I am not a child anymore, I hear them say. I am young so I need a drink to make sense of things I can’t decipher otherwise. I need to go along, no more questions, as grownups are supposed to know everything. My young mind ought to be full of aspirations and I must constantly toil to find a way to channelize some unseen unfelt energy, my young mind is free for fulfilling the desires I’ve cherished so far. Yet they don’t hear me when I say it’s not free, my young mind is exhausted as if it’s been carrying a burden of something imminent which has never come, it’s after me but every time I try to confront it I am moving into a morass adroitly, so they don’t doubt me. I am weak and vacillating my vision is bleak and my efforts creek.
The shift from poetry to philosophy to an unwanted encomium of reality then again finding refuge in poetry, my failures and the dreams so close to me, hound me vociferously. I thought of moving on, from letting things go; they say that’s what life is all about, to growing a silent cantankerousness for the cauldron, where my energy is destroyed but not further transformed, where some flashes come straight into my eyes in the darkest hour, squinting isn’t an option either, a kaleidoscope is formed inside my head then, where light is coming from some sheer omniscience and reflecting from all the edges, passing through fissures, striking a chord with voids, the light moves from trauma to euphoria, from dismay to hope, from them to me, from me to nowhere, yet it too isn’t free!
My young mind, not a free mind! Wonders of the memories to figure out what and where it went wrong. How can I look forward when memories are all we have, can you imagine a life without memories, a human life without memories? It would be a hullabaloo where we don’t remember what we did, how we have been or the very essence of doing anything will be reduced to an ephemeral, there will be a fog inside and outside in every season. A fog with a loop repeating tirelessly or timelessly as we will work under some simulation! So I decide to look back with my young mind. I remember going downstairs to a station where a train will lead me to the destination of the past that I wish to trudge on.
As I started going downstairs I was struck in the middle with a storm of papers, white papers in which some dates were written all belonging to the past I guess, the empty ones were from the future thus fugitive. There were others too which were scribbled with my handwriting but when I began to read the text disappeared, didn’t they belong to the present? So my young mind collects some of them and moves on and on. The station will be closed. I somehow grow intuitively, I climb again to the surface with my collection of memories. It’s a bright morning, the sun is shining from the far-flung hills, it’s all scarlet. I wake up and write a poem, my young mind does so before I do, it’s also about scarlet. I look around, sunflowers in a state of prostration to show affection, they are all scarlet!
“I dreamed of the forest. It was scarlet too,
I wanted to know the flow of a river and it was scarlet too.
My white papers turned scarlet!
It was a sunrise, a new sunrise, a new day, a new beginning with my own collection of old minds!
My young mind, my forever young mind!“
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