I'm a reconciler by nature. Out of the rabbit's horn I made a literature of possession. Was I the creator of a nature that took form in a tube -- as curd happens from milk? To shed one's nature is madness. Worldviews are fisher folk in a shark-infested sea. I'm of the view that a person is real to the extent of pain that one is willing to acknowledge. There is no reality but pain. The reality of unconscious is to the extent that I know it. My will is futility at war with futility. I took the squaring of a circle as a modicum of creativity. In effect my hands trembled when it came to drawing a straight line. I was never straight in that sense. When you fall even if it were in a dream the fall is a reality. I fell in the favorite of seasons when leaves color the floor of earth. I was drunk. Pity had saturated my nerves. I tried to convince you that I'm dying. Somehow you did not believe me. Thus began my life's journey. 

I accused myself of willful forgetting. I forgot spaces in fictions I made. I imagined that an action was forgiven since it did not tax imagination. I was wrong. Events had character of their own. People built lives in what seems forgettable to eyes in the dark. In worlds that I choose to live people never return. Something of them keeps dying each moment. The possibility of return is closed to them. Stories arrest them in moments. But for the moments life is a ghost. I filled my world with ghosts. I excluded myself from prying into eyes. It made me responsible for every step I took. I stood at the threshold talking to ghosts. Images of abandoned poor who walked from place to place with no place in mind stayed with me. I knew for certain that they weren't waiting for death. I was. Dispossessed they seemed detached as well. The impression is such an intense one that I could give up the security of writing for passivity of abandonment that the poor are subjected to in normal course of their lives.

I am wrong about others. I could eat from the plate that they ate. Anger that burnt my heart killed hunger as well. My contempt is unreal. My pity is unreal too. The unreality of pity is greater than unreality of contempt. Pity attaches you to suffering of the sufferer. Contempt is hollow unlike fullness of pity. In pity you're alone but in contempt you're isolated. I could've eaten the bread of your plate to prove myself that I felt no contempt for you. Instead I let myself go with the sea. I slept in faith as one who had not known rest for ages. I befriended the dark. The fear of ugliness was a delusion. In the void I had nothing to fear. Death, like music, is a friend of deserts. Looking at stars I went into the desert. For once life occupied my thoughts.

The obsessive love of strangers is a passion for eyes. I studied the science of nights in a glance. I hungered for words that eyes spoke that seemed so normal to my heart accustomed to strangeness. The darkness that covered people's thoughts and how like children they long to be noticed hiding beneath faces -- made me love for no reason. I laughed at the same time. It was my own expression that made me laugh with deliberate joy. The fluidity of passion breaks the iron of will at leisure. That's how laughter is born. The bodies of children and the way they fret as a sign of individualism makes me laugh. I laugh when I think of you because my heart cannot contain joy. I embraced the strangeness in you. Remove the strangeness and I knew that you were not you any longer. You would be a straight-on-straight extension of myself. How could I love a shadow as if it were sunlight!

Farther than the hand of man moves the hand of fate. Man will be forgotten because he is a simple possessor of a name. The memory of a nameless fate is greater than the name of a man. You're bound to fate while I'm bound to you. The fatality of your name rings in my soul. In hindsight I'm willing to accept anything. Rejected by mother for a child that was hers I waited for my father. I was a naked child in the arms of a stranger who knew how I felt but was unsure what to do about it. I pleasured my own body while reality struck my face. Mother was helpless before the strength of father. In fact father had died long ago and in the dream I refuse to believe that he died. His death is my own death played out as a scene from an unwritten play. Death brought out tenderness that he concealed in life. In dreams we perform as mourners at someone else's funeral. Mother's arms were around a girl-child. Father and I could never be certain if mother was not acting. Her world was determined like ours. But the thing that determined her world stood aloof from the hand of fate. Her world belonged to her while ours seemed fated.

In the deepest of downs I am a purveyor of whims. The whim I fancy most is myself in a glass coffin and the smug look of enemies at a face cold as flame is to moth. The opposite in me struggles to escape the clutches of language. When it cannot escape I plunge into despair. Muted it stands at the door that separates my world from others. I'm escaping from a plague in a city whose gates are shut. Inevitably I return to streets that smell of alcohol in the breath of a man. In their last days men stripped themselves to the core. They are celebrants of their own death. The opposite -- that which I am not -- comes to me as the plague. All I had to offer it was words. I kept words to myself. Inside the skin I was on fire. I let myself burn rather than utter a word. I wasn't rebelling. I let the conflict masquerade as truth. From hot springs in ice I drew the relentless power of happiness. I gave insanity to joy and reason to sorrow. I knew why I was sad. The reasons stared in my face. I did not know why I was happy but was happy all the same.

Unsustained nobility is a mannerism. If kindness is a gesture I'm a fool. Either way you win -- in the garden or the way that leads to the mountain. You sustain who you are in the mind. Purity is an abstraction if the body must wake with a fever morning after morning. Love that meant breaking barriers of imagination -- somehow it wasn't love anymore. Like time it was pointless to talk of love. Both had the immateriality that sustained the nobler sides of a social order. What parents feel for children is how the mind is attracted to madness. The overpowering strength of what I do not know is a drug that fights pain. In a brief moment pain shows its face before the drug obliterates it from memory.

The error in my nature. The music of islands that play on a sense of transitoriness. You watch the sea expecting the wave to recreate the drama of passing away as pure joy. None of that happens. The sea is reserved as far as your disappointments are concerned. You run across shores. Night makes no sense of your running. You might be looking for a friend. In moonlight shadows on waters are deceptive. The friend you look for has long returned. You could become familiar with abstractions and laugh the same jokes as others and secretly cry for the same music that others laugh to. Either way the error must come to a climax. The error is in expectation. I'm a closed door fixated to ideas. The privacy I seek is thanatos subsumed in self-consuming eros. Writing letters to strangers without a return address on the envelope gave me the satisfaction of having imaginary readers. After a point I became possessive of reading eyes. I kept writing without a sign of diffidence. I had to be watched at all times. I read along with the eyes that read my words. I felt with the feeling heart. I never wrote to the same person again. Something had to be suspended in the reading heart. I wasn't confessing an error. I was communicating the error of my nature.

When I look at blue it is blue I think of. An image of the mind is the oppressed contemplating their oppression. It is not time that kills me but waiting for time to pass. The otherworldliness of oppressed peoples is a coming together of bodies ready to levitate. The closest moments of our lives were in nights we sat in cafés and shared a cup of tea. We spoke hours without making a point. We were passionate. In some ways desperate too. What we did not possess made closeness possible. The tea was sometimes cold and the taste did not stay long enough on the tongue. We held our individuality in check. The force of childhood was upon us. We were in no hurry to grow up. Night was not coming to an end any time soon. We levitated with approaching dawn. We looked at the empty cup and it was tea we were thinking of.

Isolated as atoms we combine and recombine as colors. Something of isolation is me. Something of color is how I am with you. Colored I seem on surface. Otherwise I'm colorless as water. I share the character of a stream. Look at me without shifting your gaze. I take the color of rock and sand. I'm green with rivers and blue with seas. My nature is bound to nothing except the sadness of loving you. Which is why water flows. I twist and turn restless as a sick child. I don't deny body the experience of pain. I hide tears as one friend does when parting. You cannot see how much I've cried until morning touched the sea. The sea is brilliant pink and ochre. The streak of white amidst colors is my tear-stained face. You see the steps where I used to stand and wait for you to smile. Suddenly you know how much you mean to me. That I've not forgotten you. That we're one and same. It is not the last day of the world. It is as if the world is recreating itself in a new moment. A colorless atom moves to become a colored body.

The waters I test with my lips have been flowing since time. My confidence is shaken. I suffer the humiliation of having caused hurt. My passivity is brought to test. I never thought it essential to open the proud borders of my soul. Now sitting in a crowded railway apartment I must explain strangers why my lips are slightly open and my eyes seek to be understood. Trains. I can imagine life without time but not life without trains. I venture in and out of them as if they were homes of people I met in a previous birth. Perhaps some I'm destined to meet in future incarnations as well. In a train my voice was imbued with unusual seriousness. The moment I felt discomfort I waited for the next station. I changed platforms as fast as I could. I had driven passivity to limits. I moved until I came to those small stations at the borders of cities. There is a poignant edge to them especially in the light of setting sun with a barren landscape out there. I'm certain that the struggle with nature goes on here as elsewhere. I'm lost in places without crowds. I feel naked and watched. I rush back to familiar illusions afraid that I may never find myself. I was not ready to die.

All work is copyrighted property of Prakash Kona.