Suspended Animation

Stories and poems get all but forgotten when the wheels of a mundane profanity dripping from the salivating tongue of a world gone horribly wrong on the virtues that it chose to sustain itself on, come forth in a random, naked dance of its own wild choosing to paint the moods and aspirations of young impressionable souls locked between romance and purpose – a chasm, deep and divided, further multiplied by the villainies of fate and other such things, finite and complicated.

Music blared from the speakers as Karan sat on his chair, his eyes closed and a cigarette tucked between his lips.

It is indeed a trance that envelops his senses. He fights his own mind. Lethargy. Depression. Manic. Frustrating. Pendulums. Swinging wildly, to and fro between the extremes of a joyous existence encumbered by the posturings that pretend to be sourced from the deeper and more profound things that come about in life, yet bereft of the substance that makes the intellect of an individual rest within its confined barriers, not in ignorance, but in peace and completeness. The pendulums do not break barriers. It’s not their ‘purpose’, it never really was. The wiser saints, the blessed ones stop by sometimes drunk on their own condescension and the mock illusions of their invincibility, and then they tell him that the pendulums are the law and the pendulums are the order and the pendulums rule the world and nature and everything that has a purpose as nothing can really exist without a purpose and nothing can really exist in suspended animation.

But structure and symmetry are the fascinations of the weak, mused the weakling to himself.

When the dawn bleeds the morning sky virgin from its night stars and a glowing radiant moon, it does not take sides. It does not take decisions. It is spontaneous. It is natural. It is random. It is how the universe conceived it to be. It is independent of time and it is independent of all the obligations of suffocation that come to suffocate the ones who are suffocated beyond the suffocated limits of the an asphyxiated mind already suffocated on its own constraints and with the suffocating burden of inventing ever more newer suffocating constraints for itself.

Another match-stick. Another cigarette. Another day. Another life. Karan, stands and waits.

Love and loneliness and lust and loyalty – phantoms which prey his stagnated consciousness, beyond the redemption of rationality or romance, beyond even the comprehension that is the luxury reserved only for the ones who are smug enough to not realise the pathos of the eternal cycles that the throes of sanity sends one through. Sitting by the windows that refuse to ever open, that refuse to let the sunshine ever wash the room clean from its years of dust and hued cobwebs – the confused one contemplates of the confusions that confuse the muddled definitions of what constitutes confusion and what constitutes definition.

Memories, he called them. Haunted and harried, he choked on his own breath; coughing violently.

Walls and friends, ornaments of daily wear that never seem to grow beyond the ambits of that defining ceiling – whitewashed in a shabby way, rule the days and the nights of the walking people. Then of course there are the ones who sit by themselves, or atleast the ones who always seek to do so; questioned the naïve one – what of them, what becomes of them, who finds them or do they die trapped inside their own elaborate labyrinths suffocating on recycled air passed on down through the generations of broken hearted and disillusioned lovers and loners. There must be a revered deity of such people too. A deity who gives them the pleasure of the pain which inspires them to find the epiphany which shall through its tragedy sustain not only an entire lifetime, but also the beyond – if indeed there is a beyond for such people. A deity without whom the pain would cease to be meaningful, a chronic ailment subject to cures based on simplified algorithms of finding ever new distractions to create ever new meanings of pleasure.

She still stays frustratingly out of his grasp to either forget or forgive.