I am a Particle.

I am a particle.

 Constantly shifting its position

 without any preordained logic.

I fail to locate myself on the time-space axis.

I am never where I am.

I keep chasing myself.

I keep building myself.

 I keep traveling the world of my thoughts

Constantly building the next space or the next moment

Shifting between déjà vu and intuitions

 Like the way video games construct the maps

 Or the surroundings only immediately.

Humans live at an intersection

 of time, space and feeling.

You belong to a particular place

 Only when all three are justified

I could never find my third coordinate,

a sense of feeling something truly.

 I tried to feel as to how it should be

 Or how it must be

 to most people who ever felt it,

 but all I was doing was pretending

and assuring myself that I existed.

I hardly exist.

I believe when people say I do

I believe the mirror too.

But these are just reflections

Of thoughts and glass

And reflections might be illusions.

On winter afternoons

When rays of sun

Walk through the window

And flow on my forehead

In form of droplets of sweat

And my heart beats faster

I am confused again.

Sometimes

I wake up in the middle of the night

Waiting for the silhouette of reality

Emerge from the vestiges of dreams

And like a blind person

I begin searching

For proofs of my existence

My pulse awake,

I still feel an urge

To talk immediately to someone

Just to make sure I am there.

And all this is because

I have seen moments lose memories

As if they never were.

I have humans turn to bodies

And bodies turn to ashes

And I have seen the ashes

Melting in the river

And I have seen the bangles

Still stick to dead bones

As melted plastic.

I have seen blood

And the fear of it,

Kill revolutions

And I have seen revolutions

Erase reminiscences of blood.

I have seen love changing to passion

And swords swearing of love

Piercing the heart of the lover

While not even making a sound

Except the screeching silence

Of swords meeting flesh.

I have seen dreams being still born.

And so I have seen

Constancy becoming a variable.

While I was still searching my existence,

It changed. 

When I met smoke

                                                                                                          

For a moment,

The contours of his face were blurred

From the smoke rising from his cigarette,

which was a coil of secret desires.

That can only be burnt away

Lest they burn you from inside.

Ah! Either way they do!

My eyes ablaze

With the smoke that met me,

 and a curiosity born too suddenly

that I thought it would take ages to sort out,.

Could just see two beautiful eyes,

framed in the glasses of wisdom,

Behind a veil of his smoke and my breath,

 both merged in the air

Like things half hung, conspired to fall.

Those eyes weren’t deep.

They were beyond depth.

The immeasurable vastness that they held

Was like the black hole,

But one that had sucked itself,

And was now, powerless after self destruction.

In the process of finding something lost

It had lost itself

 as well as the power of finding the lost.

While they were still searching,

I thought I found what I did not know I wanted

A truth that I had hidden from myself too.

A secret revealed unwittingly.

A secret that should have remained efface

Like most secrets.

But I am not sure if he saw it!

He was too tired of watching keenly though.

Too tired of searching day in and day out.

His eyelashes restlessly falling from a red shore,

like waves that have been woken up

by the deadening lull like a horrid dream.

He might have known, he might not.

A secret whose recipients are unknown

Is no more a secret

But at the same time is a dangerous one.

And so

Our eyes spoke reluctantly in a language of truth

On the island of dialogues.

It seemed they had already held a conversation of ages.

When they had met,

Loved, fought, quarrelled, lost, and resigned.

Now they were tired.

But somehow the unfulfilled desires still sought vengeance.

Mine still pleaded for what they wanted,

His still spoke of a rejection,

 arising not out of choice

But out of no choice.

They knew not what the core wanted

And we stared and waited

For the universe to disturb us.

Until the thought of pity made way for fake pride.

And pride my dear friends

Is a fatal blow to all weaknesses

 including lurking desires of the past.

Except one-the desire to love

Which is more powerful

Than the desire to be loved!

And just the moment when

I was about to fall in love with the trance

The spell ended.

The winds of reality gushed in

to clear the mist of thoughts

and everything was gone.

.I could have materialized the shadows

But abstraction decided to remain abstract.

He crushed the remains of his cigarette

Under his feet

And the ashes of my dreams too.

Nothing was real

nothing was the same

and I thought I met him

but I had met only smoke.