The Way

Floating,

In the midst of the deep dark,

Aboard a vessel of fur and flesh,

I heard someone chant

In that sea of aloneness.

Startled and confused,

My heart jumped up.

Securing my feet on deck,

I glared at the horizon,

These shining dark waters,

Were flowing to.

But all my vision could comprehend,

Was a coal hued silence.

And there it was again;

That chant,

Dancing all around me,

Dressed in Colors,

I was never supposed to see.

Confusion grabbed me,

Followed by pain,

Of not knowing

What had halted

My sail on these

Calm waters of torment.

But before she could spawn her devil,

A light blinded my confusion

Followed by what I don’t remember,

For when my gaze returned to me,

I was no more floating

Blind on my feet,

But was washed up on a shore,

Lying atop the blinding sands of light.

Chaos stormed my mind,

Panic held my breath,

As my hands

Grabbed a hold of the

Light all around me,

I picked myself up.

Out there on the dark waters,

I could see my vessel afloat,

Making its way to the horizon.

And all I could do

Was watch the darkness

Sweep over the light

On that beach

And carry the sands

In their storm.

I turned to the island,

To find a way;

A way back to him,

Him who believed in me,

Trusted me till his last breath,

And beyond.

He may not have had a heart of gold,

But he sure knew how to forge one.

He may not have had perfect vision,

But he sure knew how to lead the blindest of all.

He may not have been a lover,

But he sure knew how to light the fire,

In another’s heart.

And so I walked,

Deep to the heart of light,

Hoping I might find

That guide again,

Sitting on that diwan,

Waiting for me

To put my head in his lap,

And cry my sorrow out.

Crossing the plants and trees of light,

I came to a clearing,

A parchment grey,

Where stood the two shrouded,

One in light and one in dark.

With that chant dancing all around,

Turning my impatient heart inside out,

The chaotic me took a step forward,

To the tablet that lay in between them.

And the shrouds commanded

Together in harmony,

“Read!”.

“Anger,

Hate,

Pain,

Sorrow,

Loss.”,

I felt.

“Choose,

The first;

To bend,

To break,

To annihilate.

Choose!”

The spectres took a step,

And there it was,

A path broken in two;

Glowing steps,

Black and white,

Leading me to each.

“To annihilate?

Whom?

I don’t want to annihilate any,

I just need to know,

I just want ...”

“Silence!”

The emotionless voice thundered,

Through the grey and the dark,

“Be annihilated, you must,

Break, you must.”

“Who was that?

It was neither of you.”

“That is the will of the grey,

It who lives with the dark,

And the light.

Now, choose!

No more will be heard,

Till the choice is made.”

And the black air stood still

With that command.

No more could I hear,

Even what I spoke.

No more could I hear,

Even what I thought.

That’s when my weight shifted,

In the direction

That I could feel,

I knew the path,

My mind,

Would have

Taken me on,

But my heart,

Took my soul

To its kin.

Discussions with a wraith

And there I was, standing beside him, a kin of my soul - a one shrouded in the black; a wraith of a jet black mist. He was a nebula, shrouding that which was my star of darkness. And thence forth, he started off.

“Hey man!”, his voice, a surprise in itself, held a warmth familiar.

“Ummm… hey?”, my perplexed voice trembled.

“Don’t be taken aback by my form. I am like you: a conscious being, able to relate to other consciousnesses. So, you and I, we can understand each other; feel each other. We, you and I, can help. But your mind should be open and your heart should be full.”

“Oh! Thank you for the tip? Mind I call you Vader?”

“Sure.”, it replied with my playfulness mirrored on those gaseous lips. His distorted lips hid my surprise and anxiety; they were a veil birthed of my awkward humour.

But above that grin, were a pair of deeply sorrowed eyes that just glared through mine; there was not anger I could feel but a sad understanding of the persona claiming to be me. The darkness of my star passed into our world through his eyes - I can drown in them dark gleams of mist that mirror my grief, my pain, my desperation & my resentment. The abyss called to me, hypnotised me; for when you look down the abyss, it looks back at you. Blink, and you are down there; preserving a love (meant) to die, hating a soul, buried under a self condemning guilt. So familiar. So comfortable…

“Look at that; how beautiful is the moon of the black!”

And I turned to realise what my senses hadn’t registered on the account of them being lost in the agony of his lamenting eyes - the sky was dark no more and the light around was bright and sharp. The currents of weightless quanta struck and swept past my skin - every single crash exploding on the ends of ropes tied to skin, running through my flesh, to the king of a slave seated on that mound of broken dreams. But my eyes were bizarrely unaffected - hoarding the visions of a world never imagined; the dark stars and the moon gleamed, cores of molten dust and gas engulfed in vast oceans of darkness, sprinkled on the background of currents doused in shades of peace. Undeniably beautiful, and undeniably wild. To me, at least. So much light. All these energetic quanta floating around; peace seems to be accompanied by a terrible chaos. So, what is peace? Is it in that stifling order, of which the old wise men construed the universe? Is it to be found in the fountain of chaos erupting from all we let affect our minds?

“The dark of these stars bathes us and the world of light all around. Let us walk.”, and his steps of vapour shadowed the glints beneath our feet, as they landed.

“So, Vader, who are you? And what is this island in the middle of my cosmos?”

And he turned to me with glaring reds, lighting my fear avoided. His lips creased, “Now you know”, as the lament of me dumbfounded grew in his eyes - he is me. And by the virtue of our kinship, he knows. He knows why. He knows how. He knows.

“I would like to leave now.”, I bowed my mist hanging off a helplessness.

“I know you do. But maybe, this is the moment afraid you take a step - embrace yourself.”, his calm demeanour annoyed me more; sank my heart deeper into the abyss that his presence opened the hatch of.

“No. I don’t need this. It is pathetic. Actually, all this is pathetic. What the fuck are ‘you’ doing in my world? You are pathetic.” I glared back with my own beads of a maddening anger, driven by a fear deeper than my consciousness.

“Yes, you are pathetic. Pathetic to deny the realisation of how your insolence towards yourself is ruining you and all of them your love lays claim to.”

His words struck me like blunt stones, shaving off flesh and skin where they landed. The knees of my bleeding frame felt as if (made) of water; he was my abyss, the one whom I locked away sometime after knowing. And here he was, making me realise my worst fear - knowing that my heart is a bee banging its head against a tube light, never knowing that it is not what it wants. Every bang followed by a reaffirmation of the belief that what it wants lies just a step away. I want something so beautiful. I want to be a god of big things; I want to be the one eyed in a crowd of blinds. That when people know me, they know all that is good in the world. I want to admired, I want to be loved. But turns out, it all was flawed from the start. That there are no saints without a past. I have been so wrong due to ignorance of right and wrong.

But despite all my flaws, I have a surprisingly rigid ego. I am a man drunk on a pride that I have not lived up to in so long. And so, how am I to reply not hatefully?

“You are judging me? It is because of you I am pathetic. It is only because you exist. I should kill you right now and here.”, my teared maddened eyes spake.

The seeing blood flowed down as a screen as the pair glowered at me, “If you could have killed me so easily, then have I been alive for this long? Why have I grown; been ladened with so much pessimism, grief and hate? You feed me every morning you wake up. You can get out of your bed and stop feeding me, but you choose not to. Even though I have been fed so to have grown to a place where my brother is not even seen all day, I am sick of your pathetic flailing. The reason why we are conversing.”

“Yeah well, I don’t want to converse with you. I am leaving.” I moved away, my feet landing on the sandy ruins of terrible white. And we walked, me and my feet, passing coconut trees of light hanging above my wildest dreams. Ferns and Mosses decorated their legs, rising to kiss my forehead with the little drops of jet black streaking across their bodies, floating with the light. A few fallen coconuts had cracked, a shell of darkness exposing flesh of light with streaking darkness. I picked it up, just to see what it was. The flesh felt like the flesh of any other coconut. And my nails dug further. Beneath three scratches, the layer was dark, streaked with light. These layers alternated, with dark of abundance smoothly transitioning to the dark of scarcity. And deep down were three seeds, 2 of darkness and 1 of light.