Halfway House

Life has become nocturnal. It seemingly has condensed for now. As days and nights pass by, the dawn has escaped into a permanent dusk. It isn’t darkness forever, even though bringing in gasps of hopelessness from the eerie cigarette puffs. It’s a state of conscious slumber perhaps. Yes, it is. This time, it is. For time cannot stand in stillness. And the heart cannot just remain floating forever on a coffee mug.

But, today, there is stillness in the heart and everywhere else. The sinking hasn’t ended for days. It might not very soon. In a solitary sea like a lost island, sorrow has girdled the heart.

As Orhan Pamuk writes in The Museum of Innocence, “In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.”

The sense of time has been lost in these empty, uncounted days, in anticipation of spring. The spring that once was. And that will be.

As a friend scribbled recently, “So that we’re never alone after sunset” on a book, it set a sense of euphoria within. There was hope beyond the heart’s aching corridors. Today, the heart may be a halfway house amidst hollow forts of hope. Tomorrow, the lost will be back.

The shadow of hope quivers in these days and nights. In this city, abuzz with celebration every day, the moon glances through the window each night as if sparkling with innocence.

And then, came the commercially celebrated, day of love. Roses swung at each other. Hearts crossed with an arrow. As I stood amidst the chants of promises and lively discourses on relationships, there was everything, even happiness but love visible to the naked eye. Love had become a ‘hookah bar’ today.

It’s been pouring heavy all through the weekend. The sound of raindrops brings peace. It mustn’t stop. There is calmness in the air, as these raindrops fall on the trees across the window in the darkness of the night. Even the leaves, creating a sound of chuckle, are forlorn. ‘I want to live in this melody forever’, the mind wonders. It’s however, a time when loneliness torments you much more than ever. And you pass out, dreading the silence.

As Pablo Neruda writes in his poem ‘White Bee’

“Ah you who are silent!

Here is the solitude from which you are absent.

It is raining. The sea wind is hunting stray gulls.

The water walks barefoot in the wet streets.

From that tree the leaves complain as though they were sick.

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul.

You live again in time, slender and silent.

Ah you who are silent!”