From the Backyards of the Memory

Years of dreams kept these greens fresh in me. An unhinging end of the world, among the deep dark forests, with an ancient temple in the middle, whose walls I can’t say were like chiseled stone. Rather the walls were the mud, baked by the time. A pure dream, that often woke me amidst the night, with a soft, breezy cool face, lost in the mesmerizing moment. It clouded my brain against anything that would pass me through the day. Casting a reverie. The boundaries of reality somewhere melted away, left to live with the flakes of this life on the edge of the world, without any physical presence.

It was morning when we had reached this unknown corner of the Himalayas, lost among the steeps of the hills. We had to park the car above the hill, and sway down on a narrow pathway. With a several foot deep trench on one side, and an overwhelming hill on the other, nature was more silent than I had ever experienced. We reached the high hills, walking among the trees. The powerful silence, the intensity of purity, was it only me experiencing it?

I held my mamma’s hand, pressing gently, and said “ I know this place mamma. I have been visiting it… I have been coming here since.. I don’t know when. … You remember, I have been telling you of the temple I have been dreaming of?”
Mummy was dumbstruck as she saw me, and it would not be till we came back to Delhi, that she would tell me, that there was something in me, through all the three days we were there. I was beautiful. More beautiful than she could ever express. With glassy, watery eyes seeing something too subtle. And my dad & sister would repeat that every time we would talk about the place. Stealing frequent glances at me.
And it was then, that I started reminiscing, of what I knew of the place. And the newness it had adopted, as the world turn outside, from the inner, comfortable world. A new world, that included a new me….

Sun dawned at 4. And soon it was a full moon night, with rising din of the forest filling the atmosphere. AT 7:30, it was a deep awake night, so intense that it could have been past midnight. Bathed in the sliver light, I was standing in the middle of the forest; in the premises of that old temple… a sense of endless wait engulfed me. The surmounting pine trees brought an uncanny feel of being related to them since what seemed an eternity. And the clouds of my dreams condensed to materialize tangibly. Mixing with the melted reality. Was I living a dream? Or dreaming a reality? Was I reliving the past life? A life that my flesh could never relate to…

There was me, full of aspirations and sprite for life.. and there was my silent ‘self’ of a past life, with a soul more vocal than my words in this life can ever be… I existed in the calmness of a life, balanced, and stuck between the love for the din of DJ parties and silence of my ‘self’. The pushes of my contemporary life, and the pulls of my past life met where I existed completing me…pulling me apart...which road should I take? The one bustling with humanity, or the quiet, lonely lane that will lead me to my cradle? Or am I destined to live a double life, to somehow find a balance between my twin selves?

This story is a part of Fire Freeze contest. You can post your story too, if you can see and give expression to what you feel and see as the chemical opposites existing in you. This competition is sparked off by Close Up.

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