Gilmour makes the transition from someone beyond repair to come back to life, only to head straight – to the shining sun in his epic track “coming back to life”. Many would treat it as a weakness without trying to comprehend, without taking the prospective of the other, coupled with the self. When you lose something very close to you, is it possible to go to life as it was before you shared your existence with it? Shutting down the book and try climbing the ladder to the next chapter might be termed as closure, but what happens when even closure isn’t enough?

I had been living alone before you came. And I have been living alone since you left. And trust me; one doesn’t need to be a nuclear scientist to spot the difference between the two.

Paranoia, for the exile, is the pre-requisite for survival. One might find it hard to relate to, but I understand the words, the meaning it tries to portray, and the message it tries to deliver. For I have been in exile for the better half of my life, hiding not from people, but the self.

One should never judge a person unless he has walked in the other’s shoes, shared the path and felt what the other is feeling. And there were some who walked beside me, expressed the fear in their eyes. The others, like me, hid it in their smile. You might have wondered why I smiled like a buffoon the first time I met you, kept smiling the entire time I felt your presence by my side. I even smiled at you when you walked away. Every smile grounded a different implication, but the root was the same, I smiled from fear.
I liked you since the very moment I laid my eyes on the lady walking down the park, gliding feet, dancing in the dew carefully preserved by the blades of the green grass. And it took the courage of almost every fiber of my body to hold on to the fear of rejection and ask you out. But when this transition of being attracted to you to falling in love took place, I cannot really point out. One minute, I was impenetrable, I had shielded myself from anything that could cause a disruption to the way I lived my life. The next I knew, my heart was beating outside my chest, exposed to the elements. The only fear I felt at the time was the fear of not seeing you again. My heart stopped whenever I came home to find you gone only to kick-start itself again when you returned. For a change, I smiled because I believed in it. For a change, the only fear I felt was of someday not smiling that smile.

When you try to live your life according to a big plan, it’s impossible to account for all the contingencies. And it’s difficult to stay sane when you see that the plan is on a different route from where you stand. Nevertheless, I was happy. But sometimes to calm the nerves of mutiny it was a necessity of drown them in some whiskey, or a little scotch, and hold them with a joint or two. Misery loves company. It treated me kind. The only key was being gentle.

But sanity is growing ever too costly when you’re not around. I will take it if you accuse me of being selfish, that these are mere excuses to indulge in these, which I term as the innocuousness of what is left of my sanity. True, I do it for the self. But more importantly, I do it for you.
All our lives, we keep looking for indulgence. We give all our energy to get to that elusive big red cherry and oh! life would be so much more simple, so much more fruitful if only we could get to that cherry, even hold it for a while. We concentrate so hard on the protagonist that we neglect to pay any attention to the plot or the hidden subtexts. And what happens when we do get to that red cherry? We are ecstatic, no doubt, but for how long does the enthusiasm last? When does the euphoria give way to fear? The fear of not being able to hold on to it anymore. And what if we never make it to the red cherry? Do we live our entire lives in fear of not achieving the goal we set out for?

I have seen them all. And I have felt them all. And if you ask me about the fear I fear the most, it is the one of facing the truth. All our lives, we keep running for the truth, chasing it, acknowledging it, begging for its revelation. One feels that the truth shall set the self free. I say that there’s nothing which enslaves more than the truth. Accepting the truth means the end of hope, the end of the journey. But if you keep running away fearing the truth, you become too easy a prey to the evil of living a lie. I tried walking the on delicate rope of the middle path, but somewhere down the line, the boundaries have been washed in the mist. And I fear if the path I am on will take me to the future or some place in the past. Or will it take me back to where I started from in the first place?

We put too much energy in dealing with our fears of being wrong, of being proved that what we did was in fact, not right. But out beyond the ideas of rightdoings and wrongdoings, there is a field, and I hope that I’ll meet you there. Loving you has been the most profound, intense feeling of my entire life. And it breaks my heart that I have to end it. Not because I cannot face my fear of dealing with the truth, I’m beyond it, I’ve lived my fears. But for I realize, for all the fears I’ve been left with, the only fear I wish for is the fear of losing what we had together. Being with you will require one more effort, one more life, one more starting from the scratch. I have to be born again. But to be born again, you first have to die. Goodbye.

Inspirations: a book (omega minor(Paul Verhaeghen) ). a series (californication).