Atongla Rothrong
A couple of days ago, I found a poem. I thought it would stay, but it wandered a bit curious in the lanes of my mind, then I lost it. Hey poem! Whey’s yea gone? I asked but nothing doing. Then just as suddenly a thought came to my minds eye that sometimes a poem grows in a deserted heart as a peepal tree might shoot up from the cracked wall of an abandoned house. Sometimes I’ve found a poem in some long lost corners of my mind Even as you might a cigarette from an old forgotten packet, you light it up, inhale, feel relaxed and happy for a few stolen seconds, sometimes I hold my pen as some I know would hold a drink and think. I really can’t afford to be seen with a thing that calls itself “heartbreak”. It’s scandalous.
Oh gosh! Where was I? I’m real and I exist, so let me continue with my dreams. I guess all I wanted to ask you guys out there is that don’t you ever have an enormous thoughts of uncertainty, one dreadful aching uncertainty you would fear more than anything else- being in love- realizing that you have never felt out of it and you’ll be too old or to discover it is indeed too late. No, I don’t think you’d want to be too old, never too late. After all, all those times of dreaming, where would they go? I suspect that they’d collapse ultimately and suffocate you. How sad that would be, when all along all you really craved for was to be with the one person capable of reciprocating the craving, the one who survived the flux of the times and years in order to arrive at this momentous time.
I know, it’s impossible to write about emotions, without being maudlin or overly sentimental or simply cloying. But the truth is huge, the love and care there is, exists in an immense quantity, withheld for a lifetime – small doubts may invariably prompt the self from transitional situations- in the optimistic belief that somewhere there is one person whose emotional life has remained as successfully secret as one’s own- She/He is there. You’ve always known them, and vice-versa, now that you think of it maybe it has simply taken the slow dissolving of all the other faces layed upon yours or it has required all these years of your desires or it may have needed all these years for the image to finally come clear, reality imposed upon reality.
My God! It’s terrifying isn’t? But be willing to take the risk and stand bare and revealed. Trust her/ him, value them and don’t seek to change any of those qualities that hue at the turn of life’s road, that you find most lovable, begin with their feet and paint them with the colors of your affection. Tell them you want him/ her to be wherever it is necessary, and in the meantime, you only have to hope that you choose her/him necessary.
Our daydreams scenarios may be common. They all involve time and the ripening of mutual appreciation. You may have lived a hundred years, in a strange way, you may, might have been old all your life, but that’s nothing to be scared of. Just simply allow yourself to be cared and to be cared for in return and not judged or viewed with.
As for me, I dream of the perfect, respectful alliance of amiable minds, a person for whom I can compact time, or make it elastic, who with my touch would renew his long ago dreams, dreams spun on youthful idealistic afternoons when everything seemed possible, in that time before life placed doubts upon my tongue. I’m going to go on feeling the dreams, you know, feeling on them while nurturing the secret insulated by the unshakable knowledge that I’m loved absolutely, as I dreamed I would one day be. Till then, I’ll keep on dreaming.
