searching...

What makes us who we are?
 

I am a compost bin. The waste of years is rotting inside me and I have the hope of emerging a new man. A better man. It will take time, and many more new people, conversations and relationships will get thrown in, even as the old ones ferment. I have learnt to live with the stench. It has become a part of me. When they ask me who I am,I tell them, a dull fragrance of changing sameness. They don’t understand. I am them, I tell them. Unknowingly they are shaping me. As if I were a mound of prostitute clay free to be moulded by one and all. I have been twisted and turned to fit varying designs of expectations, and every cast has found me wanting.

I know now I shall always be inadequate for the ‘I’ is ever shifting.They tell me about essences. That’s what we are. Some unchangeable core that withstands time’s machinations. That is what I must get in touch with if I am truly searching for my identity. Excavation is the philosopher’s realm, and they tell me that I must dig deep for the answers I seek. But what if I am here merely to posit questions without the burden of having to look for answers?What if it is the questioning that is the most important, what if I have given up on answers which are at best rudimentary and consolatory? They say then I haven’t probed enough, and that I am afraid. I tell them, as politely as I can, for rage seethes within at their incomprehension, about my need for questions.They brush it aside saying peace will come with answers. Questions are bilious. And with that they erase my existence, for to me what else am I but a bundled series of questions?

I don’t need to be disentangled with your explication nor forced into a state of false supplication as you try to measure me out against compartmentalized tropes that we are taught to aspire to. I rebel against the singularity of being you ascribe to me. I am burning the map you gave me to chart out my life’s course. They smile, a frustratingly long while, before they speak. There is yet an orthodoxy to rebellion, and in burning one map you have merely decided to subscribe to another. Every course of action, every line of thought is always already taken, they tell me. Who am I? That will always be a cumulative disguised as individual.

And as everything decays inside me, I walk in an odorless silence, towards boundaries that need crossing. I will follow my questions into oblivion and become part of some other compost bin.

starry loves

Love was a feisty longing. I allowed her the nightly flight and she came back exhausted having danced with the stars on moonbeams. All day she slept in the cozy little corner I had made for her. By evenings when I used to come back seeking solitude’s solace and her company, she handed me an old memory and ran off for her own rendezvous. I sat with the little piece of jigsaw, trying to fit it in its appropriate time, place and person. Shadows graced me from the skies and I saw her skipping to melodies of her making.

Every night her little love story ended with a star that hurtled down with her. She wanted me to wish on her follower, and I wondered if someone had wished on me all those years ago, when I had blindly followed her to this little cave. I sat with her disciple once, at a time that was somewhere between night and day, dawn was threatening to break loose. Soon reality would turn him to dust that would float its way to the sun. But we got a chance to sit together even as our tired love threw us a few kisses and drifted off. I say “our” love, but it didn’t pinch anymore. I could see it bothered him. A spot of bother that wasn’t going to last I knew. For these little worries had not a life of their own. They dissipated with us. We had I think half an hour to ourselves. We didn’t talk of how we felt, or about that shared love. What could we have said. We looked out in silence, each in his own thought. And longing. I wished on you, I had told him. He could have pretended incomprehension. Our worlds were different after all. But he had nodded and said rather nonchalantly, “That’s what she wanted.” And the first ray of dawn had taken away all possibility of further conversation.

How did she have this kind of power, over mortals and immortals, across worlds, or perhaps even universes, to make them follow without thought, unheeding of one’s own life, longevity, consumed entirely by the longing that she was? It was easy to understand it when I looked at her sleeping. I could feel my skin burning. What dreams must she be dreaming? I had wondered through wasteful days. I used to feel no pangs of separation when she went out. I kept myself busy with the jigsaw, memory upon memory, refusing to fit in, overlapping, mocking spatio-temporal boundaries and expectations.

One night I decided to string up the bundle and hang it on the balcony. They shone with the star light that bounced off them. She had come back that night and got all tangled up in it. Suddenly the jigsaw fit and I saw the picture complete, after years. She looked at me, for the first time, in a strange helplessness. What did you wish for? she had almost cried. I undid the strings, let the memories fall and break down in an impenetrable heap. I half expected her to fly off to the moon, but she walked in quietly and wrapped herself in her blanket.

I stared at her in her slumber the whole day. She slept through the evening and finally got up around midnight. She stood watching me collect the last scraps of the night before. I asked her how she was feeling, and some more utterly meaningless questions that she barely responded to. The fire in her eyes had given way to deep dark circles under them. I wonder if I realized then that I had lost her. In hindsight, I should have. She chose to stay that night. And many nights after that. We chose silence to keep the longing alive. I didn’t know what she was waiting for. I waited in utter terror of the day she would leave. I refused to sleep. I played music for her hoping she would dance with me. She stared at the record with blank eyes that had deeper and darker circles under. We seemed destined to continue down that road. Fiery passions tend to end tamely, fizzle out in stereotypical ways. All I had to do was wait. Love was going to be a longing. A long unending longing. Raging on in embers. And I was preparing myself for it. After all there were no more stars to be wished upon.