Tell me, have you seen me cry? Tell me, have you seen me take a humble round out of sheer happiness? Tell me, have you seen me disappear every other day like a crumble of smoke puffing out of the chimney attached to that fireplace that might have warmed up with flames a century ago? Tell me, what exactly have you seen?
Just the very yesterday, I sniffed a rotting smell from the other side of a closed door. It was a stale gruelling smell of death. It was unbearable. A few days passed away like that. I got myself familiar and adjusted with that decomposing whiff. It somehow started to get into the domestic flow. A few days went in that way like an accepted discomfort. But then that day, we found a stray cat, whom I used to call "Lennon" laid there all dead and frozen. I couldn't get a glimpse of his lifeless face but saw some flies rushed out of the room, unnoticed.
So tell me what have you seen? Is it always too conditional to consume whatever is there in front of our sight? Can't we happen to look right over what is not there? Once, a few years back, I was travelling somewhere on a train. It was a chilly night in December. The compartment was hollow with a hushed hue of snoring and blues. I was lying on my seat all tired and awake. The earphones of my iPod were stuck in my ears but all could hear was the hurled sound of railway tracks lining below me, moving me, carrying me, taking me to an unknown destination. But was I even there? At that moment? In that sleep stricken train bogie? Where was I hanging then? Where am I hanging now? Why do I only see myself in the past moments, where I wasn't actually alone? Tell me, have you seen me anywhere? Was I there with you yesterday? If I wasn't then where was I? And who was that embodied entity of mine with you in the past moments?
October. Octobers summoned such striking curiosity. The curiosity of entity. I am curious to know about the fall I never happened to see on my own. But I was there. My existence was there in the conjunction of living and unconsciousness. I see myself walking on the damp road of late October piled up with dead maple leaves. I saw myself walking through a fairly dense forest where I might come across a small cottage showing its presence of liveliness with an entwined chain of dimming bulbs and wrath of reeks hovering above the ridge. I saw myself knitting tiny woollen covers for my cats who usually spend their days chasing insects or dozing on the sofa kept aside at the late hour of the afternoon. Tell me, Can you see me there? Well... Maybe not. But you can see yourself on the verge of late autumn, sitting all alone by the shutted window counting the visible stars, reading your favourite poetry 5th time that day, stuffing warm succulent meatballs induced in a spicy broth, looking for your scarf of bad habits, lifting yourself from the struggles you are growing through, living the day and leaving behind yesterday.
So tell me.... Could you see yourself now? Did you find it? Is that you? If not... then don't frazzle up. It might be just another nightmare. Or... It might just be another bad, brooding, lifeless October. A season of fall đ...
-Shrestha Mukherjee :)
