3 hours 30 minutes

 

You left on an inky night. There was no defining moment, but it was all in bits and pieces.  It was between limits of the space zone that we’ve had all this time. In fact, the seconds started running out the moment we sat down together years ago. It feels like so much more.

It seemed to be that part of the day when the lights seem to be brighter outside the port, people seemed to move slower physically but their faces carried the same eagerness as any part of the day to get to their respective destinations soon. However, none of this mattered. We did.

Amongst hoards of people skidding, rolling, taking calls and waving their lasts, surprisingly we just stood there.
It was the worst place to be. How can you exist at two places at once?
Here, we do.
Or more precisely, you do.

I understand the will to not move, yet be moved by the anticipation of tomorrow. This place is such that it pulls you partially inwards, beckoning towards the time and meridian stamped on the smooth paper in your hand.

That is done with an urgency that we repeatedly tend to ignore, we’re pushing our luck.
what pulls you back is standing beside you, all around you. And it is not just the people, the air or your love of your land that you’re about to leave.Those are just the immediate physical beings. It should rather be the outlines of all the souls we’ve come across.

They fall under three categories;
Souls we got lost in, then lost them too.
Those we wished we’d desperately get lost in, but found ourselves in.
Finally, those which we wished to find ourselves in, but were too bigger than life.
So we just remained in their shadows, the way we did.
Just like we still do.

And knowing the gravity behind us, the vacuum forward, I wish to provide this final impulse to you to propel the whole of you through, without any of the shadows following you.
The only part of this you should be keeping in mind is that you’re going to get out of the shadow of the final third category.
Those are their own master strokes and you’ve remained on their plates for too long, wishing to see past their success, triumph, genius and wealth.
This is all of what you’ve wanted to see behind their eyes all these years. This will be the failure, frustration, dumbness and poverty.

Those are the things that you keep injecting into yourself again and again.

Get the balance right, with the intention to always break past this inverse relation that drives the monotony of this world. But even if I allow myself to be sucked back into those antithetical means, I wish you take all of this with you.

No matter where the past points, forever face the little illumination on the cloth holding you back.
Let go of its sight, the remaining darkness would be too vast to get lost in.
The sanctity of your predicament in the other world is holy enough for it to be a sin if you even consider doing anything else.

Ironically, all of this comes from the person who has lived in the world’s monotony all this time.
But do understand that even if one might not be living in the direct blaze of harshest dreams, it would only take a box of lost chances and running in wrong shifts to appreciate burns of where you live.
Inverse relations, of course.

So it’s not you who leaves us, but us taking leave of you. We pull ourselves off of you, the bits sticking to you to be shed. Hoping only that the part of us absorbed in you remains true to their value.

To our memories; made, making and to be made, 3 hours and 30 minutes earlier or late.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ride

You wake up with your head swimming in a slight buzz and throb. You regret taking the second turn on the right instead of that left one but there’d been a drop too many and I’d groaned that no four walls could make us feel any safer.

But once you lift your head up from the metallic roof on which you lie, you’ll want to get drunk all over again. Trust me, the light spilling on last night’s darkness up above will be enough to intoxicate you. In the pull of such rare dimensions of two parts reality and five parts fascination, I’ll be watching you.

I’ll be looking over, beyond you. Wondering whether I’m sinking or floating, or doing a bit of both and it is only when you look back at the lethargic viscous of confusion beside you that you’ll know that that turn was worth it. That every gear changed last night was worth it. That the heaving at the back of your throat from visiting your dreams last night was worth it.

That waking up under the morning sun on the roof of a car was one of the things you’d lived for not knowing what it would be, but once you breathed in the moment you knew that this was it.
This is a moment too much yet too less to account for in the wildest dreams. The spectrum of my sabbatical visions bathes me whole and I soak myself in it, reveling like there’s no tomorrow, and that this was it. Our moment of gospel.

And you know what they say about the forgotten things?
To let them be.
But I can’t let the question you were to me be. For now you have turned into an answer and ever since the first sparks lit up, I cannot fathom what the question was. Such are not the moments to crunch all your memories together.
Let’s just say you’ve turned into the answer to everything then.

The answer to my childhood wish I’d once made to own the stars for one night, and then negotiate for them for the rest of my breaths. It’s those stars that I own now, but I’ll soon lose them, or will I? You tell me.
And, once lost, then I’ll be negotiating with the tailor who sews the end of the world for more and I’m afraid I’ll have you no more.
There will be no more of these dawns with the knock of the incandescent glow of sun’s might against the buildings and roads not quite so awoken  from their slumbers. Even then their colours will seep away, making little streams. Around the corner, along the pathways, across the streams and in your wake. They follow not me anymore, they follow my answers and visions. They might make me up, but they aren’t mine anymore now.
That’s not the answer I’d been waiting for.

My answer always lay in another language, with different curves and edges. To have owned it, you’d know that it’s a part of you. Or should I just say that my answer lay in you.
All the time.
In the backseat, or anywhere under the sunroof. In the empty ice cream boxes, spilled drinks, prickly solitude and the blinking headlights.
And though the world is not a bad place, the powers governing it certainly took their time measuring it out and laying it down. They cut the exact bit of fabric, added a drop of that bottle, sized up a bit of that antiquity and replaced it with a bit of fuzziness.
All this while, the process was carried out in such a seraphic manner that it hurts to envision it. It makes the world unreal and fickle, to have known yet not believed in it.
To have understood, yet not realized its meaning.
I watch, nevertheless, and watch.
I see it all with a certain magnificence governing me and the air growing increasingly sparse.
I’ll lie alongside and not be anything, just let the flames take their final course.

As a final precursor, the eerie magnanimity of the stillness gave rise to the best and worst of me, in a second all that I had known was spun into a thread that held you out. This would have been in a better place, under different shades of azures, but there’s only so much I could tell you before I’ve lost everything that I’ve known.
There’s only so much to be, when the inferno enrages us together.
There’s only one to be, when there’s no breath enough to be for two.
But there’s none to be, when the last one doesn’t suffice your boundaries.
Understand that it just doesn’t work this way in the unspoken courts of justice.
Trust me, halves have never worked and never will. White hots are the only way across, and I’ll drive you there tonight if I can.

I could take you there and we could count ourselves from the past to infinity under a thousand suns. But tonight we’ll be away. Not gone, just away.  Just to check up on whether there remain any remains of ours, making sure to step across the road and buy that pizza. I find these more simple and manageable than explaining what got us here. Don’t care for these answers, I have mine, don’t I?
The rest doesn’t count. The world is still awakening, and I still watch over you. And I know that I’m looking at a star, not a meteor. This is just our ride.
And when the fire goes out no one, except the tire marks, would know what happened at the corner last night.

 

 

 

 

 

Drive On

I’ve known you months enough to know you’d love to see the sun bowing out in its majesty here once more. These roads had been tarred long ago, leading to destinations unknown and uncaring. They’ve never seen people riding into sunsets by them. Maybe you’d make for them a rush of bits and pieces of regrets losing out with every mile, every smear and every turn.

I’ve known this whole time, I’ve been watching. But somehow my silence never spoke loud enough for my heart to speak to you through these forests. I asked the clouds in vain to be the ombudsmen to my stupors, my griefs. My battles were my own to be fought. So why is it that the air around here doesn’t make me feel alone?
I feel being made whole, cicatrized, wrapped in between the slivers of gleaming whites, your indistinguishable self.

The answer seems to remain in all those mornings we’d lost ourselves in the mists. Honestly, the blurry turbulence of this thunder managed to numb all my loneliness.
You felt a different breath, moving quicker and leaning more towards the future ahead.
You felt a different kind of hunger, swallowing me whole with every round of consumption.

The skies never suspecting a whirlwind romance kicking up to match nature’s monoliths. We never realizing this progression would land us up hung over in the past, lying in the future, tuning the radio to older stations. I’ve been hoping to find myself lately in one of those numbers. Failure in success.

I find myself in you. Today, right here, right now, remembering the past with a different gravity of nostalgia and the magnanimity of this moment provokes my deepest fears, threatening to take birth in the near future. In midst of this humanly bedlam, you’re the only thing that’s felt constant all this while.

As our song comes on with the first rays of dawn, I wonder whether this happenstance was graced by the winds rushing past. I wonder whether this breeze is a hint of some approaching blind closure that we can’t see for I’d hate to lose you to another storm that could defeat this purpose and armor. I pray these winds bring the future rushing towards us so that I’d know that you’d be here, by my side. So that I’d know that this monachopsis will reside, and my ineffable whims will be banished to the realms of neverlands.

Here’s to you.
Drive on.