Just trying to clear my head with a little bit of writing.
These words are like random spouts of water that cleans up clogged drains. A
spurt here, a spurt there, and then the drain is all set to take up the dirt
again. That’s how my mind has become. Clogged. Cluttered. Full of junk. Like
the residue at the end of a science experiment. The one left behind in the
beaker. The one they ask you to analyze a little bit, and then throw away. Only
in my case, the baby and the bath water have got mixed up somewhere. The
beakers look all the same. Don’t know what to throw, what to keep, what to
write about, what to crib about. Don’t even know if the experiment went as
planned. All I saw was some smoke and some changes of colors. Maybe that was
the purpose of this. But what if it was not?
How long will I stare at the blank pages, waiting for
answers to form? Waiting for some miracle, for the ship to touch the shore. For
the dust to settle. For the fog to clear. For the beaker to reveal itself?
They say a part of us dies when we tell a lie. Some part. I
don’t know which. More importantly, what happens to the parts that are left
behind? Do they remain the same? Or are they tainted too? And if all our lives
every day we have been lying to ourselves and to the world around us, then what
exactly are we carrying forward every day? Which remnant it is that is
sustaining us? Or again, have we blurred the lines so much that we cannot
distinguish between what’s gone and what’s left behind? We held on to
something. Too late to find out if we were clutching at the wrong straws?
The time had come, to talk of many things. Of cabbages and
kings, and whether pigs have wings. Maybe that’s the problem. That the world seen through the looking glass seems more comforting and realistic than what goes on around
us. Out of the two sides of the rabbit hole, which one are we really living in?
Which of these is actually the make-believe world? The beaker with the dark
sediment? Or the beaker that seems to have clear water?
But what if there were only no rabbit hole. What if there
were not two of anything? There was no dust, no
fog, no nothing. And no experiment either. Just a beaker waiting to be
observed. Nothing more, nothing less. Maybe there was no need to burn all those
fires and try and connect the dots. We assumed that there were multiple dots.
But what if it there was only one?
