LIE

The wires are entangled, I am clearing the intricate twists and setting the wire straight. I turn my i-pod on and am jogging past the Locust walk. These days I have control over nothing, not even over my Ipod as it selects the songs that I listen to. It did select an apt song to start off with “there must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief. there’s too much confusion in here, I can’t get no relief…..All along the watchtower, the princes kept their view…,” I feel like the joker in that song who’s agitated from lack of freedom.

Many days pass since I let imagination kick in. I try to think while jogging but unfortunately I am panting. Within ten minutes I arrive at the Schuylkill park, finish a lap around it in another ten minutes. Its time for a break, I sit down on the bench, take out a piece of paper and try to write a line, atleast a word. Its not as easy as an impulse from the brain that passes through the nerve activating our action to hold the pen and move it in a rhythmic pattern, its more complex. It requires an impulse that comes from the soul stinging our heart and forcing our brain to do the above action. I can feel the inability to rearrange the universe, suspend the stars from clouds, the force in me is fast becoming a lost possession. I feel like a droid controlled by the world around

I ask myself a simple yet complicated question ‘who am I?’ – a question that has been asked many a time in my life but never leading to a perfect answer. This time the answer is a rude awakening from the person whom I have deserted myself from “To the truest of senses and the most bitter of tastes I am the TRUTH, the truth you love to hate, its presence you hate to have.
I am the TRUTH my friend, so better not be in my world for sweetness is all you love.
This is the fortress without boundaries my friend. Once you are in there is no way out. “
It took me a moment to recover from this violent outburst. I realize that I reached a point where I am not only hating myself but also faking personalities to impress others. I escaped from my fortress sans fringes and got stuck in a cell surrounded by a system that defined the parameters of my world.

The night is fast growing old, filling the avenues with cold. People heading back home, those conversations on roads about democratic convention, about the eagles odds to win superbowl grew sparse by minute. Midnight joggers are tagged weird entities in this world and so I have grown to be weird. All these days of living a lie, bragging about lies, I try to reconnect with myself. I pass through the spruce street, with lights going off at my every passing step as if I am carrying a decree of darkness from a cast off world. The old story about the pied piper of Hamelin flashes in my head at this weird coincidence.

Another day dies a silent death. Not a word on the paper, not a thought written in my head. I move on like a dead man walking with his dead eyes glancing at the world with nothing registering in his world of numbness.

Socializing is the catchword that spread various aspects of humanity, that is believed to have connected various cultures, but it often produces a weird and unnecessary chatter yielding wasted minutes. On such unfortunate meeting happened once with the people around the table choosing to talk about their fiancés. A sweet topic to be brought up until the brag-a-thon begins with the perfumes to clothes, none describing why they were the chosen ones for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately, my thought process loves to parry such useless banter. I know at one point of time the baton will be passed to me and I also knew that there are two ways to answer this one:

The truth is that I befriended with death, I promised her that she has the choice to come to me and propose any day and I wouldn’t say no. There are very few tomorrows in this life of mine, fewer with every passing today. One day she comes eventually for the final proposal to take me home and I would just walk with her on the altar. All that impressed me to be with her forever is her promise too take me into a completely new world when my force conjoins with her.

That’s a bitter truth my friend and in this game of socializing truth gets least love and is tagged bohemian. So I go ahead with a lie talking about the Polish girl, Megan Sczowinski born and brought up in Krakow and how my interest in Poland has become our subject of regular meetings. How easily this regular meetings blossom into love which happened because of this mutual exchange of information about Poland, how easily our relationship is leading us to a trip to zakopane next summer. People around the table start paying more attention to this newly burgeoning relationship. A well crafted, wily and imaginary lie might make the society happy and accept me to be part of it but truth is always a crude reminder of reality, a reality that always mirrors our truest self.

I have come to an understanding that truth has more enemies, lie has more friends and these days I seem to have more friends than before. I seem to find many people who want to grab a slice of my happiness. But where is happiness, my friend. I chose to sacrifice it, I chose to sever it from my life. There is no happiness in the shots of vodka that I buy for you nor in the home runs that yankees score.

In a world where the “money is the root for happiness” had become axiomatic, I am a pariah. For a person whose true pleasures cost no penny, he chooses to be part of this wicked axiom. That was stage one of self destruction, part of the soul has been sold to stupidity.

There is a deep abyss in this world that requires to be filled.