Orbits

There’s this word, or idea that I like. Journey. Odyssey. We are travelers in time and space, all seeking, knowingly, or unknowingly our purpose in life. Pilgrimage. That’s another word. Draupadi and her five husbands knew this when they embarked on the final journey of their lives (perhaps a lifelong path of wandering homelessness taught them that) – the one we call the ‘Mahaprasthan’- the Great Exit. And that’s true too. We journey to a purpose while also moving onwards towards the final leave-taking. Estragon and Vladimir were travelers too, even if all they did was wait beneath a dead tree.

But what if our paths are ellipses, an Ouroboros circling Godot? What if we were all just lonely planets lost in our own orbits of individual, inexplicable sorrows? And the hope of meaning and purpose, like the sun, gives us light and life-sustaining warmth, but we can never really touch it, and getting too close would burn and blind us, and so it’s much, much safer to remain content with change of the seasons.

And so we revolve in vacuum, trying to make sense of the silence, to fill it up with sound, to communicate. But sound doesn’t travel through space, and words are deceptive things with arbitrary meanings. Consider these words here, for instance. You don’t know when and how and why these words first formed in my brain, or how they reformed and reshaped themselves as the chores of the day kept me from writing them down and how much of it was lost and how much of it changed in the process of writing. Or, if matter is constant in the universe, perhaps nothing was lost or gained and what I truly wanted to say is still there being told somewhere else. Are my words my own anyway? I’ve sometimes caught myself humming tunes or saying words without planning to, without any conscious design. Are those tunes my own? And of those words that I do plan, what control do I have on their meanings once they leave my orbit and enter the frequency of your own? I look at a rose and say red, you might see the colour of your favourite scarf. Or blood. Or hibiscus.

Do you understand what I say? Do I understand what you say? Across all the interruptions and the distractions and the forgettings and the tides of ceaseless thoughts, and the many makings and remakings of ourselves at every instant, who knows what we set out to say, and what we hear? And may be I wrote this because of a relentless drive to remember the unwritten words before they are lost, or because I couldn’t breathe without writing this, or maybe I wrote this out of vanity and took a BuzzFeed quiz in the middle. Or maybe the quiz was only to procrastinate when I realized that all that I had meant to say was steadily slipping out my fingers. And maybe I wrote this for someone, or everyone, or everyone except someone, and you won’t know, because I hid that behind the words I didn’t type.  Or maybe you will, because I am not you reading it. I am not even the ‘I’ who wrote it. Who knows?

Yet we reach out across the orbits, and we try to touch each other’s sorrows, and sometimes, at brief moments of magic, our paths through space might be perfectly aligned. After all, planets too shine in the night sky.  

P.S: I write U.K English. My word processor insisted on changing everything into American spellings. That’s another gap between intention and expression to ponder.