Any dream will do

This is a C&P job. Not my words, not by a mile.

Written by someone infinitely more gifted.  

Something that I felt deserved a wider audience. 

Of course, I have the necessary permissions to reproduce it here. 

What do you think?

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The trick is to detach yourself, to become the observer.

Then you watch the tendrils of pain, from their tentative beginnings. Hold it in cupped palms, watch it bloom like a flower. Observe with anticipation as it courses through the body like a lambent flame, till it subsumes the mind in a raging inferno that seeks to blank out everything else. Feel the crimson coloured petals envelop consciousness, smother all rational thought, till one even loses the sensation of pain. When all the crevices of the mind are filled, there is a blissful nothingness. Or an ultimate satiety, depending on how one looks at it.

Like going through a dark tunnel where you can only feel the closeness of the walls around you and emerging into a sunlit plain, the brilliance of nothingess is dazzling. It is at once totally alive and devoid of all passion. It is the white that is the sum every hue and the black that swallows them all. It is wrong to call it a joy; it is a plateau that is far higher than these minor highs of sensual or emotional pleasure.

One seeks these plateaus in different ways. A long run followed by a sprint over the last few hundred yards, searing lungs and muscles aflame progressively building a crescendo of pain that ends in a silent scream of pure release. That last set of weights added to the bar as you hold it above your chest, elbows taut, groups of muscles involuntarily jumping as you lower it ever so slowly. However, these offer but glimpses into that vista of infinite emptiness.

For the true experience is in holding it inside you. Go about your work in absolute, easy normalcy. Only occasionally allow yourself that luxury of feeding the oxygen of attention to those embers that smoulder deep inside, fan the flames till they singe, then burn and finally purify. Wipe away these abrasions of the daily grind. For as noted earlier, fire cauterizes.

And as you do it, the letters on the page in front of you lose focus, and then come back with renewed clarity. The meaningless people pressing cases of varying irrelevance become faceless, then slowly regain identity, and then slowly the disjointed facial movements attain a voice, and then conversation continues.

"Err, could you run that by me again ?", you say.

Exultant, inwardly.

One more hit, one more swig from that bottle of sparkling nothingess. Or an ultimate satiety, depending on how one looks at it.

Purely as an observer, of course.

I don't know when I stopped thinking of you

and of French windows overlooking the sea

and white curtains fluttering in the breeze

and an imperfect terracotta vase

on a corner slab on the red wall

and the flutes on the centre table

with the last dregs

of an evening lived,

but every now and then,

forgotten words

and faded dreams

hum and dance together

in a careless cadence

to stir up memories

of an unseen yesterday

that I can't seem to remember

but don't want to forget.