Boats rowing at the seashore, the evening sun drowning into the sea somewhere around the curve of the earth, surrendering its colors to the clouds on its way down. Watching it would give someone serenity; a calm, placid moment suspended in time. If scenes could carry feelings, this one would carry the feeling of absolute stillness. Birds returning to their nests, fishermen folding their nets and heading back to their abodes. Does life make everyone accustomed to their rhythms? Everyone seems to know from somewhere deep within exactly what they are supposed to be doing next, and where. Those who are here are all returning. But there are some who had promised to return and haven’t. Some who haven’t yet found their way back. Some who left their homes in search of something and couldn’t find it, who knew their entire life depended on finding it. Now that they couldn’t, how is life supposed to continue from the next moment onwards?
A deprived life makes you tumble with every passing second of living. It is like walking and sleeping and waking and eating and washing the dishes and drinking tea, but before the sip even travels down the throat, the thoughts cast long, dark shadows of the missing pieces over the heart and the mind. When misery runs thicker in the blood than anything else, you begin to wonder how the air and the chair remain so utterly unbothered by it. How do the walls not know that the darkness has consumed the green patches of the heart? The world is so absorbed in its mornings and movements, its evenings and returnings, that it never notices when someone has quietly sunk inside his own soul. For him, the birds chirping become baseless noise, the earth’s revolution around the sun a strange, indifferent ritual. The moon’s shape-shifting every night, pointless. The skies, unfeeling.
The cold winds were made to soothe someone else’s cheeks, and prayers to warm some distant stranger’s heart. The sun rises every day to illuminate someone else’s home, and returns to rest in some place where the beloved are waiting.
In these moments, in these hearts, while she watched the sunset that day, she was simply not sure if the sun would rise again tomorrow.
