Leaving

Everyone’s saying different things to me, lies or half truths and circling in paradoxes and clichés forever…and I’m waiting for that positive sign of connection and freedom. But then I laugh and smile and accept that these are the same people ill always love because by some strange coincidence I was a part of their lives and they were a part of mine, in more ways than they can imagine. And I agree that we haven’t found freedom or answers. We haven’t found anything at all. I have walked sober into drunken dingy rooms filled with happy people. A boy lying on the floor eyes half closed but conscious of my arrival lifts his hand to hold mine. Stepping over empty bottles and spent cigarettes I have walked in and drank with them, in pain, in happiness, in wild boredom, in nasty anger, in friendship, in closeness, in faith. I owe them so much. How will they ever know?

It’s almost over. What is remaining now is a few days, a few waiting hours, a few lasting conversations, and the few clean constellations on a moonless beach. A little less of everything can amount to a lot. Everything will shrink into one of those snapshot reels that never really ends or begins.

I’m watching him. And he is leaving, with his suitcases and his computer boxes tied tight with a clothesline he has used for four years, hauling his luggage and heavy heart through corridors that echoes with the remains of laughter so insane, that it’s not possible to forget. I see him smile at me as I walk down, honest and heartbreaking. And it’s strange when he finally says goodbye so naturally, without effort, and takes a share of my insanity, to keep it in his little blue box as I take a share of his acceptance. It’s strange that we both feel the same, it’s strange that we both realize that after four long years of sweat and salvation we still don’t know each others names...and won’t ever need to.

And I accept. And I return, for the sake of a time too long to be torn away.

But everyone is all grown up now. Everyone expects the end and accepts it when it arrives, just like another beginning.

They are not complicated people. And I like them. The strain that creeps in is almost sadness, only a little more. It’s like good chocolate. Always surprising but there is the hint of sweet bitterness everywhere.

But its overdue, I have to go, I know I cant stay, I cant say why, I don’t know how but I just have to leave this place and the dreams it makes and breaks. I am wounded in ways that make bleeding seem like an everyday affair. Not suicidal, slash wrist, choke on blood torture but the more forcefully sensitive bleeding. The bleeding that makes you weak and teaches you how to live a life when all you can see is this world of beauty, the world in which you are the slight stranger watching the children play in their strange beautiful ways and wondering where purity lies.

Sometimes within

Always without

* to Prabha and the still night and the stars we tossed around