Untangling the Knots

Dreams are a kite

That dances with the wind...

Love is a fetter,

Held down and pinned.

Hope is a paper boat

Braving a stormy sea,

But thoughts are a bird

Rising skywards,

Unencumbered and free...

Illusion and Dream

Against the darkness in my mind,
I see faint starlight.
A woman dances, in the ethereal gleam,
Held close by a man she doesn’t know.
Yet they sway in perfect harmony
As he leads her across the floor.

The melody fades, the image dulls
And I see a room with mirrors...
Shadows through smoke,
Distorted reality and a single pure note.
The face in the mirror
Belongs to a stranger...
Reflections of a yearning, too hard to ignore.

Reaching out to touch an illusion
And to live a practiced dream,
I set sail a little paper boat
Into a turbulent stream...
And pray it safely reaches the other side
Through the uncertainty of the game...

To the island that is inside me,
To a nameless face that resides within
To bring to life the reason
Why the stars sometimes glow brighter
In their pattern through the skies,
As they shine and spell out destiny’s trail.

Endless Numbered Days

“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way...
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun...

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say...”

- Pink Floyd, Time

I look back on forgotten time and wonder how to account for it all. Standing where I am now, at this moment, I have nothing to show. The pointlessness of my life suddenly looms large and it’s not a nice feeling.

So many squandered opportunities, so much lost time, so many mislaid priorities, so much water under the bridge. If I can only put the ‘could haves’ and ‘should haves’ behind me, then maybe I would still have a fighting chance to make it to someplace, if only in my mind. But inertia rules, and I remain, in misplaced complacency, in the place I am now. And wonder where the person I had set out to be, got lost, or left behind.

I listen to ‘Time’ and figure I’m not the first who’s been thinking these thoughts. And I know I’m not alone in my deliberation. There must be others who wake up to the same realization and maybe feel the same way I do. This unknown, invisible company of strangers brings a certain solace. It’s a good feeling. One that almost cancels out the bad...

Almost.

Abyss

Where do you draw the line between a dream and a nightmare?
Can you identify the point where one ends and the other begins?

The dream is good and the feeling is one of pure joy, with everything going the way you always hoped. The touch seems real and the happiness you feel is unbound, overwhelming…surreal. For a moment, you step away from the person that is you in your dream, and simply observe. You know it’s just a story that’s unfolding in front of you…that it isn’t true…that it’s got to be some waking thought that has percolated into this illusion…but for that one infinite moment, you almost believe.

You wake up, with flashes of the dream still vivid in your mind…but what you remember most, is the way you had felt, which only magnifies the loneliness you feel now. It awakens the void within you, which exists in the real world, where the players, having departed, will never return to fill. You realize what you’re missing, a hundred times over, and with a degree of despondency, recognize that you can’t control or keep the players in real life, any more than you can, in your dream.

Maybe this is where the dream ends and the nightmare begins. When you wake up. To have touched elation, to have tasted desire, and to have seen it dissipate when your eyelids flew open. To perceive the depths of the abyss you’re helplessly falling into, and to know that in your waking hours, the closest you can come to living the dream, is by dreaming wide awake.

Another Place, Another Time

Another voyage around the sun

And yet my life did pause,

At that place where the sun shone brightest

After which the light was lost.

Arrested in another time

A still frame in my mind…

When forever was a promise to keep

And friendship was sublime.

It’s been a year of sunrises,

But the sunshine stayed behind

At that moment when dreams awakened,

Another place, another time.

Desire

In those hazy, nebulous spaces between sleep and wakefulness, between dreams and reality, lies a secret place where our deepest desires come so close to the surface, that we can almost reach out and touch them.

The N,N-Dimethyltryptamine Trip

Last night I had the strangest dream. No, not strangest…I’ve had stranger ones before, and I do mean the kind where you see your friends supporting a few extra appendages, fancy tentacles…that sort of thing, excavating on the surface of Mars, all the while dressed in some kinda shiny fireproof outfit that does much to enhance their appearance.

No, this was different. This saw me laid to rest in a coffin, peaceful and stone cold. With people walking in an orderly line around it, to view me!! View me!!! And at one time I remember yelling at my parents when the topic of marriage had come up, that the only way anyone could ‘view’ me was over my dead body! (Hmm…maybe the things you claim have a way of returning to claim you!)

Well, whatever. The point is not that I’d died, but how! Because, that, my dream did not reveal! Ah, that makes for interesting discussion over a hot cup of tea. Yes, the beverage and the temperature it’s at are both important. Coz if anyone bugs you too much during the course of said discussion, you proceed to make yourself a hot cup of tea and pour it on the lap of whoever’s stressing you out!

Oooh wayyyyt! There you go…maybe I just discovered cause of death! Simple retaliation from injured party with blunt, heavy object! Now, did that turn my frontal lobe into putty and deliver me immediate vegetable status or did it give me a decisive shove towards the light and ‘up, up and away’ me? (For a moment there, I felt like superman! No, it wasn’t the vegetable part that did it, coz I’m not sure whether superman’s abilities here on our planet can be linked to vitamins obtained through ingesting carrots or okra…but the up, up and away bit.)

So, ah! I see the light. Rather, I saw that bright light which apparently guided my soul in the direction of St Peter at the pearly gates, and left my earthly form in that coffin, to be viewed (by me in my dream?!)

However, I’m awake now, and technically my mug ain’t grinning at you from the obituaries column in the papers, so I’m thinking... (Thinking…which means my frontal lobe, pea-sized though it may be…is still in working order! Mass relief…knowledge, that.)

Anyways, I’m thinking that this dream has left me with one displaced, yet disturbing thought. About the vegetable state of being…and that I wouldn’t ever want to be there. So, here’s my declaration, just in case…

I, Chellsie, being of sound body and mind, declare that in no condition should I be kept alive artificially; under no circumstance should my fate rest upon doctors who would simply like to see the length of their bills grow, and lawyers who couldn’t affix a light bulb to save their lives. Hence, when atleast seven days have passed and I have failed to request even one of the following:

Chocolate

Tea

Pizza

Cosmopolitan

Sex

Chocolate

Chocolate

Muffin

Cake

Chocolate

Sex

Ice-cream

Dad’s chili chicken

Chocolate

Breezer

Sex

Chocolate

You may safely presume that I have fallen off the road to recovery and won’t be finding my way back ever. After such has been determined, I hereby instruct my next of kin and attending physician to yank the plug, save the environment some energy and call it a day.

PS- For the morons who are clueless about what N,N-Dimethyltryptamine is, but are hesitant to ask or too lazy to google it, allow me put you out of your misery.

Quite simply, it’s the stuff dreams are made of! ;)

Now if you want the science…It’s an endogenous substance speculated to play a part in dreaming as well as near-death experiences. It’s naturally produced in the human brain during roughly the first month after birth, following which it is stored there and released only at the moment of death. How neat is that!

Wake up! Now here’s the really cool part! It can be synthesized externally and yes, you can smoke it to dream up some wild, psychedelic stuff! But people, please! Say NO to drugs. Help bring the prices down!

End of science/economics lesson. Feel free to get back to your mundane, boring lives.
Cheers!

it's Complicated!

A friend called this morning, simply wanting to know if it was worth all the pain, the ‘it’ implying love. This was the same someone who’d called three days earlier to tell me she was on top of the world, thanks to a certain someone. And then another friend tells me that she’s done being alone, that she’d give anything to meet her special someone now.

So what do I tell her? Do I give her the assurance she yearns for, and say that in time, things will be alright? Or do I tell her, rather heartlessly, that fairy tales and happily ever afters are quite simply that - make-believe stories. And do I tell the other, the same thing?

From the time we were little, we’ve heard and read fairy tales, with the same saccharine ending to them all, and nursed dreams of a prince charming sweeping us off our feet and carrying us off into the land of eternal happiness. And then one day, ‘life’ happens…and we grow up.

So what happens to those fairy tales and the happy endings we’ve always carried in our minds? The love we’ve secretly, desperately craved for in our hearts? Do they die a natural death or have their life beaten out of them? Or, is it hard to let go of that dream because there’s this tiny ray of hope that keeps it alive?

Maybe we really need to mark, learn and inwardly digest the fact that being alone doesn’t necessarily translate to being lonely, but at the same time realize that personal spaces, though closely guarded, need to be invaded every once in a while, for our own good.

Maybe at the end of the day, it’s simply enough to know that love turns up in the most unexpected places, and looking for it will only make the wait more cumbersome, and the heart more restless. That the fairy tale may not follow the same storyboard as in the classics, and that the knight in shining armour may need to be traded for an ordinary looking guy in ratty tees and scruffy jeans. And that the happily ever after ceases to be important in the light of happiness now, in this moment.

And whether love is worth the pain…maybe every story is a fairy tale in its own right, and whether it ends well, or doesn’t, is simply a matter of perspective.

The real question however, is this. When we have found the person we are seeking, how do we know for sure, before it’s too late? Maybe we don’t. Maybe we never will. And therein lies the tragedy of it all.

Aamchi Mumbai...

Where despite everything, there will always be room for dreams...