Afternoon Rain

Does it bother you that someday this would all cease to be? This Sunday afternoon, this silence of unspoken words and this smell of cinnamon in your tea. 

Does it worry you that, no matter how many photos we take or videos we make, all this and it's memories will fade away? 

Does the coldness of the space still scare you? Does the cacophony of this world still irritate you?

Or has my love made you stronger? Will you now go where you'd have never gone before and fight where you'd have never fought before?


Has my love made you love life more? 

There is an inevitability of death of all things beautiful and it will soon be knocking on the door. When it does, even if long after you are not you and I am not me any more, will you still hold on to that door? Will you still protect this carefree laziness, this lying about on the floor with your hand in my hand and the smell of this afternoon rain?

Meaning

Professor Orcello, the tiny octopus, loved traveling. He went from pole to pole to deliver lectures to schools of fishes and universities of whales. He swam deep and shallow to interact with the weirdly shaped jellyfishes and debated endlessly with his brother, Squeaky the giant Squid. He had vacationed in the reefs of Polynesia and was in Caribbean for a guest lecture when he was caught and ended up in the plate of an Indian professor in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco.

The professor, unaware of Orcello's fame and knowledge, ate him up while discussing her research with a colleague. Next morning, she passed out Orcello as shit before going out to deliver her talk on "Meaning: There is more to life than happiness".

Rainfall

On those late afternoons when you see R sitting in her swanky glass-paned office on the 35th floor, with earphones plugged in, typing away on her silver white laptop, she is also whiling away time with her younger brother in the orange orchards of her village, just playing with the golden sun entangled in her brown hair. And on those nights when she is busy drinking and laughing with her friends in a loud bar, she is also on a beach, naked under the half moon, making love to a stranger with nothing to hear but sound of the waves.

Maybe if I was a physicist, I could have given you a satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon but as I am just a history teacher all that I will be able to tell you is what is happening to R. And it is this: R splits involuntarily, at times, into two or more complete selves and wanders off in different directions. No, not psychologically or metaphorically. She actually physically disintegrates into copies of herself.

“How many of you are there right now?”, was my first question when she told me about this. And after I had asked her innumerable follow-up questions, only half of which she answered, she had permitted me one last question.     

“Which one of you survives when you recombine?” “Both,”, she said, “until I split again, into two new halves”. “But which is the correct version of your history, then?”.  She waited for a moment and took a long drag of her cigarette. “World wasn’t designed keeping ease of documentation in mind. All that I can tell you is that the walls that limit possibilities are more permeable than we allow ourselves to believe”

Obviously this wasn’t a spontaneous answer but it did shut me up then. In the following days, I coaxed her into letting me study her in all possible ways. I even installed more than a hundred cameras over different places that she frequented, to capture her decompositions and recombinations. And, with all my effort and research, I had just three observations.

First was that R was not lying but that she was understating her condition. She didn’t just split into two but multiple entities - once I observed her simultaneously in as many as 42 videos. Second was that no existence of her had any connection with any other existence but they all smoothly transitioned into each other. While in one she would be crying inconsolably, in some other she would be laughing her ass off. And when in one she would be shopping for gold and diamond jewelry, in another she would be begging from door to door.

And, thirdly, that even with all those varied possibilities, R did nothing but be R. While she could have gotten away with murder, she, in all her incarnations, mostly just sat around looking out of the window wondering, for example, why was the beautiful rainfall making her sad.

Death

I don't think my life will flash before my eyes when I am about to die. I think I will just picture that afternoon again. The one from that time that I don't remember any more. When we had gone to that place which I can't recall with those friends who faded away long back. That afternoon when blue sky had hid behind trees and the breeze had rushed through the blades of grass.
Would it even matter whether you aren't by my side when i die, as long as my mind can bring back for me the smell of white flowers from that afternoon  when the back of your hand had first touched the back of mine.

Beach

That night I woke up to find myself lying on an isolated beach somewhere. It must have been around four in the morning and the beach, the sea and the sky were all painted in various shades of blue and grey. I knew the time because it was not the first time that I was waking up like this. Since childhood there were these nights when I would wake up at four in the morning and roam about in my house.

There was something beautiful about the darkness and the silence of these nights that I always looked forward to during the day. The days are lost under layers of small talk and the schemes that keep it going. But at nights naked thoughts bubble up to the surface. Useless thoughts and stories, all meaningless. They thrive because they are never spoken out to be judged and because they don't have to follow the latest fashion.

But that night I found not a stray thought to think, not a metaphor to decode, not a song to sing, not even a soul to hate. And I couldn't sleep either. So I got up, got undressed and ran towards the splashing waves. For some time I could see myself running - a black figure getting smaller against a large dark blue sheet. And then I vanished.

Morning Mist

Don't you, at times, want to Disintegrate?

To break-up into tiny particles, like the ashes of burnt letters, and Disperse.

Or to Dissolve, like a pinch of white powder, in a greenish-golden liquid.

Dont you, at times, want to get rid of this burden to exist, as a whole?

Yet, not cease to exist, altogether.

Justice

If I decide that what I do is justified simply because I did it, can I absolve myself of all guilt? After all I must have had my reasons to do it. And because I always do something for a reason, even if it is as simple as “I felt like doing it”, I can live a life of total guilt free bliss. I can murder someone just to test a new pistol or rape someone just because I was horny. You can put me in your jails, flog me, stone me or hang me but you can never put guilt in my conscience. And what about the petty crimes, like defaulting on a promise or cheating on someone who loves me? You can only hope some make-believe higher power will strike upon me with vengeance. Even if I am somehow punished, will justice ever be delivered if I never repent?

So, at the end of it all, do not all matters of morality and justice come down to the ability of the rest to manipulate the conscience of the accused? The power of reasoning frightens me at times. What we consider morality is just an informal standard to which most of us have agreed and that is being pulled down step by step through powerful lobbying. And we spend all our lives believing in such flimsy concepts. The more rational we become the more capable we are of the most heinous crimes. How I wish I was born in an age where people were still less refined and believed in chivalry and honor. And greed and self love still considered vulgar.