they in fact what they were?

There were times when I couldn’t wait to see the end, and then were those when I could have given anything to go back to the start. I made choices that I couldn’t live with, and I lived through choices that I thought I could never make. Well, I guess, that’s how it works, that’s what time does right? When you make a choice, it just inevitably makes another choice for you, the choice for you to live with your choice.

I was flying, and sometimes drowning. If you’d ask me, I’d swear to have never touched the ground until now. Shadow boxing with the curiosity of fate, I made discoveries. With long talks, in monologues, I stumbled upon creations. I probably answered the few imperative, the “may sound stupid” questions.

As I sashayed through, I read too much into some stuff, and the rest, apparently I didn’t glance at. I was, at times persuaded of being precisely where I should have been, and moments later, convinced of being lost. And the best thing, no one else knew about it. I was nowhere to be found.

The things that I missed, I found in the partial reflections on the other side of the mirrors. Only when they held something in the top left corner, something that I didn’t have in my top left corner, I was scared to look to the right. What if something was missing there too? What if everything I wanted was a mirage, a nuance of an unattainable desire, something that the person behind the mirror already possessed.

‘Coz in the end it’s like this, if you call darkness as the absence of light, it’s fair enough to define brightness as the absence of darkness. And THAT is indeed as it should be defined, ‘coz at last THAT is what we remember, the opposites of what things are, and rather what they could have been. And someday everything will be different, everything will then be remembered for what it is right now, not for what it’s going to be.