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“It’s amazing how you can see right through my heart!”

There was a time that line used to give me a thrill, a thrill of discovering someday what that feeling felt like, that connection with someone, the satisfaction of knowing someone inside out, the belief that someone can read your mind faster than you can. My friends always said that those notions were fanciful, that all that was unreal and implausible but my heart never really believed it. I always hoped that it would happen to me someday, that I would be able to experience what poets have been talking about for centuries, that I too would someday know the feeling of seeing the whole world in one person. And it would have come true too had it not been for this cruel cruel world. The past 3 years have tried incessantly to teach me the true meaning of life, the way it should be lived, the way it should be looked at and treated and I’m not sure I like what I’m being taught. People all around me talk about the need of the hour, the pressing engagements and obligations of everyday life that just HAVE to be taken care of, the work that always needs to be completed before one can even think of indulging in leisure and the responsibilities that one can never really get rid of.

I’m sitting in a room all alone with the rain falling on the leaves outside, a sound that I haven’t heard in ages. It gives me the kind of peace that no achievement in the last three years has given me. Sometimes these experiences almost make me think that I’m a loner, content with the sights and sounds of nature, at least the sights and sounds that I have in mind – from the smell of the first rain on a parched ground to the pitter patter of rain drops in a puddle to the swishing of trees in the wind or of the rain drops on the roof – I just love the sight and sound of the way the world works!

Sometimes I crave for someone to share it with – anyone who’ll understand where I’m coming from when I go on ranting about the clouds in the sky and the wind blowing in my face or the sun shining down on my back on a cold wintry morning and the lethargy that accompanies the warmth. I miss the ‘good old days’ at home when I saw time as it went past me, not as a blur but as a procession of experiences and events, when everyday had a meaning, a purpose and a new lesson to teach. Now it’s always the same, with one day being an exact replica of the other, doing the same thing every day, learning the same lesson and following the same routine.