Confessing To My Diary

While human exploration has reached to a point where we are considering settlement on the Moon and space tourism as an industry, we are yet to throw light and peep into our own self. Hardly do we realize what we want out of life. To be rich, to be happy, to be famous, to be content—these are all oversimplifications. Many a times we realize of one desire of ours only when we reach a point in our life when we cannot accomplish it, we mull over it thinking of the time when we were so close to fulfilling it and cursing ourselves for not taking that step. And many a times this realization comes when we are doing something petty—washing the dishes, looking at photographs, writing a poem, mowing the lawn, using the toaster…

For my friend’s birthday, I had decided to make a small movie containing some photographs of hers. The problem was to choose a few photographs from the sea of my digital camera’s output. I began looking at each of them, one after the other, sometimes going back to the previous ones. It was not the smiles and the poses that caught me. I saw a pattern in the photographs, a chronology of growth and a bookmark to the day and incidents when the photograph was taken. It was infact a time machine, dropping me into the past without a ticket.

I dwelled on it for time I knew not, surmising the thread to today with all its tethers. We have all changed, so much that I felt like painting the old pictures in the Polaroid black and white colors. Isn’t it amazing, the ability of a picture developed in the dark room to visibly grow old like the mortals in the picture? Some proportional relationship no Newton could ever prove.

It was in this web of knots that I finally surrendered my fort on that day. In the photo story I found my own story. Of the love I refused to surrender to, of the songs I refused to sing, of the dreams my sub-consciousness did not permit to dream… And while I have loved her all this time, I’ve realized it only today.

I felt a strange relief; of the kind you feel when you find an answer to the questions bothering you for long. With it also came flooding the answers to all my innate actions. I looked at the photographs from my new set of eyes, wrought in the colors of love. She was indeed beautiful, an undiscovered mire challenging you to explore its depths of quicksand. So slowly I had sunk into it that I did not even offer any resistance and the transition seemed as normal as the flow of water from the river into the sea.

When I had finished the photographs, it was well past the time of the night when you feel very sleepy. Maybe around 3 AM it was. But I did not bother to check. And then I constructed the photo-story—with the words I wanted to speak and the moments where I wanted to live. The architect in me wanted this construction to go on forever, encompassing everything I had admired in life, into the nothingness of being. Every brick that I picked up from my photograph-store fit in perfectly in concord with my dream. Eventually, I ran out of the bricks, but even than the house that I had built was complete in all sense.

Later, I mulled over where I stood. I was amazed at the way I was looking at things now, with the softness of the dewdrops comforting my view.

As I write this piece, I am standing in a fork on the road where I do not know whether to confess my love, or to just let it linger on in me.

I’ve read somewhere:
Many dreams may remain without a trailing line of pursuit. They plunge into the darkness while we never lose the ones with the trailers.

The Wait

Someone has said, if you are on the road, you should walk; if you are at a crossroad, you should decide. This age defying road must have started as the dead brown grasses of the fields, stomped heavily by the ones keen to go some place but not finding a road, a shorter way. Those early stompers had played the other way: deciding on the road.

And they have left us the road, which is hardly a semblance of the one they had walked.

Once, at a crossroad, I could not decide where to head. I waited there looking at the people—coming and going, busy with things that hardly mattered, ignoring the words floating in the air. They walked on, pausing at times maybe to decide, to where they found attention. And just when I had figured out the crowd’s pattern of movement, I was yet again brought to another situation—whether to move in the glittering road of attention or the road I desire, narrow and small. I decided to wait.

I am still waiting, and I do not know why or for whom?