In one sudden moment, to be repeated several times over, all that thought and emotion and reflection and introspection merge with the remains of the oil and the spice and the salt and the flour and find their way out of my body. Eyes streaming with the water of guilt, head throbbing with the pound of adrenalin, I survey the world around with in a gaze of curiosity triggered by unabashed self absorption. I dig deeper and deeper into myself, questioning every single decision I have ever taken in my thirty four years of existence. Each spoonful of sugar that added to the waistline, each utterance that left a heart broken, each act of conspicuous consumption that burdened my wardrobe, each penny I contributed to the temples of gluttony, each instance I missed to make someone's life better, each speck of dust I left untouched - let all the sins be accounted for! Let them all stand in line and confront me with my own baseness, so I may touch the ground with my head and beg for understanding, wait for that light to shine from above that reveals the complicated machinery that is driving this destruction. But I beg in vain, I wait in vain. Because there is no light. There is only darkness, where all the sugar and the spice go and wait for their companions to join them. As this darkness grows and envelops all, I notice how the walls don't look so white any more, how the red of the curtain appears to have faded into a duller hue that reveals as much as it hides, how the smiles look forced and how the eyes are actually shut all the while they are open. Am I surrounded by blindness? Is this some sort of fantastical existence where all the light has been merely my desire to run away from the darkness. And when finally the moments of truth, as they are so passionately evoked by the authors who write books of a thousand pages, do finally arrive, do I realize that this light is as worthless and as transient as the shimmer of the diamonds in the sky on Diwali night, creating an illusion of light and magic that only the very stupid or the very blind would believe to replace the reality of the darkness? There's that boy planning the first threesome of his life, anticipating the excitement of love (!) at both ends. There's that woman systematically planning the impulsive, emotional arguments that will slowly drive her loved (!) son to the destination that she firmly believes he needs to reach. There's that girl who has finally arrived at the answer to the critical question of life "what do you love (!) to do?" and is now going to make a "go for it", in the language of the self-help books she read recently. What madness! What blindness! Or are they the ones who see the darkness and accept it, evolving with it so their eyes can see in the dark, and help them to hunt, and eat, and survive, and grow stronger? While there are us...the idiots who bump their knees, their elbows, their ankles...anything that evokes the howls of pain...and then attribute the pain to the process of "growing up" and "learning about life" and, like Calvin's dad, "building character"? Well , there's my character now, a pile of pastel colors on the floor, the regurgitated remains of my inner blind self, raising a stink that can unblock the most stubborn of noses, supreme even in its messiest avatar.
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