Time, they say, is an illusion.
A calendar is but a physical manifestation
of the psychological defences that humans employ to pretend to know what is
going to happen next. Monday surely comes after Sunday.
Memory is but a bittersweet record of the
Time that has passed, or rather, that we have passed through.
Memories are assigned dates, and locations
and are hued with the colours of our ever-volatile emotions, an angry red, a
happy yellow, a romantic pink. The paranoid urge to contain everything within
the human range of senses is an innate limitation of our kind, as much as the
unavoidable need to confine the indiscernible and unknown into simple words.
The memories I have of my life are
beautiful. At least, I make them out to be. I refuse to believe that certain
things may not have really happened and I only remember them that way because
of my befuddlement with memories of dreams and reality. I refuse to believe
that certain words weren’t spoken to mean what I remember them to have meant. I
find solace in my memories, a certain nostalgia, for what was.
When I was very little and needed to hide
myself during play, I used to shut my eyes and believe that if I couldn’t see
my seeker, so couldn’t she! All of thirty one years now, I still do it. I blind
myself to the chaos of my lonely, unpredictable present and go back decades. I
frame my memory with measly words — beautiful, kind, wonderful, annoying—
impotent to grasp the immensity of the occurrence, of the crisscrossing of my
path with another’s.
My day started with his smile. My play
ended with him beating me at a game. He showed me how two stones rubbed against
each other could make them get attracted to each other. I was drawn to him,
although he never held my fingers, simple physics becoming an unlikely trigger
for my first love.
I dig deep into pockets of experiences,
tweaked with subconscious manipulations, a license, I think one ought to give
oneself. Why else, would you relive something that exists no more, that might
as well have been a dream, unless you needed a beautiful sorted-out phantasm to
escape to, from where you are right now?
Hope is but an unapparent prediction of
Time yet to arrive, or rather, that we have yet to reach.
One’s present is stamped with seals of
life’s panorama, having loved, hated, suffered, succeeded, failed, tried and
struggled. After a certain time, it becomes second nature to predict one’s
fate. It becomes a habit to hope.
Hope, not being limited to momentous
events, provides a wider canvas to portray dreams, dreams of the future and
fantasies born of dissatisfaction with mortal affairs.
Hope hurts. The lucidity of a hopeful
dream, however, is self-replenishing.
Hope hurts, yes, but the courage to hope,
again and again, is life-blood to the beautiful landscape of universal Life
that forever remains in want of completion, by the oft-spoken about collective
human consciousness.
I shall hope for another day and another
smile, lit for me.
In the grand plan of things, our present,
past and future are ridiculously minuscule, almost non-existent, and so close
to each other on the Infinite Timeline, they might as well have been a singular
entity.
When I reminisce about the summer of 2000,
my present might as well be the summer of 2000.
As I consciously type the words, my
present is 16:05 pm on the 2nd of July.
For all I know, the future I am hoping for
might have happened already.
The Past is the Present is the Future.
You get what I am saying?
Time, they say, is an illusion.
