Thoughts From Beyond The Line

Silken Nights

Some days, you walk through velvet trees down purple midnight roads, and you look up into an unfamiliar sky, and you see the seven sisters, clearly, like in a book of celestial magic. And then you look down again, and then up, at the northern star, burning in that purple, silken sky like a fervent wish. Something tinkles inside you, shivering, quivering, and then it breaks, shattering like a crystal constellation. You wish you hadn't ever looked up, because the loneliness of the world, the emptiness of the world comes cascading down upon you until the cold air freezes in your lungs. Things are happening, farther away than you can ever reach, on the very edge of your three-span wide existence. And your infinite smallness encompasses you and your eyes well up with helplessness.

But some nights, walking through that very same corridor of trees, you look into the eyes of the sky and smile, because it is within your reach and within your dreams. And sometimes, you cannot see the skies, and you cannot see the trees, and you cannot see the black of the horizon.

It's on nights like these, when my work is done and the next day holds no attraction, that I feel a little lonely. Not lonely for a particular person, but just a sort of deep-seated aching for a girl who could simply exist alongside me, filling my void with her activity. Someone to pick up the phone in between chapters, or sums, or thoughts, and share in a distracted, introspective kind of way the lessons just learnt. A familiar voice that gives a sense of before and after to my timeless evening. An unconscious statement for me to dwell over, or smile at the thought of in later moments. Something to look forward to, something to look back upon, even if it is only a half-moment in somebody else's life. When she finishes…. Before she starts…Knowing that in a room apart from mine, a life I love is burning with the friction of to and fro, of thought and motion and action, makes my own inactivity seem less wasteful.

Empty room in an empty world, Full of things and thoughts and sounds,How is it I only see and hear,The emptiness around?

Where did the time go?

It dissolved in unfinished actions.

It disintegrated in wasted evenings.

It burned in futile retrospection.

It corroded in moist self-pity.

It fell apart in forgotten moments.

It melted into shapeless figures.

It changed into another of life's regrets.

And emptiness remains, a filling void…