A tad less than

Somehow this title has been hovering in my head since the middle of the day. Of late things have been like this, little short of whatever they were supposed to be. Then again I think I am wrong. The definitive hour when this phenomenon started goes back quite a few years. Perhaps we are all too tired, of the mindless rambling all around, of treating non-problems as problems, of a relentless exhaustion from which there seems no respite, no escape…. Perhaps we are all too tired and sleepy to feel that we are that way.  The hurdles I pass, the tests I give everyday somehow fail to provide that idyllic rush of happiness, that sense of relief and success even after I have crossed all of them.

Did I take the road not taken?
Has that made all the difference?
Questions have baffled me, making me reach the end of my wits. In the end they disappear somewhere like the white clouds which rotates over my morning coffee every day. But the misty enigma which sheaths tomorrow’s vision persists and thickens itself every day. When I was younger I used to derive some sort of saccharine pleasure from this mystery, even if my tomorrow was part of that not knowing. Somehow the unknown had a romantic notion, perhaps of an adventure or of a realization. Perhaps that’s what childhood is all about, to descry a far-off horizon and to be happy with just the knowledge of its existence. Discovering that could be postponed by a silent procrastination. Let Dylan and Cohen make sense today, let the tambourine play this night. Tomorrow’s morning and all that would come with it could be taken care of, after the tambourine ceases to play. Childhood was like this.

When I grew up everything stayed at its place. Music still elucidates all the wonderfulness it has on windy nights. The road beside me house still looks beautiful when soaked in moonlight after midnight. The 2a.m. tryst with a certain chocolate cookie which drives me through endless periods of hapless introspection is the indelible part of childhood in my adult self. What changed was me. With an unfelt hasty snatch I was removed from the centre of the space that once used to complete me. Now there is just an oddity, of belonging somewhere where everything has upturned itself.

Travel in a lost land is tiring. Through tenuous inroads it leads us to mirages of helpless despair. An impediment it appears indeed. The doable gets tougher and even when it gets done the sense of an ending hardly appears. Then again what more can one get from a mirage? Of lost hope and lost dreams I wonder what is more painful. Both bring an unfinished ending, one whose sour aftertaste exacerbates the prominent declivity which comes with it.

Once I started a cab-ride with someone who told me I was his favourite woman. In this long road which I should not have taken, it has been the only journey which brings back an old fragrance. That was my brief period of adultery, with childhood, against my adult self.  Someday I will perhaps get back to my old lover once again, and his cab full of darkness to talk about Floyd or to read the books I dare not read alone. Ironical that his darkness seems more resplendent and sanguine than the juncture at which I stand with sunlight full of paleness. It heals the palpable wounds on my idiosyncrasies. It smiles like Edelweiss, every time it meets me.