Ruchira's Ramblings

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...

And just like that, summer ends, and winter creeps in, stealthily, and the air around you is suddenly a little heavier, making breathing difficult as the clock-hands hammer away their way to yet another tired planet’s weary turn around a star. Quite an average-sized star in the sidelines of just another weary galaxy. And all you want is to be somewhere else, be someone else, be some non-sentient being that doesn’t mind being devoured as the monster of silence parts the thinning air in its gaping yawn and leaves you just whole enough to know your own deadness. And you want to turn on the television, even that inanity could fill up some space, perhaps shatter the silent screaming inside your head, but you have no energy left for all that malicious slander seeping even more poison into your soul. And the airwaves, tired of being unused just leave you to gasp on your own.  Take me somewhere else on the wings of nightingale song. Let the magic casements open and the faery be r...