Fiction fragments #3 - Bridge

He sets of on his long ride by the scenic seventeen mile drive, his 'go to' road of epiphanies. When he particularly feels lost or low he steers his way into what the outdoors has to offer as this exploration leads him to unexplored territories into his own psyche. Lately, he is experiencing a slight dislike about the way things are shaping up in his life. Again, it has to do little with the outside and a lot to do with his insides. He is a man of answers. He has them at the tip of his fingers...answers to every quandary, every dilemma life might present. But even heroes have hindrances on their way. Even heroes cry and complain. Even the strongest of men falter sometimes and their true feelings surface, for once, betraying their fortitude.

And it isn't happening just once. It has become a pattern lately. He finds it so easy to share his joy about the littlest of things - like a man child. He smiles when it drizzles and exclaims that rain makes him happy to the random passerby on the sidewalk and talks to a stranger at Starbucks and tells them how ecstatic he is to meet his niece. Sharing joy comes naturally to him. He likes to spread the smiles and bask in his extrovert overtures. Until the inevitable antihero of life kicks in. Pain. Yikes! What pain? He denies it almost viciously. He is at this juncture in life, face to face with the urge to confess. That's where she comes into the picture. He finds himself blurting it out to her like he had taken a truth potion, something about her triggers in him, the inexplicable compulsion to come clean and tell her his deepest of hurts.  There's a magic about her presence, the nonchalance with which she listens to him, never interrupting or judging, and then saying something that wondrously simplifies his agony. She annihilates all his facades, all his inabilities to process painful emotions with the precision of a skillfully administered antidote. This leaves him flustered enough to look for answers to the vulnerability she subjects him to, and then miraculously dismantles them into non existence.

He sees a bridge in the distance, faded by the dense fog - and he smiles. The epiphany. Happiness might make us think of a hundred people to share it with, but sorrow has the power to reveal our most intense bonds to us. He smiles because at that moment, he learns a valuable truth about himself. A bridge that leads to his treasure when he is struck with the deepest of hurts. 

She flashes in his mind during his every moment of pain, as if she is the only one that could salvage his trauma. Bingo! The solace, the shade, the relief, the solution. Suddenly he feels blessed for all the pains, for they lead them to the most cherished, sacred connection of his heart. A few lucky souls like him experience it.

Pic credit - Chandra Elango

Fiction fragments #2 - Reflect

She's someone who likes to do things promptly. But her promptness in communication is something that makes a stand out. Whether it is a voice mail, email, text,call or an evite- the moment she receives one, she makes an instant effort to respond. She doesn't have a laundry list of pet peeves, but she gets mildly miffed when people take correspondence easily, or worse yet, when they choose to ignore it. The modern day 'read receipts' give her some kind of solace, that the communication has happened as sometimes, that very comfort of knowing it happened and the party in receipt of it chose to ignore it, for whatever reason they had, put her anxiety to ease. She liked to observe things without being judgmental and suddenly finds that she is in the middle of judging herself for this quirk. She  ponders over how her otherwise easy going self takes this particular aspect of human behavior seriously and one day a flash comes to her from nowhere, in the form of a childhood memory.

She remembers being awake to the door bell of her dad coming home and her mom answering it. She shuts her eyes in an effort to go back to bed when she listens to her parents talking in the adjacent room. Her dad's voice sounding strained and low "RS has passed away" He tells her mom to which her mom gasps and exclaims "What?" in utter shock. Her dad's friend in question was someone she heard of but had never seen, but somehow she knew that this man was an important friend in her dad's life.

"He sent me a message through a young boy yesterday and this morning as well. I was busy at work and said I'd show up later" Her dad continues to sound drained. "I had no clue he was dying. Only if I had remembered and taken the message seriously" She hears his voice shake a little and the room falling to a deathly silence. She fails to recollect if her mind went into her usual thinking spiral upon overhearing her parents or if they just stayed silent in the helplessness of the situation.

That event forms a lasting impression on her to a point where she never takes a message easily. She, always, in a deep subconscious, wonders if that friend had something to tell her dad - one last favor to ask, or probably a burden to share which would have made his passing easier. A message that would never be conveyed and  would always be conjectured. she inwardly knew that it was a burden her dad had to drag along whenever he remembers the friend.

She smiles to herself when she discovers the foundation of her obsessive need to respond to every sort of communication, even when her ESP senses a cold caller on the other side of the telephone ring. She doesn't ever want to allow herself to slip into a self wrap that might deny a dear one  or anyone in some sort of need - whether it be a deathbed wish or a mundane favor of picking up kids from school while they lay stuck in the notorious commute traffic or the simple need to say hello to someone close amid a tough day at work.

Life, she discovers, is death lurking around the corner - and an opportunity to alleviate someone's pain might flip into a guilt that creates one's own pain in no time. and she at that very moment, obliterates the distinction between her pain and someone else's - cause from the perspective she chooses to see, they appear to her as the sides of the same coin. 

Fiction fragments #1 - Repurpose

She walks in the garden getting a whiff of the foliage. She halts and bends to snap a leaf off, gently rubbing it in her palms to sniff it. What in the world does this remind me of? A familiar smell perks up her senses to a point where it tricks her to feeling hungry.
"Italian" She whispers to herself, "Parsley!"

Her mind wanders around into the database of her recipes, wondering what she could transform this lovely flavor into, except her taste palette, quiet confined to the finicky familiarity of her native cuisine, rejects the prospects of taking some into her kitchen and whipping up a freshly made 'from the scratch' pasta sauce for instance. She remembers how her sister measures up dried parsley leaves to add to her home made marinara to smear on the pizza crust.

"Too much work for something I might not even taste" she dismisses the idea. But the herb holds her attention. She runs her thumb on a leaf, while gently holding it on her fingers, and smiles to herself.

A recycled glass tumbler holds the fresh cascade of parsley on her dining table for almost a fortnight. She would light her candle next to the herb and gently pluck a leaf to sniff every now and then...this tiny indulgence of her senses acting like a  pleasant punctuation to her daily chores. The leaves fade to an interesting yellow at the edges and the smell dwindles into a milder version as the days flip by. She feels a sense of achievement to have put the herb to some use, albeit unconventional. She realizes that she's slowly becoming an expert at her game - to find 'out of the box' ideas to fit into her pesky rigidity. Sometimes she wonders if a lot of what does linger around in her heart could be revamped this way - if a heart ache could be plucked and arranged into a display, somehow making it an eye candy. If a loss, a void or a suffering could be used to generate similar sense of achievement. She smiles to herself. Sometimes, she could only let the time wither them into subdued, faded versions of themselves - their remains, still burning like embers in some concealed corners of her heart.

"How cool it would be?, If we could feign a suffering into sanctity, a deceit into a delight?"

But for now, the delicate bunch of parsley substituting as a centerpiece of her dinner table is enough distraction for her. Until the next opportunity to repurpose a shrub or a slash presents itself...Then she'll up her ante, and one day, lets hope, that she might transform a deceit into a delight!

Illusions

Through your opaque coolers,

Those bangs that dilute the hazel of your irises

Many masks you sport

Of indifference, joy and intensity

Through the filters that distort

The inmost of your feelings

Through your self depreciating humor

Or exaggerated self worth

Gently shoving an insecurity under the radar

Of an appraising world. 

Through the scars that your camoflauge

As decorations

That mist around your peepers

That disappears before its formation,

Freezing forever in some depths 

Of your unexplored pain points.

Through your machoness

Or your delicate etiquette,

Let me explore

Beyond my five senses

The real deal that lurks beneath.

Come, be my muse

Let me, reveal you to yourself

Distilling all those add ons

Making your being 

Accessible, acceptable, tolerable.

Perhaps, my words would 

Then gather some meaning

Reflecting in your own meaningfulness.