It is not a long time back and it feels very close, not like yesterday or an hour back. It felt like now. My thoughts were swimming across salty seas and cold currents, every moment I changed, the moment I got a glimpse of myself I changed. It was solitary, it was madness. A naked body clinging to the cold metal of a clock needle. The sound of passage was deafening, the sand screaming as it emptied in hundreds of hourglasses. Freezing one moment and the blinding sun, and then I was above the weather, hitting the horizon. I peered out of every window, broke down every wall, walked out of many doors. I was still there. Everything led to where I was. The incarceration was the escape.
The first time I saw blood was not the first time I bled. It was a thorn and the tip of the index finger. The bright red drop on my brown skin glistening in the bright sunlight. I punctured the other hand, it was there too, I pricked the nose and the same red came out. It was everywhere. Red, and then it was all grey. Grey skies, grey trees and grey birds. Everything a shadow, everyone a shadow. The ground was swept by shadows, no jostling for space, no lines, shadows over each other, darker, lighter, making love. The world was empty, it was beautiful.
Loud thunders and the sky tore apart. It rained for years and years. Large big drops incessantly pounding the earth. I was safe and dry inside the hourglass as sheets of water kissed the outer glass wall. The earth spinning erratically, east to west, west to east, north to south, south to north. There was no direction. I was new again, someone else, same body, new thoughts, walking in another direction, holding another compass, following another star. The shadows vanished into beings.
I shouted out her name. There was no air to carry my voice. The leaves rustled with no sound. The wind whistled past mutely. All the animated shadows laughed and shrieked in joy. But it was silent and still. Multitudes of people saying away their shadow years, but the vacuum paralyzed sound. It was sad and the dust rose. ‘Inayat’, I said her name once again. The last grain, the hour glass emptied.
It is not a long time back and it feels very close, not like yesterday or an hour back. It felt like now. And then closer and then it passed. I remember tomorrow, so vividly as if it were yesterday. I cannot know but the shadow. Awaiting to embrace the memory of times to come.