Flowers. Oceans of the brightest hue of pink, Overflowing with waves of petals One over another, Each slowly falling apart As if the glue that held them together Begins to weaken.
Slowly coming to its end but not willing to let go. With spirits undeterred, It continues living life, Attracting admiration. For to find joy in fading ink Yellowing paper Wrinkled pages Is a gift.
It still pulls through, Knowing it will wilt and crumple and shrivel up Contrary to those flowers Just being birthed by nature.
It still blooms And shines like a dying star. Drawing glances And many a hand to stroke it one last time.
Flowers. Oceans of dulling hues of pink, Scattered petals, Arranged in a unique style. Fallen apart.
The moment we stop thinking, we stop thriving. The moment we stop pursuing questions that haven’t been answered, ideas that haven’t been explored, notions that are out of this world: we are down to nothing.
Thoughts will flood your mind and when you sit down in an empty room to think them through, you can reach somewhere. If we leave all material, and sit with ourselves, we go down the Rabbit Hole of thoughts. We border along the thin lines of reality and imagination.
When we think, we push ourselves to challenge our limits. We are inspired, we are astonished, we thrive. We feast on thoughts and gobble them up, and thus ascend in life.
But we get distracted. We are distracted by our own creations, not being able to go long without a break. We fail to notice when that ‘break’ turns into a constant lifestyle, and we lose our ‘thoughts’. We stop thinking. We are caught in the frenzy of life- rummaging for a moment with ourselves and coming up with nothing.
We stop questioning beliefs, ideas, facts and simply accept information as it comes. The rebel in our mind has fallen and we don’t think anymore. We lose bits of our originality every day, and let ourselves be lured into a daze.
We are constantly looking back on our memories. They’re arranged in a sort of a scrapbook in our heads. With each event, we narrate a chapter of our lives; decorating each page and ending with a flourish. Only when going through our book do we realize the tiny moments that made us smile.
Sometimes it is playing with toys and losing oneself in all the singing. Or letting yourself go wild and shouting out in the wind. Maybe it’s the feeling after you watch a movie and the moment when it all sinks in. Maybe it’s holding hands with someone and jumping up and down or laughing at a bad joke till you cry or screaming your throat sore to a song.
We all have these moments. Filled with joy, happiness, a fleeting feeling of a happily ever after. We often let these moments go, make space for new ones. It’s not possible to hold on to so many scrapbooks and memories. We run out of space. So the insignificant events slip through the cracks of our minds as we shake them clear.
Years later, an old memory sparks you. You remember the days that made you grin and shake your head and admit that we should make the most of life. The days of your dancing past midnight, driving to nowhere, swaying to music only heard by you.
You can’t bring them back, but bookmark the pages in your scrapbooks. Look back at your memories in hopes of finding bottled up joy. The tiny moments, the little things, will make your eyes twinkle. Capture these moments, while you can.
The weird thing is that no matter how much you try to remember something, you are bound to forget at least some of it. Some call it age, others call it running of RAM space in the human body, but we end up at the same conclusion. Books are forgotten, stories are half-broken, lives half-lived.
Sometimes, we try to consciously remember things. We will run them past, think through every detail, every night. But every night, some speck of that story will fade away. We replace it with some memory in fear of losing it, but we hold on to whatever we have.
The most important thing is that though we forget, these things mould us. The books you’ve read, things you’ve seen, experienced, are what builds you. We may not remember them, but we know they have changed us and made an impact.
We know that events have affected us, words have moved us and touched us. And we don’t remember them because memory plays tricks on us. We grasp onto fragments of those memories, but it’s a relief knowing that they have changed us, even if in a small way.
Memory won’t be your friend through it all, but you are a constant example of memories. Memories have moved you, and made you who you are. And soon remembering is not the key, but imbibing is.
There are a few moments we experience that give us life. It’s the small things some of us fail to notice, but on looking back realize how much it affects us. It’s something different for everyone, but we enjoy it all the same.
When you ride a bicycle properly for the first time, and after ages of falling and bruising yourself, you are able to go on. You bump a little on the roads of life, but you fall into a harmony. An imperfect harmony, as you ride over pebbles and as your bicycle swerves on reaching a barrier.
But those precious moments when your feet fall into a rhythm with the pedals are ones to cherish. You feel the breeze you are cycling against and let your hair fly like in the movies. In that moment, though you know you might fall very soon, you feel like a hero.
Cherish those moments and make the most of out them. When you’re in a car with the sun roof off, you feel the thrill and your heart starts jumping. You know that after a few moments, you will climb down, feeling too cold or too bored. But that moment, worthy of being framed, is rare.
Ara loves gazing at the night sky. She would lie down under the blanket of stars, talking to her best friend Sam, wiling away time.
“We’re not special, you know,” she told Sam, who kept insisting they were. “We’re not, because-“
Sam cut her off, shaking his head. “Don’t drift apart, stay here with me. Stay here, in the present.”
They didn’t meet each other’s eyes, but kept staring at the stars. Ara grabbed Sam’s hand, an unspoken gesture they’d developed over the years. It meant “I’m here.”
Hours passed and they were still lying there, basking in the moment. Not worried about the sunrise, or the fact that any day could be their last together. They could be whisked away to join The Battery any time, this was all they had.
Many years ago when The Battery came into existence, Sam and Ara made a pact. Since The Battery recruited people only during nighttime, they vowed to sleep in the day.
“I’ll stay awake, if it means being with you. That’s all that matters. That’s the ‘special’ we have.” Smiles were shared, and promises were kept.
Everything was uncertain now, though. Their friendship rocked on an angry sea, threatening their ship to topple over and sink slowly. They knew this, Ara even tried talking about this, but was cut off as usual.
“We’ll escape if they come, Ara. That’s what we decided six years ago, and I’m not going to let you go. You’re special,” Sam told her over and over.
She writhed in her sleep that day. The light was too blinding, her thoughts were too meddled. All she wanted to tell Sam was that they were not special. She’d known this for the longest time, it’s what she grew up knowing.
Ara remembered her mother telling her,”We’re ordinary, Ara. We’re normal, like everyone else. We’re all the same, not special.” She couldn’t forget the way this haunted her after The Battery, but she lived by it.
Ignoring her heavy eyes, she got up and began writing a letter hastily. She knew what was going to happen, she’d known for quite some time. She could almost hear them coming for her and Sam didn’t deserve this.
It was the last thing Ara wanted to do, but there was no way out. Sam deserved more. He deserved a ‘special’. Not her.
The Battery came for her in the evening, when she was with Sam. She had stowed the letter away in his cupboard, and nodded to his words with tears in her eyes. This was it.
“Ara, are you crying? Did I do something wrong, I mean I can be pretty dumb at times…”
Ara shook her head, a bittersweet smile adorning her face. She embraced Sam, trying to hide the tears now streaming down. Minutes later, their moment ended. They could hear The Battery.
The world blurred and chaos reigned in those few moments. An invisible force was pulling Ara, and she started speaking quickly.
“Sam, we’re not special,” her voice was cracking.”We’re not, because destiny always gets to us.”
And just like that, Ara disappeared.
He stood there, understanding everything. Sam was broken as he felt it all sinking in. Nothing could matter now, but suddenly everything did.
‘We can only rebel against destiny for so long, till it gets to us. We’re not special,’ he shook his head, thinking. He went out and looked up at the stars. Fate would always catch up to them, and outsmart them.
He ran. He ran away from destiny, from The Battery. He knew that he would have to surrender to fate one day, but not that night.
That night he grieved. For Ara, for everything they’d had. For the truth, that they were not special.
This is a poem about how we are astonished at time that flies. How we dream of, yet fail to pen down our journeys through life.
MAP
Before me lies a million moments I am bound to forget And behind me lies a million memories I hope I can remember.
I’m hopelessly caught between the two Letting my mind wander Between the two worlds Yet marveling at How the two worlds merge.
How does time ignore my constant pleas To slow down And rush to explore what lies ahead Sometimes leaving me behind wondering what went wrong
And how does time slow down to a crawl After the usual marathon it sprints every day Forgetting an invisible target And waltzing like nature at night.
I’m caught in the midst of an ocean With no regard of the tide That ebbs and flows With no regard of me Who is strangling, struggling, against time Wanting to be set free
But what will happen after After we have been rid by time And the world has been rid of us
Will we be clung on to and cried upon Or will we be reduced to some insignificant speck of dust Blown from one place to another Always unmapped, unrecognized, unknown
By some magic Everything fits into a huge puzzle The whole of which is invisible to us But we can accept That when imagination meets reality Sense can be made.
But what if someday Everything starts to fall apart And we come to a point When language fails to express Our detailed thoughts and intentions
When the very tool that helped us communicate Will be the tool that ends us And severs all connection That previously tied us together
Will there be a time When all books Will be rendered invalid And all principles will have Molded into something horrifying We would not have accepted Before we changed
Will there be a time When we shed our skins And enter a new state Forgetting our morals Forgetting that we are mortals And declare a new ‘normal’
When the simplest of our senses Will have betrayed us And found a new path We once feared, To now follow?
Milomi's world 