Thursday, February 16, 2006

free falling

Exhaling, I lean back. Nothing fills my head, a white noise really, a blend of many babbling thoughts. The noise soon fades and my mind floats away. Staring ahead, I try to blink away fleeting ghost patterns that haunt my tired eyes. Shaking my head, I jerk back upright, trying to clear my head off a fog that is fast threatening to overwhelm me. But the sudden movement only serves to pitch my head forward and I am too far gone to resist. "Just two minutes", I promise myself and lay my head down on the table. Lingering I try to remember something. Something I had promised myself just a moment before. Something, something ...

And a sudden "But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus and always thus will be" flutters in from somewhere, a dying sputter of a thought. But that is the last and I am pulled in. Pulled into a free fall.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Life's like this

Life trundles along the gray plateaus of the daily, avoiding the dark and sunken valleys of despair and missing the tall shimmering hillocks of happiness. There is a path that it follows amidst these, on this endless gray sea of slate. The path which for the most part is by itself, is intersected every once in a while by other paths and more often than not, takes sharp turns into the aforementioned valleys. Life has to be careful, for there are never any signposts put up in advance, to warn it of such things. "Conniving sod!" it says, its irritation directed towards the one who designed all of this. Surprises almost seem to be built in - a feature, instead of a bug.

And every once in a rare while, along the dusty path, are glimpses of what-may-be's. Having stopped now, at one of these, it pauses to look upon the what-may-be. And a moment later it ambles on, wondering about mirages.