Ballet of a Broken Leaf
5 am. I found myself on the floor, covered in dust and sweat. Next to me is a Broken coffee mug having yesterdays left over espresso that I start sipping while staring from the balcony of my 5th floor apartment. Silence everywhere, or an illusion of silence, as all of us have our own demons to fight with. A fight within us where it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, the fight is all that keeps us going and growing. But my fight is different. A fight for quietude. The one that is not make believe, the one that hides behind her veil of materialistic pleasures. A silence so deafening that I wish to lose my hearing forever.
10 am. The streets start bustling. The smoke starts rising. Crowd moving from one stop sign to another. Everything is an organized mess. The occasional beggar that knocks at your window, you wave him off. The eunuch who curses and flashes at you, the salesman who will invoke every god to make you buy his counterfeits and the signboards on road that tricks us into believing that this city is organized. This city is a dream of which no one wants to wake up or be woken up from, this city is a dream, completely order less, no sense of direction and full of absurdities and so this city is a dream, a dream where no one remembers anyone when it all gets over.
3 pm. I go out to buy me some coffee beans. The Café near my office serves muck and passes it off as latte. As I’m about to cross the road, I watch this dog on the other side. Utterly scared, tail tucked between the legs and his huge eyes pleading for help. It reminded me of someone back home. A friend, of whom every dog was a friend. Swiftly picking up any puppy on the road, allowing every dog to smell the clothes and being able to run fingers through furs of every color and texture while I stayed back at a distance. A Humble Magician at work. I wanted that scared dog to feel that hand, The Tricks that I could never perform, Tricks that would bring a smile on every face and Tricks that would warm everyone’s heart. But we are not humble, forget about being magicians. Our Heart is nothing but broken shards of Bone china that we try to house and display beautifully in this small mirrored cabinet called life. I often wonder, “Do you need to be broken enough to feel what healing is”. We all need such warm moments in this cold world. Our heart is a muscle that works all the time yet there is no Gym for our hearts, Not a single bench to relax upon, No one to talk with. All it needs is just warmth and a good diet of course which, neither of it, anyone possesses.
10 pm. I enter my apartment. The pile of cloths lying on the chair greets me, victim of my procrastination. Various paintings of gods and sceneries hung on the wall stare me out. My dusty bookrack looks at me with disappointment and A broken Vinyl record of Bach that felt my rage couldn’t sing ‘Allegro’ for me anymore. I clean up the mess, or better to say, I relocate the mess to another room and lie flat on the bed. Small glowing squares from my balcony. Many Broken Vinyls, Even more broken hearts. I crush the beans to make a cup of coffee while I realize, I never liked coffee. I pretended to like it during my unsuccessful attempts to mix up with my coworkers but now I have sort of acquired the taste, the flavor of pretending. I look around my room, my books, my clothes, my paintings. This is not who I am. I own this stuff but this is not mine. Whose room is it. How life changes when you forget yourself and your own being for this world. The coffee mug cracks as I lose balance and It gets hit with the door. I place the broken mug on the floor and starts to look outside from the balcony. I doze off on the floor and dream. My Dream. Just Mine.
Colored boxes of light,
Fighting among themselves
A fight that was never theirs
Glowing in the day
Dreaming in my nights
Dreams of silence and pats on head
The head theirs, hands of a stranger
Of many colors is the color of warmth,
A color that doesn’t pretend to be you
The palm that pats and hugs plants a plant
A plant that plants feelings in those shards
The color of warmth waters it early
A time where no one could see
The plant grows, the leaves outgrow it
And then they fall one by one
Spinning and twirling to be dust again
This
A Ballet of a broken leaf
