Vicarious

The shadow on my wall grows, I stretch impossibly to make it look as tall as you. Imagination is a heartbreaking substitute for proximity, and your voice, and your footsteps across the dark room. I've taught the talking parrot your name and mine. I make her recite it now and then, when I need to feel we are one. I've also taught her to complete my sentences just like you do.

Your words paint my wall. My eyes travel to them from time to time and rest on the beautiful red flower you've painted in the corner. I always drink two cups of coffee these days. One of them with sugar, exactly the way you like it. A man passed by me today. He was wearing your cologne. I forgot where I was going for a few minutes. Chocolates on drugstore shelves can kill. I don't enter that aisle anymore.

*Pop* That shadow is not yours. No! You would have smiled, I'm sure.

Pining

You live inside me these days. Or memory has befriended me in special ways. Your image in my mind is precision itself. I see your neatly parted hair, the corners of your boyish grin, the fine creases of thoughts on your forehead, a hint of a dimple teasing your face, the angle of your questioning head. I can see your fingers flying over the keyboard, the way you squint at an error, your eyes shining bright in the screen's light. I remember your measured pace, even the tiny skip in your shadow's gait.

I write to you a lot these days, oftentimes in my mind. Sometimes in class, punctuating the professor's wisdom with cryptic verses meant only for you. You make me very tongue-tied. Maybe that is why I write so much to you. Or maybe because I don't trust myself to say the right things. You've taught me, painstakingly, that anger and sadness, exhilaration and joy, misconception and doubt, everything diminishes with time. I've learned, on my own, that writing helps greatly at such times. Can I really fill silence with writing? I try. It is always more exciting to try the seemingly impossible.

I talk to you when you sleep. I whisper actually. I'm sure you hear me, every time. You smile, you even murmur back. I like it when you talk to me with your eyes closed, your voice husky and distant. I wish you would reveal your dreams now and then. Am I in them? I always wonder what it would feel like if you say a different name or if I do, for that matter. These fine lines of fire that we tread so carefully within never cease to amaze me. Nevertheless, talk to me in your sleep please...

I've etched each memory a hundred times in my mind. I have resolved to save every note I scribble to you. I guess I can talk to you when you sleep, no matter where you are. Sigh!

Confession

I sit in a train, familiar rails running alongside. I just had an epiphany of sorts. I discovered that I cannot write, I never could. I just think aloud with a pencil. I shamelessly pardon myself the stutter and the doodle, the incoherence even. For I simply have to speak my mind. To someone, something, even this crinkling white paper will do. I have to spell it all out, in excruciating detail.

Today the mind is a clamor of words. Trees, tall majestic trees. Stranded ambition stretching hard to touch the sky. Now I am full of hope, and a ludicrously innocent faith in happy endings. Then again, a tree will be a tree. Its shadow it can share. But can it ever lend color to the magnificent rainbow?

Wispy fresh snow. Little gleaming flakes of time, imperceptibly melting away. It is a finite life, every moment is finite, so is every emotion, even you and me. Eternity is merely a quest, ironically- one that promises to last forever. This probably explains the excess, the extremes- my abandonment of right and wrong. Believe me, it doesn't have to be hard. "Free Spirit" is a more convenient mask than admitting decadence, even to yourself.

Numbers everywhere, on billboards, on buses. My mind is crowded with them. I like them, particularly the second decimal and percentages. Many people claim that intelligence is a turn-on. Numbers are a long shot indeed. But what better illusion of knowledge and precision?

The President smiles from the Economist's cover. I flipped it open and read a single line. And I read it again and once more before I gave up. Maybe inattention worsens with age. Maybe it is inertia, or my passive rebellion against the information brigade. Maybe the thirst for knowledge found a younger desert to ravage.

I just heard myself! These excuses are my own failed motivation masquerading in party-wear. I just read my scrawled words. My discovery holds. I cannot write, I never could. I will go back to biting my lips, to my constant anticipation, to my abrupt musings.