Nothing

This empty moment also flits away as I’m still trying to fill it with desultory busyness. I watch the moments accumulate to form periods of ‘nothing’. My nebulous thoughts and erratic emotions collide with and morph into each other, and we soon find ourselves on a slippery slope of meaningless mulling – meaningless because I’m mulling over the empty moments that are passing by. I realize that over the years I have gathered growing piles of ‘nothing’ – of guilt & inertia, which keep fading into the bottomless pits of time. 

This is my addiction - my addiction to Nothing.

My addiction to an involuntary urge of pondering over everything and accomplishing nothing; to the discomfort of hunger past meal times and the accompanying nonchalance; to the perfect vision of a productive evening and the emerging void.

I fight it day in and day out - accept it and deny it, suppress it and feed it, resist it and give in to it.

It's always Nothing.

The Deluge

The mind falters as he struggles to keep pace with the deluge of information from his surroundings. In one sweep he attempts to comprehend the article on the laptop screen, conjure a reply to the message on the phone & absorb the songs on the playlist.

In that one second the cacophony seems exhausting simply by its presence, without any active attempt to draw attention to itself, and he wonders why he refuses to walk out of it. He narrows down the scope of his vision for a few minutes and it hits him -  the scarcity of minutes. The tunnel vision morphs back into the ever widening, blinding glare of information overload. He takes a moment to wallow in self-pity & longs for the simpler times.

We have definitely progressed backwards, away from us.

The Bridge across Time

I feel I've grown up too fast. Not because I feel old. [I don’t know how to describe “old” anymore. Time & Perception seem so amorphous & vague; I will never be able to refer to them with any certainty.] It is because my life has flashed by and I’m trapped in an illusion chasing after Time with a frantic desperation.

I’m standing at the edge of a rickety bridge connecting my Now to my Future and all I can see is a maddening medley of rediscovered wants & desires vanishing into a haze. There is no horizon and no pathway leading up to where I am standing or who I am today. I try to piece together what could have led me to be the person I am today and led the others to a different shade of humanity. But the harder I struggle with the answers, the faster the pieces crumble in my hands. The bridge appears more & more to be a pier leading into a whirlpool of shimmering mirages & it is unsettling that I’m alone in each of them. Any alteration to the lone figure dissolves them into gaping holes & the bridge turns into a chasm.

I suppose I would like to reach a point in my life where I don’t want things to change anymore, where I’m content with the firm ground beneath my feet and I no longer want to cross shaky bridges across the yawning gaps between my dreams &  my reality. That I would love to settle down in the quietude of that point & rest my anxiety.

But would I still be alive if there were no bridges to cross & no mirages to congeal? Would I love to exist?