Perishing in Solace.....

Prolouge

The wind hazzened the distant horizon. It blew around her head like a halo. Like a galaxy of dirt orbiting a sunken star. She felt like a ghost. A ghost that haunted the deep dark hollows of night. And this night, all she had to offer was a confusion of thoughts and a skerry of emotions that rose out of the distant frame of flirtatious nods and winks. A dangerous game. A game of lust and longing and make believe. Pretend.

Somewhere below a car changed gear and a green light ambered.

Her hands trembled as she touched the passionless glass of the window pane that held her to this world. Beneath her the traffic rumbled ironically reminding her of life. A clarion call from the romance of suicide.

She thought again of moist love…. of fingers and tongues and the rumour of his loins. But a rumour seldom is a reality and remote lust rides chill vectors.

Her thoughts drifted. A paper cup that floated upon the sewage of failed sensibilities or even an ocean of lingering thoughts.

And suddenly gravity beckoned. Gravity, which was a sullen mistress. Gravity, whose call was as remorsless and inevitable as the seasons. She felt icy fingers clutch at her ankles and her wrists.

The wind hazzened the distant horizon. It flew around her like a halo and the dust of her dreams followed her down like a trail of tears….even as her hands excited the window pains ever more vehemently.

---------------

I sit beside a swollen old raven, whose beak has cracked more shells and skinned more bones, than time has time to tell.His eyes are so crystal that they reflect my own reflection.Within his eyes exist another universe with galaxies and constellations, all of its own, where the daily doings of any intelligent life form are observed by a bird.A bird as black as famine.

I wonder whether there is a parallel universe existing in each raven’s eyes that live and breathe. And when the bird dies, as every bird must, does the universe that spins its unique existence, within that black environment, die along with the bird? Or does it go on spinning in an independent life cycle? Spinning and turning and burning its own bright stars and suns?

Who knows?

The evening drags a charcoal blanket across my sky. A blanket, blanketing the distant glitter of time-blessed stars. Stars that speak in silent flickers of ancient days. Days of triumphant dreams..Stars....Fallen heroes or forgotten angels?

Who knows?

Maybe just lights hung within the dreamtime in the wilderness of eternity.

I look at the raven and the raven, with head crooked at one side, looks back at me. We know where we sit and who we are. We know our places in this world and we know how the fates confide, not in the doings of man, but in the ways of birds and beasts and insects.

Below us the traffic grumbles a discordant sound, the sound of brakes being applied and horns being punched. Life is a blur of taillights that fade into a rapidly moving wide-angle screen.

Above us a murder of crows move down like a dark stormy cloud. The coming together of the carrion fowl. They gaze at my raven with eyes of ostracism. There is sardony even in their flight.

A sudden wind blows a halo of dust that converges above our heads and spirals down below us, where a woman sits with sunken eyes and talon fingers that cling in quiet desperation to a glass pane. A glass pane singing its swan song.

The raven shakes his heavy wings and with a practiced ease takes flight.

Worlds spin in the eyes of crows and the days of men are numbered but still…. a single life matters.Dust swirls into a nebulae of infinite possibilities that froth and fail in the winds’ currents, as the raven plummets like the dead.
Head thrust forward, wings pinned back, a black missile with a singular focus in its beady black eyes.

The ramshackle congregations of crows await the inevitability even as the old raven plummets.

The song ends. The woman falls, like blood spilling from an open wound, surprised to note that time slows.... as if to make the moment of freefall last....

Punishment perhaps or a time for belated reflection. She sees the earth spin and rush to greet her whilst her own body falls in slow motion. She sees the crow.... beside her. Wings, now open with wingtip feathers, held out like a clawed hand. She sees in his eyes, wisdom beyond reckoning, and briefly she smiles, as heaven gazes into her and lights her pallid face.... and blood spills on the concrete, drenching the pavement with droplets of rouge.

The heavens turn black as the wings flutter.

Later, when the raven has settled back down beside me, droplets of blood on its wings, and I have finished shaking from the shock of it all, he turns to me and smirks…

“No one should perish in solace”.

Words....

His had been a lifelong struggle with words. Like dried blood, words lay in clotted clumps on his tongue-for he could never express himself in front of people. Beautiful thoughts flitted through his mind but whenever he tried to pen them down,words refused to flow out, for his mind worked faster than the rate at which he wrote or talked. His mind, which was so different from the rest, a mind where a hundred or so thoughts created chaos and he envied the mind of others that was so simple,so uncluttered. He who saw the World differently...

In school he was the boy who raised his hand but could never answer his teacher-the words were all there, rolling deliciously in his mouth but they failed to budge from their hiding place. And now he is a man brimming with amazing ideas & yet when his boss looks around for suggestions, he ends up agreeing to the mundane ideas offered by others coz he can’t express himself, he can’t make himself be heard. Caught in an empty world devoid of words, exists a brilliant man not understood by the world-the past thirty years has been a lonely walk.

They said she was like that from her childhood, that she would play with words when girls her age played with dolls,that you could give her three unrelated words & have her compose poetry out of it in a minute. When she spoke, she could weave magic with the way she used her words alluringly. When she wanted, she could use those very words like a whiplash & leave raw gashes on people who hurt her.

She lived in a world full of vibrant words...He lived in a dark World that craved for the warmth of words to stream in like sunshine. One day God answered his prayers.

He met her, the goddess of words...

He was browsing through the names listed in sify messenger under the alias gypsy_cloud & there she was as azure_sky & somehow he liked the match. He wanted to float like a cloud across the blue sky & explore it. Initially She was reluctant to chat with him,who was but a stranger but finally she relented. All he saw were words on his messenger, words of such colossal magnitude that it shook him, words of such beauty & naïve innocence that his heart melted and he could not help but fall violently in Love with the enigma that had almost mastered the art of making words come alive.

He was in awe of the power of her imagination, the vivid descriptions of her words that burnt itself in his psyche.

She was all that he was not...

She was the one who could complete his incompleteness...

He tried hard to meet her in person,to unmask the anonymous young writer who drove him crazy with her words. Like a cloud that’s hard to pin down, she eluded him but not for long...
Like a whiff of spring air she drifted into his life & he felt satiated. But he kept his battle with words under wraps. Oblivious to his struggle against such demons, she felt hurt when her words elicited no response from him. She felt angry for he never reciprocated –unaware that he wanted to express his love for her but the dark forces held him tongue tied, held his speech paralysed...

His silence infuriated her & over the months a stage came when she could bear it no more. It was then that he spelt out the dark secret.

‘Autism’

He whispered...

She was advised to leave him… but how could she? Did the advisors know what love was? She hoped not. She was free once, now she realized that she was being pulled down to a shell, along with him. A shell she knew she would never be able to come out of. It was like an invited constrained, a constriction that would bind her to him. He would be incurable, he would be wordless, but he would be there. She had enough words for the both of them she thought, and his shell was strong enough to let them in, forever. So what he lived in darkness, her words had made him crazy once, he saw light in her every syllable. She hoped she would replace her words someday. She hoped her words were strong enough to win the battle, that they would make his clouds pour, and then may be, one day he would look beyond her words, one day, he would look at her. Just may be.

She could live with autism, she realized, but she couldn’t live without love.