opening-the-lid

[opening-the-lid]

china after going through a portal into his head before landing on the side of New Jersey Turnpike

[opening-the-lid]

Trials

'tis the plague of late teens; the world doesn’t meet you halfway, we all are in the wrong places, we want to be everywhere, we want everything, all the time, all at once. we’re restless,  searching. warming up to a cold world,  giving in to a callous world, one that bulldozed our walls of insouciance.

hormones wreck your harmony, you lose the treaty of peace you’ve made with your skin. suddenly the pact needs to be redrawn, but the ocean of complexities looms over the summit. there’s a pushback for every solution, so the talks go on and on.

everything is summoned for a trial: that bench you sat on your orientation, that (rare) late reply, that shy compliment that hesitated to come out in time, that date you weren’t feeling upto, that niche interest that hooked you blind, and the trains you missed thereby. might it be that decision ? or, perhaps, it was your indecision. rue the might that deals with these might-s! gone is the world of linear equations, you are now affected by chaos theory. you summon past; nature, habits, beliefs and ideals follow. you cross-question them, about your trail of loneliness, about these corpses of unloved potential  only you see around.

biology grins at this farce, from the crowd.

[opening-the-lid]

Calibre of the Macabre

"Tell me now, what is your wish?" asked God with his hands on hips, slightly slouching, looking down at Poorna.

"I always laugh at people who ask you— the omnipresent, omnipotent being— for worldly things," said Poorna. He looked pretty nonchalant for someone who didn't believe in God.

"So, this will not be like your typical wish-fulfilling day."

"Go on; perk up my day with some novelty."

"I have a long list of things I want you to compile, curate, catalogue and label according to the query's scale and scope."

"Aha…You, too, want the world's gossip, don't you ?"

"Shallow as I might be, I am gonna make you do some real work", Poorna babbled, forcefully holding on to a niche, recollected thought. 

"Here we go."

"I want to know about all the things intended to never see the light of the day, never did and never will. All the burnt files, tattered papers, misunderstood crimes, "settlements" that restored the illusion, evidence of crimes innocently floating through deep forest streams, "trash bags" buried near sugarcane factories, footmarks undone by snowfall, bodies dissolved in acid and dumped in the sea."

"Let's tone down the grisly quotient a bit now, shall we ?"

"All the secrets people carry to their graves,

the unspoken, unspeakable betrayals, all the injustice that isn't made up for, unsought stories behind every scar and tattoo, secrets that could have saved a subset of the dead, wartime betrayals no one noticed, things that passed through everyone's heads when they died."

"That's more like it !"

"I want to see all the messages of substance backspaced before sending, Images that are permanently deleted; those unique patterns of 0's and 1's dismembered irrevocably, Audio that is destroyed; those crests and troughs flattened forever, graffiti on bathroom walls that got painted over, masterpieces before they were cheated on by rogue strokes."

"I want to know about all the whiffs of possibilities every author ignored that could have made a story better,"

"Better story for who, though ?"

"every speck of distilled essence lost during lethargic translations, books burned in Alexandria that we couldn't recover, wisdom of people who couldn't speak and write."

"I want to know about all the times people mistook obstacles for dead ends, and how close they were to the real end. Rightful hunches wrongfully discarded, breakthroughs that weren't, not the things that changed the world,  but the things that changed the course of the world and the things that could have changed the course of the world."

"You are biting off more than you can chew now."

"All the secret societies and their shady activities throughout history with all the salacious details, backstage military coups that were just but executed, classified documents that remained classified, unrevealed revelations holding the power of an earthquake."

"I want to know if there was any malice behind the kindest acts of history, and the fortuity involved in the imaginative leaps of mankind, All the bonafide stories of valour unpeeled to their pragmatic core."

"I want to know about everything that vanished into the 'thin air'. In fact, I want to eviscerate  the thin air,  the dark night, the abyss, and the wilderness."

"Eviscerate the wilderness !!?"

"All that never 'added up', That part of the whole that made it greater than its parts, All the stories behind those words whose etymology is 'unknown'."

"All the fundamental lies people built theories and the world on,"

"Knowingly?"

"Knowingly."

"All the things I didn't know that I didn't know but would like to know, All the decadence, rabidness and perversion the world can crawl to,  the forbidden, FORBIDDEN and the "forbidden" stuff, the muted filth, the whole restricted cabin of your office, the true underbelly of our existence, the absolute history of things minus the feasible, existing history of things."

"Uh…"

"I want to gauge the bandwidth of the world that dissipated, the true calibre of the macabre, not an approximation, not using inadequate empiricism, but using omnipresence, using you."

God vanished.