Taking a Step Back

 

Dearest Em,

Doors shut. The world on the other side today is eating, drinking, singing, dancing, and living- all which I can assume from the rising hubbub and loudening beats of music. The party flames next door setting the walls on fire; while on the adjacent side in my room they've been frore, the winter painting them blue. It's past midnight, I am awake with the steaming coffee on my table and the night lamp on and outside the window there's a star gleaming in the sky, a single one, and invisible light-strands cutting through the darkness, entering my room. Though I can't see the light, I know it's there, something celestial in the way nights shine without light. I know there's not much thought needed to claim that solitude isn't loneliness for me, at least to a great extent. I do deny that I have never pined for company, that I have never been the wildest party animal in my head and have never had nonpareil friends for life, I still do. But there's this side of me, this soft corner in my heart for a solitudinarian part of life, for the kind of loneliness imperative for the creation of art. I have only seldom hated it and ever since he left, my loneliness has got beautiful wings to it, to put it mildly. This reclusion lets my poetic heart beat in a different way, I am more myself. One of the best things the universe ever did to me was to give me a vision, a nebulous yet a lucid one; I know sometimes I see the reality beyond reality or rather romanticize it to the extent that to the soul, it feels kinder? I know I think too much, I feel too much and in doing so I have lived a few moments of my life just too much, relived them too many times. Maybe I am introspective more than it's necessary to be, but I am still fond of this 'me'; I am made of passions, hopes, flames, flowers, stars, stardust. The pain of longing, of separation, and the catastrophes of happiness, and its aftermath, make me seek refuge somewhere, perhaps in the lights of distant stars. Pausing there, stopping the time for a while to let buried emotions free-flow; taking a step back when you're sick of moving ahead. The vast sky, as I stare at it, makes me feel so small, tiny, and so all my worries. It feels like leaving everything behind, being lost somewhere for sometime in the dimensions of the universe, ever expanding, ever unfolding. The way of searching for my own missing pieces, calming my nerves, returning back the blood flow to my dried veins, this wintry night when I, sitting on the sofa, shawled, with my coffee getting cold, pass minutes after minutes sinking deeper into thought and realisation, as a sailor sailing afar, still not lost. The party is still high next door, I have work piled up for tomorrow. I too am a theatre person, I do have friends to rub elbows with but I don't always need people to understand me, no doubt there's more to the story than what they read from my face. I volunteer to always be there for myself, live for myself and find all the little joys I long for, and never let the poet in me die.

With love,

Just yourself