The man sat at the table, his steady gaze never leaving the door. What a bright gaze it was as if battling with the brilliant light sneaking around the room. Yet, for all the rays illuminating the room, he seemed to be unlit by anything around. May be he would have been reminiscing the bad old days of his life, thought his lovelorn sister. It was his sister's thought nonetheless; but, he had a different view altogether or perhaps none. He was forcing to foresee his future in the dim light of the past, without any sense of the present. What an oddball, sighed his son who just happened to streak pass his dad.
The father wryly swerved, signaling something his son could barely understand. In no time, everybody around gossiped, thinking the father could hear them. They owned their own opinions, among which few were facts and fewer were likely to be called truths. Still, they had the luxury to do so. The ripe man has been out of such action for quite sometime.
This was nothing new. All through his life, he was charmed by a scare of a smooth life. Before he became an adult, his mom tried to lethally inject opium of optimism in him. She was flummoxed by both his frailty and fragility for decisiveness in life. He was often a prey for pilgrimages, taken to domes and towers to bring him closer to the outside world. He hardly resisted but remained aloof among the devout crowd. Neither could he completely appreciate why he was doing so nor did his parents ever made full sense of him. Still he spun his soul on this axis of attitude.
At school, he was at least nearly alike any other kid, enjoying wild imaginations while listening to boring teachers, rubbing with others over ranks, wrestling with the studs to impress glancing girls and least of all, showed no aversion to passion. So, why at all was a glacier of gloom gliding under him, waiting to drown him with endurable angst. He was quite unaware of it or just was pretending to be. But, one incident couldn’t unleash it all.
She was not the most sought after girl in the class; yet, for him, she was nothing less to an angel. Why, he himself can’t answer. But, he pursued her with deeper desire than his jobless uncle was for a heartless seat in the local assembly. Yet, she was barely impressed. He gave her mystical peeks, which were meagerly meaningful. It’s sad that all he wanted was his favorite pen back. It had slipped into her bag the other day when he was revolving it on the desk at the back of her. He was too shy to ask her directly.
“Why don’t you demand your pen?” proposed the watchman, his only friend who knew him more than anybody else in the class. “Somehow, I’m not able to steal my pen back?” he sighed. The watchman was dumbfounded; he thought a lot before advising anyone ever after. The boy was too sensitive to ask for his treasure back. More than the pen, he wanted it because he wanted to spin it around an axis on the bench. For other students, it was just another way to kill time. But, this regular ritual meant more to him.
Life for him hinged on some pivot that tried to escape the center all the while. The more he tended to swirl it steadily, the less it did so. He similarly couldn’t anchor on anything; no interest could rest his mind. He wanted to sift across various things; slipping away into topics profoundly without knowing how well it made sense to him. Yet, he got marooned by this madness, mauled by it and still could mop it off with new manias.
Before he could handle this undertide untidy process, he stumbled into adolescence where obsolescence becomes eminence. Others’ careers become ours; their passions become our obsessions; their lifestyles our fads. “Such a drag to become others’ shadows is an inescapable exotic journey one has to undertake,” he read in a stolen erotica. “It’s another way to prepare for the impending apocalypse,” said the preacher the before day. Yet, today had a different dose of despair.
In his usual run of life, there were events and effects. Most of the time he lived with effects; so, he was excessively wary of events, not preparing for them allowing them to plunder his life. Letting the rage rampage him, he unhurriedly waited for a rescue-team to salvage him. His mother often reminded him that he has to rescue himself, but the local preacher falsely read the moral books to evangelise the gullible adult into believing that some Other would come to save him. Like most adults, ambulances attracted him. “Accidents are around the corner if you close your eyes to the coming killers,” whispered someone to himself.
Yet, he would trudge the sidewalk raising and lowering alternately, a leg on the pavement and other on the road. He behaved as his mind swayed. Only one fairly knew the boy’s meshwork of mind: an untrained psychologist, the oldest beggar on the sidewalk who bared his body to cold and the sun. More so, he exposed his eyes too to the lad’s deeds and derived designs out of them. But, the benign beggar was dumb and unlettered; using signs he thought were savage. So, neither did he hint anything to the boy nor did the boy extract any directives from him. The boy missed out on another salvager…
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