My Diary Entries: 12th November 2007: Riding the Wings of a Promise

I am smoking a bit too much these days, and although I can quit any day, I don’t know what it is that I am drawing from the smoke puffed into my self only to be released after a brief touch with the lungs. Maybe, it also wants a piece of my heart. But isn’t it me, myself baiting my heart to the damage?

I want to quit. I know I can, but every evening sees me breaking one promise in the making of another. It also draws me to the futility of a promise: not a stain of uncertainty on making it, but losing color like the denims soaked in water for a night. I often wonder how it would be like if we were required to validate a promise. Just like the creditworthiness of a person, we’d be judged on our ability to fulfill a promise—on a scale of promise-worthiness. We do sign on documents everyday, it is infact a type of promise, but I’m not talking of those. I am talking of the ones which require no signatures: Promises made on terraces on cloudy nights, promises made in the flow of cursive ink, promises written in the bark of a pine, promises written on the sands of a beach, promises held in ones eyes and read by another’s, promises…. it’s a sea of words and we never tend to realize how it is going to impact the other person. It can take us soaring to the heights of rapture but then leave us to doom in the darkest of our moments.

Such is the power of a promise, and we are allowed to carry it and use it too without any license.

Talking of the promise-worthiness scale, what would it actually indicate?
Character of a person?
The ability of a person to predict his future?
Time’s cruelty or munificence towards one?

We dwell on a moment so much and get carried away in our emotional spurge to such an extent that the future seems an easy constant for us to define. And we make that promise. A promise-worthiness grade would actually indicate how grounded are we while saying something.

For I have suffered, and everyone reading this piece and everyone not reading this piece alike has in some way or the other suffered when a promise made was not fulfilled, a promise that had our hearts hinged on its wings, so much that when it died, we lost a part of our innocence.

Now that a promise-worthiness scale is a not on the radar of Humankind’s invention machinery, I smile at every promise made to me. When it comes to the everyday stories of my cigarette promises I tend to nurse myself well every morning for I had played with my own self the previous evening and am not carrying the corpse of someone else’s crash of hope.

But this also brings me to the point where I wait to be asked for a solitary promise rather than giving one myself—to quit smoking. I patiently wait for the day when the cigarette would be pulled out of my mouth, its butt crushed under the soles of the shoes and a word taken from me to quit it all.

This promise, I would keep, the truth of which would never known during my lifetime.

My Diary Entries: 1st November 2007 (2 AM): Forgiveness

We had walked together, and although we never held each other’s hand, we felt each other’s warmth in the space of our breaths. And today we find ourselves separated not by miles but by the worlds we live in. That space between our breaths has become too very insignificant. I once wondered what has got into it. All I found was a deep pain of loss. And so I started living in the breaths of my life. But am I not living the other equal part too… between my breaths?

She had cried, I could see and for once I felt like crying too. The ambience of the party would masquerade my tears, I knew. But then I discovered I had no tears left in me. There was no desire for the pain to come out and embrace the world. Content it was within me and I was struggling to say goodbye to this only constant thing in my life. Have I become too stonehearted to forgive myself? I wondered but not for long. We were in a party and had to attend to other things as well.

Late at night the following evening, I decided to clear my inbox of SMSes. Resting my head on a pillow, I started reading and deleting the trivial ones. It was then that I encountered her SMSes: the everyday good morning quotes she used to send, a few ones where she told me how much she was missing me, the ones which had prompted me to think of our relationship, the ones seasoned in the spices of lies, the promises that were never kept or maybe forgotten, the few complaints, and an endless sea of explanations. Arsenic poisoning, they call it in medical parlance, but I’d still name it as a slow death where the pain starts off as a pleasure and then slowly gets into you. Those SMSes transformed me from a smiling individual enjoying the Sun to the one of today, waiting for the Sun to set to be able to see the swirls of his cigarette smoke more clearly –all in the blink of an eye.

I found my pillow getting wet and before I could realize I was sobbing hard. I held back, lest someone might hear me, but then gave way to the on flow.

And while I’m crying my silent tear today, I know she has someone to wipe hers. In that cauldron of empathy she’d reside and she’d slowly take it as the flow of care and understanding.

I’d wait for her to bring me the day when we had smiled on a sunny day and prayed that it’d not end; I’d wait for her to give me that one single moment of her unadulterated life which she would not share with anyone; I’d wait for her to bring me the gifts of love bought in the company of no one except my thoughts; I’d wait for her to understand the song sung by the masses for her to realize the truth in it; I’d wait for her to lay down her fortress and still command the respect of the attackers; I’d wait for her to look into the West with a hold on the East; And I’d wait……

Till I learn how to fill the spaces between my breaths.