SECRETS - II

This isn’t a commemoration. This is second-time honesty. 

I’ve been crazy the past few days and I even know why. I can’t say it though. I wouldn’t even hint at it, which is ironic because the very intention of this post is to do just that. Or to remind myself of a pitiful state of mind that I’m already aware of with enough of a dose to incite retaliation, intimidate my senses and to threaten them to cooperation with the fleeting vision of a doleful ‘or else.’ Not gruesome death as a ransom note that would sign my own release papers, but eventuality as the brick-red wall that grows with my efforts to climb it. I think I’m trying to put in words the inimitable agony of what it takes to ‘snap out of it.’ Which is what I’d try to do with the rest of this post as well, at the end of which I shall either have ‘snapped out of it’, or have admitted my failure to do so. 

The last time I shared my secret with you, I told you how I anticipated the time I would see you on screen and ask my mother to quit it with the Divas and take a look at mine. That song-and-dance routines never change was the bottomline where I wished for your intervention in that hour-long slot. And yesterday was the first time I felt threatened by that notion. 

Not that drastically– it’s not like I’ve never had to eat my words before, I think that’s primarily why I try to cook them up this well, so I wouldn’t have trouble eating them back in poor reception. That, of course, is a cooked-up statement as well. Words aren’t vomit where the mind is a takeaway counter that rings with the bell at every summon of thought delivering itself like a tasteful salad that’s both healthy and cold so you could relish it and it wouldn’t burn you and yet leave you like it should – warm in the heart and satiated in the belly. I’m going to go have one in an hour from now. 

Ah, if only life were as simple as a train of thought that I could take to the poles and bring back home loaded with Christmas gifts. Then I would have you gifted a record that played this song for you that I’d already have written and kept aside for the moment to come, except I wouldn’t remember it and you wouldn’t have expected it and both of us would be pleasantly surprised. You, with my intention, and me, with my ability, rediscovered. Too clichéd? 

And it’s not that I’m incapable of poetry. It’s that I despise it. Poetry I write for you is inevitably mine. I’d be a verbal exhibitionist encroaching upon you, puffed-up with the rise you gave me, wielding a baton you would never take in hand even though you might appreciate it from a distance. Appreciate and not be alarmed, because you’d find me beautiful, naked; because I’d have found you beautiful and I’d show you as I saw you through my eyes that made you so. Your beauty could be twenty two, about as old as you are, but I shall have made it twelve years old, sexless and naive. Part of me calls it 'inspiring consent', but then I hear a wry little voice saying 'Rape.' I'm no predator.

I can’t tell you, I can’t write you a poem, I can’t sing you a song, I can’t make you a movie that has us both as characters where the one that’s me tells the one that’s you exactly how he feels, and I can’t do that because I don’t know what would happen after that. Would you still smile the smile that you smile so often? Would you deem me misguided and spin me around so I could find my way, except I’d spin myself around and head back to you again? Would you be offended? Would you be kind? Would you shame me with your sympathy? Would you honour me with your anger? Would you dust me off with condescension – the air of one who’s seen much better, much worse that my adequacy wouldn’t impact you enough? 

I don't know if you made me, I don't know if I brought it upon myself, but for the first time in a long, long while, I'm speechless; clueless. For the first time in a long, long while, I ache. And for the first time in a long, long while, I write.