Open

I will not be broken-hearted
If you refuse to look at me.
Life is sometimes like a sky somewhere
Where birds don't fly free.

It Is All FruitCake

When you think that it is better to leave me alone to find myself, that is when continents begin to drift apart.

I am my own island now.

One Million Days Every Year

It is frightening to open a book for the first time. Always. The hands tremble. The heart races. What if the world turns upside down with the first page, or flies away with the last? What if new horizons open up and so do deep gorges? What will the author leave you with? Deep sorrow? Heavy and frozen happiness?
Who will you be, once the trickle of words stops?

The book travels one million days every year to a library's shelf, stays sandwiched between the ones about war and dynasty, only for a brief period before beginning its journey again. Dropped into a satchel, mulled over a coffee, read aloud to friends.
And then that single everlasting moment in between all these, when the heart races. Because another life's journey is now going to merge with yours. The vivid and wonderful world from someone else's mind is going to open up before you. You follow the lines through their meanderings, you listen in silence to the thoughts and you feel something stir within you.

After the last word is savoured, your life is never the same. Ever.

She sat there, under the sun, for a long time, lost in a book.

Another Year For Archival

Sometimes life is more than emptiness and pain, more than the need to be politically correct or to be sharp like the roads that wind around cliffs.

Life is more than the craving for love or a home, more than the silence that hangs in a winter night around the lit fireplace.

Life is more than the flight of a soul, like that of a bird, in its trials to shorten the distance between two thoughts.

Life is so much more and yet, each breath we take is so very light, that a sigh holding the weight of the world goes from heart to heart without the slightest ripple.

Soaring

Another chunk of life is on my wings. Memories have been packed up and shipped to another city.

The times had been good.
Glimpsed this place. Saw cooked-rice grains falling softly, like snow, on top of each other and wondered if they have souls. Adversities breed character.
Lived that age. Timeless and silent, they stand terribly alone.
Met people on roads, in buses and trains, who stopped to share tiny bits of their lives with me.
Went up a spiral staircase and was glad when it finally ended.
Met myself and I am surprised again.

Little pieces of us live in the future - in dreams and tomorrows. One day, we shall meet those tiny ones and be whole.

Pebbles in a Pond

With stony certainty, we are sure of some people. We have the pulse of their being what they are. We know them as if their blood flows in our veins.
Sometimes, not so much, about some others.

They had not been sand between the fingers. Not words written on water. Not a sting, not a fall. But they are, now.
They had been sunstone, summer rain. Detours that changed our destinations, enriched our journeys. They still are.

Now, you look at the vastness of the empty space and the darkness of the deep gorge left behind by them; you hold their share of sweet memories they didn't want a part of; you try to make sense of the nothingness in everything.

Dear friend, you held it well, precious, in your palm. And that is why I am sure of you.