My watch ticks 2:00 on a frosty winter night. I am walking down a lonely road, with my hands comfortably tucked inside my jacket. The absence of wind in the isolated boulevard makes the night even more uncanny. I know I am being followed by someone, someone familiar from my past. I can hear the dead autumn leaves crunching under his feet, and it sends a chill down my spine. My heart starts thumping wildly, expecting the worst. Just as I freeze in my tracks, and slowly turn around to look at that person, everything around me starts to dissolve..
I am only half asleep, with all the lights in my room still lit. My eyes are half shut, but my mind runs like a clockwork, thinking. I try to force my eyes open, feeling groggy. I flap my arms around wildly, searching for my cell phone. I attempt to unlock my phone, focusing hard to remember the last pattern that I had used to protect my privacy. There are 3 signs, telling me that I missed a call, a text and a ping, all before 10:30 p.m. Since how long have I been sleeping? I try to clear my mind and concentrate on the message. I finish reading it. Okay, I had pretty much expected it. I start thinking again, which no longer helps me to endure the situation. I can barely remember anything. I try to focus on the dream that woke me up with such a start.
Was it about the girl sitting 4 seats across me in the train, by the window, with piercingly sharp hazelnut eyes and dark wavy hair that fell so casually over the length of her shoulders? She was eerily beautiful, and her sheer beauty left me in an awe..But wait a minute! That wasn't what happened in my dream; I actually met saw that girl two days back, the very same as I remember now.
For about a month now, nightmarish sleeps have overpowered my usual sound sleeps. Nightmares, fused with gruesome hallucinations. Those which I had all this time, have been far worse and disturbing, than the one that I had described initially. Waking up every morning depressed hearing the screams of the people you love the most, can drive even a saint to lunacy. Creepy as it is, it gets worse when you can't share any of these things with anyone. You are afraid of someone judging you, and then ending up with crappy gossip. When the chips are down, everything starts getting on your nerves.
(Thanks to the most special friend of mine, with whom I could finally open up and share my situation; these nightmares have gradually started to blur!)
I have started living in a state of perpetual Deja Vu. Everywhere I go, it feels like I have already been there before. It's like following an invisible man. Irrationality prevails, like never before. My mind has gone bleary, unable to accept things. Anything.
Then suddenly, it hit me. The dream, on which I was focusing so hard to recollect. A thousand other thoughts start crossing my mind randomly. Meaninglessly. It feels as if my mind has gone into a roller-coaster ride. Everything happens very slowly over a large span of time: The phone calls, the conversations, the fights, the happiness or any other random thing - I am no longer confident whether these things took place in my dreams or if they actually happened in my reality. I sit back in my bed, making myself comfortable and start brooding over things, trying to get to the bottom of my problem. I extract some ideas and draw some pointless conclusions.
Yes, this is what I am going through. It's like, waiting like a lamb in the barn, ready to get slaughtered. I feel lost in my self-directed maze, knowing the way out all the time, but too afraid to find out what's out there, beyond the end of the last passageway. The only possible solution to all this is to muster up the courage and peek into the facts, the reality that awaits me.
Nature always has a subtle way of showing us the back door - the way out of all our miseries. A simple solution to every complications. But, we are always too busy licking the asshole of our problems, and then complaining about how unfair life is. But life is never unfair, for those of us who make the right choice, at the right time. It's not our abilities that define us, it's the choices we make that show what we truly are. But, making the choice needs more than just courage.
I am still in the search of what it takes to make that choice.
Till then, I can just wait and watch. I can be an onlooker. I can see my life tumbling down the hill, but there's absolutely nothing that I can do to stop it...
