Keep walking.

The important thing is to keep walking. Maybe you won’t get where you intended. Never mind, keep walking. Maybe life will seem pointless and you will lose your sense of purpose. Keep walking. Perhaps your friends will grow distant, disillusioned by your perpetual rudderlessness, your family will become indifferent, and the woman you love will eventually give up on you as a lost cause. Don’t lose heart for you will have yourself. So keep walking. You might end up becoming the man you had once looked down upon in disdain. Keep walking – the act of living is an experience in itself and it is in no way less instructive than the experiences you consider richer or more wholesome. You will fail, you will falter, you might even find all your peers getting ahead of you in the ‘race’ called Life. However, if you dig your heels in, and still manage to convince yourself to keep walking, then I can assure you that you will come to earn yourself some respect towards the fag end of your life.

Your trials are your own. Your failures are your demons to contend with. In the confines of your psyche, they are absolute and final. No one will ever understand your struggles as well as you do. While you march, no applause is going to acknowledge your effort. There will be no medals for the hurdles you cross everyday, even if your shortcomings and your debacles are unforgivingly hurled into the limelight. But this is the price you must pay for strength of character.

It is a choice you make. It is not inherently good; no God is going to come and make these decisions easier. If you choose to walk, then you must choose to keep walking, and find a reason to do so that does not lie outside the purview of the activity itself. If you do, then you have to keep walking because that is all the reason you need. That is all the reason you will ever have.

I wish I could tell you that it gets easier. However, I am in no position to make promises. If you can do it now, when you have begun to run away from ‘living’ because of the way it makes you feel, you will get better at this. If you just close your eyes and keep walking, things might not get any worse because even when they do, you will know that that which is difficult and absolute has already happened. You will know that in that moment of reckoning, you had made up your mind to keep walking. So when your unruly mind threatens to engulf you and you can’t make sense of your journey through reason, keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep walking. That is life itself.

Black Magic, woman.

The terrible thing about building a wall around oneself is that it is heartbreakingly easy. The bricks slide into place so conveniently that you wonder what had been stopping you from donning the hat of a mason all this while. The terrifying thing about doing it is that it comes down all too quickly. All you need is a lone voice that gains in strength as it revolves in ever tightening orbits around the cold sphere of your solitude. The past and the present merge to form a meaningless blur of regret and disappointment until this voice is all that you know and all that you feel. It overwhelms every last ounce of your will and consumes your mind and your body, your heart and your soul. And while you are lying on the floor, groping around in the darkness and assuming that the clouds will never clear, the darkness lifts just as quickly as it had descended. In that moment of temporary respite, you make the rookie mistake of quickly assuming Nietzsche was right. What doesn’t kill you must make you stronger. Yes, but not always. You don’t have to take my word for it. Try letting down your guard and letting in that lone voice once again. If your heart doesn’t explode thinking about all the things you thought your life would be, you can have your money back. As I said before, the terrible thing about building a wall around oneself is that it is heartbreakingly easy.

Feared Intimacy

so many dreams, so many whispers, and so many anecdotes -
some invigorating, few inspiring, while most insanely inane.
shared, narrated, told, then retold - means ever so varied -
often through a mindless silence, or indulgences in vanity.

will they run out of them, having done so over and over again?
silence, shared in light and dark, become ever so intimidating?
will the quaint little nuances, growing into inexplicable causes
of hatred, poison the novelty in their character and stifle them?

they fear formalities and niceties turning something pretty into
a marriage of convenience. a secret paranoia and insufficiencies
ravaging the palace of cards; with it all its ideas, all its hopes.
will ambitions then be murdered at their altar of question marks?

the beauty of the moment seems tainted by this feared intimacy;
the friends and the lovers, though, still revel in their cynicism.
they give up more pieces of the puzzle than they can take back,
yet, without letting go, i fear, they would never be able to know.