On Bloodied Skies and Broken Children

There should be a special place in hell for people who want to write, but don't; want to read, but don't; want to learn music and art, but don't.

Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have a confession to make. This is where supplication begins.

Today I realized how much I have failed at things I should have done, could have done. The books I should have read- that list keeps growing. And the many reviews I promised to write, they linger at the back of my mind, threatening to abandon me. The beautiful moments I have experienced over the last few months, as mundane and as life-changing as they have been, deserve to be put down in...

I wanted to say "ink", but I stopped myself. My relationship with ink and paper has deteriorated. I find myself chopping thoughts onto a keyboard, mechanically, like a half-human. The many years of sitting at my table and bleeding ink all night long seem like distant memories.

That girl that used to be, her wild imagination that conceived many a story. They all ended in miscarriage, landed in a splatter of blood on a concrete floor where the setting sun had painted patterns.

In many years, almost five I should think, I feel like I have finally found a footpath through the wilderness I had lost myself in for so long. Love does that to you, they say, and growing up. I remember being only 12 years old, finding my own body under the sheets damp with the heat of the tropics, and glimpsing what it is to be in this skin, in this castle of flesh and bone.

Walking home across central campus this evening, I saw the sky copper red and bleeding. Swells of clouds covered the whole expanse, casting an ominous glare across the grass. The distant trees were black and their shadows even darker and foreboding. I felt the wind, cold like a thousand needles, and in spite of the menacing scenery before me, I felt it embrace me. The words of Thomas Gray's Elegy were fresh and reverberating in my head. I felt at whole with myself, with the blood-soaked skies and black trees.

On the pavement children had scratched pictures with chalk. Indistinguishable sketches, marks and crooked letters. What caught my eye was a bunch of flowers- their stalks perfect lines, their petals placed symmetrically and colored meticulously- white and pink on the grey concrete.

Reverie took me to a time when I had been that dreamer, etching images conceived in my mind on a wall, on a desk, on the back of a book. It has been years since I let myself fall, fall into the joyous realms of freedom. The looming of adulthood has zapped out of me the essence of life that, throughout all these years, had made me not want to kill myself every time the waves crashed on a desolate shore.

I have sinned. Killed the flame that burnt within. I see zombies around me everyday. Creatures living, breathing, feeding on life, simply because they were brought into existance by a mighty hand of Creation. I can still feel blood pumping under these ribs of mine, and I want to live.

Live not because I am living, but be alive because I choose to wake from the slumbers of mere existence. If there is Nirvana, if there is Eternal Life, I will find it within.