Darkness All Around

Have you ever felt standing at the edge of a precipice looking down at a great deep abyss? Have you ever wondered whether this is how it will all terminate? Have you ever stared at the end of the tunnel wondering, rather hoping, that this is not the end?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Bleakness is all-pervasive. It snares you slowly making you feel restless. It makes you feel inadequate. You sit and wonder if life is playing another joke on you. You look all around and see others in a darkness worse than your own, fighting tougher battles, yet you feel that yours should not be the one that you lose in the end. You moan the loss of the day when your success depended only on you and not on what others defined. You remember the day when you had built your first boat that had sunk within the very first minute and yet you felt like the greatest engineer. You lost the Three-Legged Race and yet you rejoiced because your best friend had won the sack race during the Annual Sports Day.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

You look back at a you that were there a decade ago and you see a you then who is much changed from the you now. Something pains deep inside. You do not know what it is. Yet it churns your deepest corner of the heart. You grope around for a light. Cold hands touch yours, equally cold. You hold one of them, searching for some warmth and when you do not find it, you begin to fake it. And thus you begin a relationship. Sometimes you trade. You trade friends, you trade love and you trade your hopes. Then you gamble and risk it all, all for nothing.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

You figure that you were not as indispensable as you would have liked to believe. In this world, you are just another commodity, ready to be traded at the best available bargain. You cast your dice and wait, wait for something to happen.

Waiting for something, that you know will never happen – it makes you laugh. Laugh the last hysterical laugh before silence engulfs you once again. The flight of the free bird is curtailed and the chains are in place. Everything has fallen apart, nothing that you had fought for have borne fruit, you have become a prisoner to your own pride and it has taken you safely in its custody, putting you in a haven that could have been a paradise, had it not been for your own gamble.

You slowly walk into the dungeons, smiling like the lunatic that you really are, that you really want to be. You call yourself an escapist but then at the end one must be truthful. Ahh!!! Truth. Wish you had used it better during the life of lies you led.

You have lost the bet and the best in you has died with it. The Phoenix – is it for real?