Islands
The world breaks down into faraway
islands. Yesterday I could have found you in a chance meeting, a couple of
wrong turns or an unexpected phone call. Today you are on a different planet.
And I am hiding out in my little bubble. It is peaceful, I admit. I haven’t had
such a luxury of solitude in a while. But when you pull down the shutters
against the world, you don’t expect the world to shut you out as well. Funny
things, islands. One gets tired of all the noise from the busy ports, and one
gets tired of the sound of water lapping against the stone. People are the same
way. They want to run and they want to stay still. They want adventures without
things changing, and when things change too much, or stop changing at all, they
wonder why they’re still standing where they were. And sometimes, it’s not the
world standing still or the world spinning too fast that is the problem.
We are, to use a cliché and a curse,
living in interesting times. When we read our history books or watched our
disaster movies and imagined ourselves being heroic, we hadn’t really counted
upon reality writing the worst disaster movie plot of all times. Turns out, saving
the world isn’t all that fun, and the mundane wasn’t all that boring. Somewhere
in the world, men and women and children had trudged miles and miles on foot in
search of home and food. They hadn’t asked for a quest. Somewhere else people
bleed on the streets, they would rather be inside and happy. Perhaps alive. And
all this while, we search for words to say, the right words, the correct words
that will keep us safe. And yet we want to be heroic. Back when the world was
only the little island you could see around you, you thought people were saner.
You thought people were good, and you were right, and so was the world. Then we
opened the world into our little rooms and you heard the fear and the rage and
the virulence and the disbelief of difference. The angrier people got, the more
they huddled together into little islands. And now it seems we are either going
to splinter apart or keep ramming into each other till we are only the remains of
our mangled flesh and blood. Yet we persist in all the anger and all the hating
and the carrying on and staying alive. I wish I knew of a way to live without the
fear.
Somehow, when we thought of the end
of times, we had envisioned a countdown of sorts, a certainty of an end, a
knowing. But what we have instead is a protracted limbo as we wait out our
days, suspicious of our own selves while we watch each other over old sailors’
telescopes. And we drift further and further apart into unfamiliar islands of
forgotten names, like a backtracking history of unraveling potentials. We
become strangers, to ourselves and to others.
Dear Stranger on your dove-gray
recliner and your bottled cocktails and your utterly adorable dog, I watch the
forest swaying in the breeze outside your window through a screen barely bigger
than the palm of my hand, and you are worlds apart. Shall we never meet again
in strange places? What of the adventures we planned? What of the wild dances
on a drunken beach at night? What of the joyous hugs of long-awaited meetings?
What of holding hands in the dark? What of spontaneity? What of all the people
I could have met and would have met and should have met? Shall we now all hide
behind our screens, working as cogs in remote sync, our stories permanently
frozen into stasis? If we came from stars from millennia back that still move
in our disparate bloodstreams, how can we let the stories halt midway?
Or perhaps life will pick up the
pieces in the end and we shall return again, to our boardrooms and waterparks
and classrooms and theatres. We will forget the fear of being and go on as
before. Or we will learn to live with our fears, when we pick out our
groceries, pass the coins at the till, stop for a drink on a tired evening,
even when we’re alone with ourselves. Everything begins and ends as we’ve
always done. As they’ll always do. We can put on armors- building walls,
lighting prayer lamps or drowning the silence with our own loud voices, but at
the end of the say we’re always alone, our armors melting away like a daydream.
Meanwhile there are travel plans and schedules and reservations, and everything
can’t be put on hold forever. Once upon a time we lived in smaller worlds, with
smaller stories to guide our steps. But that was long ago. We can’t go back to
the savannahs neither. We’ve told ourselves the world’s our oyster, we’ve told
each other we are one world (while we still bleed to keep the other away from us
and ours), we have hashtags and forums and platforms cutting across meridians
and we need each other and our stories to love and hate ourselves. No, I don’t
suppose we can keep the windows barred forever.
But I see you there, by the window,
your little rescue dog asleep in the sun as you tell me how you’ve been doing
up your new home, and I wonder if we’ll ever meet again. Or if at all.
I would have liked to meet you.
...
I am just thinking aloud. You can catch
me on
You can also follow this blog on Wordpress .
Thank you for reading. Please like, share and subscribe.
Comments
Post a Comment