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.