CHAPTER 1

I am one such a person who has never experienced how she is by herself. To make such a statement at this hour and place looks a fanciful self-obsession when both globalization and my accessibility to platforms for expression are working fine for an educated rather relatively empowered woman like myself. I would not disagree. It is just that I have been surrounded by such strong people all the time in my years of sanity that I could never know how strong I am, how well I could take care of a sick friend, would I understand dumb charades even when it was not for a game, would I have a suitable reflex for a crisis, a genuine workable solution to a friend’s problem or to be emotive in events of death. Sadly, all apprehensions came alive in various instances and I was embarrassed. 

Sometimes I hid my fragilities and at other times my feeble persona was found by others. I felt fickle. To most questions beside those whose answers are contained in books, I answered that I do not know. Some ideologies remained, but rationality to them was lost. While worrying ceaselessly about nothing, I started to lose my self and saw the lowest of reflections of my own even when the situations were at ease. I had started to perform relations, roles, and life and not live by them. I concocted stories to feel accepted. I talked and fumbled upon my vulnerabilities to random people. All I did was hurt myself more.

One day I just decided to do what I could least do good, that is to write. But for hours I fiddled with my pen, gathering courage to face myself and this is what I could scribble.  I titled it 'Enigma'.

ENIGMA 

I am not sure.

Not sure about what I want to write.

What I am thinking are not mere feelings but emotions,

So deep that my limited vocab finds no appropriate expression for the same.

This feeling of getting lost is no stranger.

This familiarity has struck me before many times.

I admit I am honest but not truthful

Inactivity is sickening.

Probably that somebody inside me is ill.

It is the same person I have been fortunate to have seen on occasion.

This one is insanely a craving soul.

It craves the high before fulfilment,

The perfect before the climax

Because every climax is itself a new beginning.

It's raw that sets another crazy void

Of inaccuracy, quietness and oblivion.

This sort of gibberishness

Has been an object of an extended quest

To understand myself better.

I have done it before, but differently every time.

I want the wind to hit me

Faster than my thoughts,

To galvanize my unabated flight to nowhere

Into the limitlessness of infinity,

To request my revisit to obscure self

To cure or aid the enigma.

Not so different

From others or yours, this closed book Is mine

To decrypt or ornate.

No hooch talks are these

Nor pensive.

They might seem so

But are florid

With remarkable alacrity and beauty

Calmer than the gaze of still waters

Quieter than the rustling dry leaves

Dormant than a baby's dreams.

It all makes sense

Much more sense to me

Than any of those direct vague talks.

This is my gait

And I accept it as mine

Because I limp differently

But sincerely so.

This difference is familiar.

I just heard my inside breathe a sigh

The dead fetched to life

And the poet sneezes,

Breaking the monotony

The ink blots

And all of this spill

To flow or to sail

Directionless?

Probably,

I'll say-  'still not sure'