Washed Ashore…

The waves lash back and I sit stoned. There is a weight attached to every memory in your head. At times, it just smothers you under its load. It breaks your back and reduces you into a mulch and spreads you over a barren piece of land and you lie there wasted, thinking if you could go back in time and do things differently.

I have always believed that there is a reason why people meet. There is a settling larger universal order in the random chaos of days that pass us by. Maybe it’s just that we sit so close banging our heads with each other that the overall big picture eludes us. Perhaps one of these days, we all will rise and see what this big mosaic is about. This universe will have to unfold itself one day and let us in – one at a time.

The window of life has drapes of time on it. It is not very often that the winds outside unfurl these curtains and one gets a glimpse of the meadow outside.  When the days are thick and do not trickle down your forehead as easily as before, one needs to drop his sickle and catch some breath. Maybe its about the fading daylight as well. When you can’t see much ahead on the road, you tend to either slow down or seek a shelter.

My refuge are the days from another life. A sleepy afternoon, a dreary walk, a starry night, a rickety bus, an endless wait and the ride back home – when I mix all of them together, it becomes a joyful, happy place. Don’t ask me how. I wouldn’t know. The problem is I ran through those days so fast that I wore myself out in the first lap itself. Looking back now seems meaningless for I do not care either about the race or who I was running against and what I was running for is long gone. The race ended before the finish line and all of us went home to our own respective wrecks.

In my head is a pile of old photographs – an assortment of people, places and days which were once golden but are now a shade of brown like the worn russet pages of an old book. In my quest for the shore, I didn’t stop to mourn for the people that were lost to sea. I now sit alone on the sand looking back the same way I came from, waiting for another ship.

Maybe the destination never mattered and it was always about the voyage – about being seasick, forlorn, tired of rowing at the end of the day, battling the storms and finishing off the last barrel of rum and singing to each other.

I guess I wouldn’t know now. Not until another journey – if that ever happens.