People cross paths by chance. Sometimes they choose to walk and dream together. Who knows how long of a walk is enough to become a journey? How vividly does one have to dream to believe it’s real? Paths end, dreams break. Perhaps what makes it worth the effort are the memories that become a part of you when the walk and the dream are over.

Yet I manage to find these moments of solitude when the two of us sit beside the river flowing through me, the silence occasionally broken by the mild waves, every moment carrying an eternity of bliss in it. And I realise that time has stopped forever on the banks of that river.

You return with every piece of music I drown myself in, your memories step into threads of my thoughts uninvited, I shattered myself into numerous pieces to stay sane in all the realities and fantasies I exist in. What I once had mistaken as love, turned out to be an endless rabbit hole of madness.

It’s not just you I ran away from, I had shut the doors to the entire universe on the way.

Life is a conspiracy to make one forget one’s identity, incident by incident, day by day. It is a constant free-fall through a rabbit-hole of misadventures. If one tracks it, most of the time is spent in relentless struggle to survive, as if in a long-drawn war. The experience is like tiptoeing through a web of traps cleverly woven by a spider which has mastered the art of distraction, and the prey always falls for one when it’s least expecting. There are only two ways to exit – dystopia or death.

All my preoccupation may merely be ways to keep you off my mind.

We are so different. And yet in a quiet, cold evening like this I would like to be with you by the fireplace and listen to the faint local folk music floating from the other side of the hill afar, covered in dark crimson… barely visible. To me, that evening would be enough for a lifetime. Since my efforts to reach out to you to escape my world of silence was the problem, you will find me muted. Just like I am now… just like all my time lately is.

In my dream I found you to whisper my stories to. When I woke up I lost my voice forever. I had nothing left to say anymore.

Something was amiss in the beauty of the first rain… until you stepped out.

When all is done and the soul becomes an island or a desert, does every breath feel like a curse?