Sunday, October 28, 2012

An Abridged Tale of Memories


Photo retrieved @
 http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/the-persistence-of-memory
Projected memories have this smooth silky coating that allows them to float around carried away by the wings of a vivid imagination. It’s time to look back on the past and sort through what it truly held and what projected in the previous “past”, as if we are awarded several “pasts”, that we are free to chunk up according to our will. Or wits. But it’s true, we have that ability but we probably ignore it for most instances. I don’t know if I should dare look back on my high school years and try to recall those instances when I indulged myself in the sweet memory of a rosy future, or of a different future.

I might not have had the world my feet, but in my Cinderella clothes I dreamed. I dreamed of other days and somehow that projection carried me away in a depersonalized me, a me that had little to do with the past or present, cause in dreams you simply have the ability to do so. I know such a projection has little value, but in my emotional geography stakes are high. There was an instant of my being that was dedicated to that faraway future and discarding it would mean discarding a part of myself. What kind of future, and what lie ahead of it, is of little importance to the reader, for the treasures of my soul are treasures to myself solely. My riches are your rags.

But from afar lurks the sense that this recollection of memories is a brush up of those forgotten corners of the heart, in which the protruding light of consciousness failed to shine on. But it feels good to dust off those old fragments of thought, like frozen tokens of time, shaded by the passage of time. Just because sometimes you have to give little things a grand time. We've only been assigned a one-chamber life and inside those four walls, time piles memories high, sometimes orderly, other times in a beautiful chaos. And in the sweat of my temples, I seek the forgotten ones; I sift through them hoping to reconstruct a puzzle that has neither a beginning nor an end.  

Sunday, October 7, 2012

The Eye of a Stranger

At first it was curiosity and chance. Not the fulfillment of a dream, but the lazy stream of chance. And it was that chance that prepared the ground to turn it into a clean slate. It took a significant amount of liberalism and mindless youthfulness to have that taste for the new. But the novelty of the scenery bore the mark of strangeness and distance and maybe for the first time geographical distances had little to do with that feeling of separation. Not for the first time, that lyrical nature is thrown in the midst of a whirl of functionality, a victory of the working hands over the thinking mind. A time of profound challenge and the subsequent sense that in the midst of that loneliness of the self a self-sufficient hero had to emerge. That hero would wear silent clothes, would dress its braveness in meek words but a steady pace would always go along with it. And then there were mountains to be climbed and demons to be fought. But there's more than meets the eye, and the eye had to confront itself with matters whose inner nature shared few similarities with the obvious, the tangible.

In every move, in every passing street, the eye made a statement of its awkward presence. There were piercing looks, inquiring looks, lashing looks or even friendly looks, all bending under the weight of those silent whys. They'd sometimes abandon their heavy silence and then the eye would bow to confession, a non-cathartic confession for it all repeated itself to unfruitful ends. And even if it didn't repeat itself, that confession wouldn't necessarily equalize the inner world whose core was drenched in a sea of doubt. Like a faithful companion, solitude stopped by, in the close vicinity of the secluding doubt. There was solitude to keep him company and the shouting waves of the ocean, screaming sky-high. And in that tower of solitude, the eye looked upon the world. Myriads of judgments could be cast, but the eye knew, it'd be to no avail and unfair as well. Other eyes would look upon him with love, that wall-shattering inquiry, and many other eyes too, that would one day break the shells they lived into. But the eye had so much more to do other than breaking his own shell; others had their own shells as well. And in front of that revealing vulnerability, voices waver, looks go down in diffidence. But words, words flew, back and forth and where looks couldn't speak, words did. And their power humbled the heart and awakened it from it numbed indifference. And in the midst of shells and other outer coverings, the eye saw the veil drop and truth and fabricated genuineness coming apart. Blessed by a jarring silence.

Rupt din vis

Iată-ne amândoi ajunşi la un stop
C-am început să scriu e pur noroc
Iar când alb si negru din nou se unesc
Voi ştii să te găsesc acolo, în livresc