Grey shadows deepened into dark blots, grades flitting between black and white. They danced their ritual night dance, fluid forms fusing, fretting and fleeing from each other. He felt a heaviness in his feet. The tendons tightened in the face of the ultimate truth dark skies forebode. He set his weight against the dry earth, fearing flight. I am as heavy as a stone, he feigned false conviction.
They walked, two shadowy affairs limned against the setting sun. He would come back to light before the black sky severed them. How he dreaded the hour, when they had to part ways. He would make sure the lights were on the whole night.
“You must face your fears”, a friend had advised. “Only you can solve this! There is no way round it. Do it before it’s too late”. Tomorrow, he would say and stave off the appointment. Tomorrow! Days piled, fears knotted his veins, his stomach churned and breathing became a sore.
As dust motes gather with time over the window pane, rendering it translucent, it had grown layer upon layer till he realized it was too thick there was no way he could drive it away with just his will. Everyone around him went about their lives bearing the burden. Have they not realized yet? He questioned the wind, that now gathered speed it seemed to screech and wail, auguring his fate.
“Do you know how lost I am?”, the question came, intermittent heartbeats stretching seconds into eternity. Sounds dissipated into the evening, everything around him slowed into a dream, and all that remained was the thunderous thud of his heart, which beat on his eardrums like the knell of an impending omen. “Do you know how lost I am”, the iteration. Sound gave way to silence which grated at his temples he couldn’t bear it. “When you are borne by the night away?”, an effort to fill the silence.
The sun half hid behind the hills, shadows began eating up the earth from the horizon. Soon! Soon! He feared. The clump of trees at the edge of the fields now became a funereal group of widows. They swayed and wailed into the night their atrophied existence. The dirge caught a wayward wind and reached his ears. How painful! He realized. “I feel your pain”, he breathed a message back, “I feel your pain”
Many a night, with his friend by his side, nightmares haunted his dreams. Sleeping to forget his fears only got him demons from his subconscious; aberrations that compounded what plagued his mind during the day. He could hear the rip of tendons, the cracking of his stiff bones, and the acrid smell of black fluid oozing from his veins. Before the loud snap of separation, he would wake up delirious, wet clothes sticking to him like second skin he felt the presence of a third entity which would only leave him with a cold shower.
His friend hung his head low, shaking it with the slow deliberation of a someone who had no strength. In the fading light, the features dissolved into the importance of shadows. “Do you know how lost I am,” he said, a little shiver running through the length of his being, “when light dies and I am one with the night?”. A cold wind buffeted his bones and he could not help but reflect his friend; he shivered more from trepidation than from the cold.
“you are…” , he mumbled in exasperation and surprise.
“when I am amidst ghosts with no one to ease my plight, “ he rasped, heedless of the interruption, the questioning tone lost in present urgency. “yearning for dawn…” in a fit of paroxysm that rocked the frail body he feared the answer would not be conveyed tonight, a night he had been waiting for his whole waking life, an answer which necessitated a question as a rule. He had feared he would face the same fate as his friends had faced time and time again. The only way out of the quagmire was the eternal question. And now he had been asked he had barely enough strength!
“I yearn for dawn,” it struggled “ when we become one…”
Shadows swallowed him and the silence of his absence hit his small being with the weight of shallow emptiness. Yet, the feeling was accompanied by a realization which flooded his entire being like the effect of a heady wine, and he reeled for a few seconds before he hit the ground on his knees. “Forgive me!”, he wailed in ecstasy into the night, “I never had the courage to ask”
His soul ruffled in the wind of revelation and the fear that ate his being receded into the skeins of the night.
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