daakusaxena

In his epic track – Coming Back to Life – Gilmour narrates the story of a person beyond repair who comes back to life and heads straight to the shining sun. After hearing this song countless times, I believe that many would treat this narrative as a depiction of weakness without trying to comprehend or to relate to the perspective of the other taking the self into account.

When you lose something that is very close to you, is it really possible to go back to life as it was before you shared your existence with it? Shutting the book and trying to climb the ladder to the next chapter might be termed as closure, but what happens when even closure isn’t enough?

I had been living alone before you came. I have been living alone since you left. Trust me on this. One doesn’t need to be a nuclear scientist to spot the difference between the two.

To survive as an exile, I guess, it’s important to learn the art of being paranoid. At first you find it hard to relate to, but then you start understanding the words that start to fill up your head, the meanings that they portray, and the messages that they deliver. For I have been in exile for the better half of my life, hiding not from people, but from my own self. I sometimes wonder how I managed to do that; but, paranoia can take you a long way when all you are doing is to try and hide.

They say that one should never judge a person unless one has walked in his shoes, has shared a similar path and has felt what the other feels. I suppose there were some who walked beside me who expressed their fear with their eyes. There were some, like me, who hid their fear in their smile. You might have wondered why I smiled like a buffoon when I met you for the first time. I kept smiling the entire time I felt your presence beside me. I even smiled at you when you had walked away. Each of those smiles was grounded within a different rationalization of scenarios, which had its roots held together by fear.

I have liked you since the very moment I laid my eyes on that woman walking down the park, with gliding feet, as if dancing on the dew that was carefully poised on the blades of grass. It took the courage from every fiber of my existence to let go of the fear of rejection and to ask you out. But I guess in the order of things in time, I have never really figured out the event in which attraction turned to love. One minute, I was impenetrable, I shielded myself from anything that could change the way I lived my life. The next, moment I realized that my heart was beating outside my chest, exposed to every element of emotion that’s out there to be experienced. Paranoia seemed ephemeral for a change. It would retreat only to be back in bits and pieces. It returned as I wondered if there will be a time when I won’t be able to see you again. My heart used to stop whenever I would come home and find you missing. For a change, I smiled because I believed in it and within that change, the only fear I felt was of someday not being able to smile that smile.

I wonder if life needs a big plan. Maybe it does and I did have a plan, but when you try to live your life according to the big plan it seems impossible to account for all the contingencies. And I guess it’s difficult to stay sane when you see that the plan is taking you on a different route than what you would expect. Nevertheless, I was happy with an occasional shot of whiskey or a little scotch with a couple of joints to calm the nerves of mutiny that rebelled against my happiness. Misery loves company, I suppose. It has always treated me kind. I think that back then it was my turn to play nice.

But sanity is growing ever too costly when you’re not around. If you accuse me of being selfish and that I took your absence as a mere excuse to indulge in my paranoia – I will probably accept your words to be true. Paranoia is the innocuousness of what is left of my sanity. It’s who, I continuously realize, I am. True, I do it for the self. But more importantly, I do it for you.

All our lives, we are on the lookout for ways to indulge ourselves. We give all our energy to get to that elusive big red cherry and oh, life would be so much simpler and so much more fruitful if only we could hold the cherry even for a little while, or if we could only get to see it. It’s like reading a story. We concentrate so hard on the protagonist that we neglect to pay any attention to the plot and the hidden subtext. And what happens when we do get to that red cherry? We are ecstatic, no doubt, but for how long does the enthusiasm last? When does euphoria give way to fear: the fear of not being able to hold on to it anymore? And what if we never make it to the red cherry? Do we live our entire lives in frustration of not achieving the goal we set out for ourselves?

We put too much energy in dealing with our fear of being wrong, of someone at the end of the day, proving in all their wisdom of hindsight that what we did in a particular situation within a particular context was in fact, not the best way of doing the right thing. But beyond the idea of right and wrong, there is a field of the middle, and I hope that I’ll meet you there. Loving you has been the most profound and intense experience of my entire life. And it breaks my heart that I have to end it. Not because I cannot face my fear of dealing with the truth, I’m beyond it for I’ve lived my fears, but for I realize that of all the fears I’ve been left with – the only fear I wish for is the fear of losing what we had together. Being with you will require one more effort, one more life, one more start from the scratch. I have to be born again.

I have seen them all. I have felt them all. And if you ask me about the fear I fear the most – it is the one in which I face the truth of the end. All our lives, we keep running for this truth, chasing it, acknowledging it, and hoping that as its divine revelation unfolds we will know the meaning of it all. As the most popular of all colloquialisms says, “The truth shall set you free.” I say that there’s nothing which enslaves you more than the truth. Accepting the truth means the end of hope, the end of the journey. But if you keep running away fearing the truth, you become too easy a prey to the evil of living a lie. I tried walking on the delicate rope of the middle path, between hope and paranoia, but somewhere down the line, the boundaries have disappeared in the mist. I fear if the path I am on will take me to the future or to some place in the past. Will it take me back to where I started from in the first place?