It’s the same windy road that I walked yesterday and the day before and the day before all the days…It’s cold it’s hollow like a dive in shallow waters.
Did you see dear Moavi, what I did there…I tried to add poetry to it. It really feels like poetry had left me long ago, I just keep trying to hold onto her and in that persistence, in that abode of the falling leaves, I hope I’ll reunite with her in autumn again.
I wonder where you have brought me today…yes it’s cold and it’s a long, narrow, and winding road and yes indeed we are in the downtown alley of castle street. It’s not easy to find this particular street neither everyone can find it either but I did. I may fail in mystical myriad ways and things, I may complain about the exhausting days and nights yet I found the castle street and I’ll be forever proud of it. Midway the stop where the last bus left and midway to the stop where the first bus is yet to arrive…A silent deviation with a note next to the vase, a silent language whose wordings are misspelled.
It’s an ambush down here in this brazen banal beauty of longingness, I feel guarded and surrounded by the thoughts…In this urge of vulnerability and ambiguity, I seek for a well to hide and ponder drowning into the depths of nothingness, and yet there it was the infamous fire surrounded by travelers, lost just like me awaiting their transit to the transcendent.
Moavi, as I placed my fingers in the long incessant trench coat of mine, the one which I have always imagined but never owned…I found what I was looking for I found my lighter that has forfeited its desire to kindle and now it was just a piece of metal which produced a sound of click…And there I was ready to click. Suddenly I could find all the eyes on me as if the time stopped and suddenly a spark turned into the ignition and it heightened our small fire which was getting devoured of the woods as if this click was the reason we all were sitting here in the leisure of the warmth we never deserved but there we were and if I remember it correctly it was just a click.
The person sitting closest to the fire just peered towards me from the visor of his round, old and unstitched-stiched hat…he looked and he passed a cigarette so uncomplicated that I couldn’t resist. I clicked again the lighter worked as it had on the day I had brought it…the smoke the melody and the unreal castle road had something for me, I knew they had and in resonance, they whispered…”Check”
As I placed my hand again in the pocket suddenly there were pebbles there were hays there was a drop from the faraway ocean, there was a letter and there was a bird who had forgotten to fly…Wait a second, I had a letter…The smell of those pages which has been aged in a corner of four seasons and that smell they carry like the first petrichor…A letter after ages and a letter when you had it least expected, suddenly I could realize the heart that beats in the asynchronous paradoxical manner and suddenly I was breathing gentler than ever…And it read:
“Let the first things first“
Let the first things first…It was written as the clock struck 3:30 am…3 and 3 as I could see 4 and 4 next to it, the continuation of numbers passing through mirrors maybe in a parallel universe I wish I was somewhere I was precisely now.
It talked about books and it talks about how instead of periods I prefer the trodding of breaths with words as even the thoughts can get tired yet in a perspective so new.
“K”, like a fresh ray of sun in the nordic winter…It talked about a movie I wish I had watched and it had few questions…
“The path leads to you and the path is incessant”
“Midway I stand…Midway the windup bird chronicles”
I guess it was time for my transit and yet as I look around you had already left…
No fire burning in castle street anymore, the snow had melted and there was a tarmac below…Suddenly a lot of footsteps had encroached and in a distance, a dog had barked…Am I awake I asked and in the resonance, it whispered
“The path leads to you and the path is incessant”
“Midway I stand…Midway the windup bird chronicles”
By – Kshitij Sinha
25/09/2021