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'