There is a calm wafting in the air. There is calm in the music, in the cup of coffee on this table, in my heart. I do not know what else to feel about it. I only want to lie down and read until the sun begins to set. I believe this is what I have been running towards for all these years. This is it. I know it in my heart. All of it starts within me and ends there. All of who I am is here, and all of it is welcome. I do not want to trade an ounce of myself. All my faculties and thoughts only scream this on this irrelevant Sunday in August: what a wonderful life!
There comes a point when you do not want to change; you do not want any more answers and, indeed, no questions. When you’re here, you must resist. Most rarely do, and they turn into a caricature of who they were and a reflection of those who came before, and nothing changes. The world is not moved, not by a smidge, and all that they did will turn to dust years before they do. In this happiness, I shall not forget that things change; with them, so do we. This calm will change at some point, which is all the more reason to read in the sun, to savour every ray. I will remember the warmth when the sun sets and clouds cover the sky. That is the instinct to stand in the stray patch of sunlight that falls in the room. Save this warmth, our body tells us; there may be none later.
But for now, I want to sit here and look over my shoulder right outside at the pigeons perched on the roof ahead. It does not elude me that I may have gotten older earlier; this is a good thing in most ways. For all the good in my life, many of my years were purloined; my life has always skipped ahead, like a problematic tape. There are seasons I don’t remember. Years of my life stay unaccounted for, like some old picture that gets lost amidst a plethora of paperwork. I wish I could tell people the cost I have paid for these gifts they revere. I wish I could tell them, but people don’t much value time, and more often than not, time is the only price we pay.
For now, I shall read in this patch of sun. There is little else to do, and what is more, I am not willing to lose even a second’s worth of time—enough has been stolen already.