IX.
I was walking all by myself. My feet aligned one after another then another and so on. I was not walking with a purpose, I was not bent on going anywhere... There was not much traffic in the street, scents of local stalls were invading my nostrils. I reckon there was a staunch gloominess to them— the thieves of first light— like a pile of snakes spiraling up among the sweating reeds. Tall trees, they cut the light mercifully. Fissures on the treeroofs gave in to the pile of sunlight dropping beneath upon us. They were, as if made into spades, clutching on the ground not unlike children at beaches. Then they made the soil into sweet beds. Sweet beds. There was no intimidation, there was no intent or dreams of intent. Even if a dreamer of intent was stopping by the stalls, they could not clutch on the soil like piling light did. They could not call their temporary standings their home. A traveller was once here. And being once here, he had left for faraway beaches and then maybe somewhere else. And there was also another. He was not special, he was a traveller. Sound and simple. The musics of these streets were alien to him. Once he had lain, under his soft quilt, pneumonia stricken. He had heard the musics of the land just next to his. A myriad of consulting-among-the-ruckus fragged, had pushed onto him frictionally. Then they had beaded upon his forehead, sweats of disdain: "the fever is releasing". I too was once on that bed. Maybe mine was different but it did not matter. And maybe what I felt was different but it did not matter. I had suckled on the warm heels of that bed just like these travellers did with the stools of land that they thought were keepers of their being there: "Each gust of wind was an enemy". Just like the brother of my mother, and his wife and his merry children, who were close to me in age, thought so with the streaks of their day-to-day inspirations. As I sunk on the bed and bends of it there was comfort but not a shard of belonging but then again there was something that was to render me existenceless. He was keeping me in his house not out of pity or obligation; not because my mother had died and I was already fatherless, not because he thought I was fruitful. And certainly not because I was soon to be a dreamer of intent. He was a simple man, he neither knew nor would have cared about the kinks on my head. If he could see, he would have seen so— that, there was an invisible crown of kinks around my head. This terrible bitter crown that kept me latched onto the headshore of the bed he had arranged for me. Maybe that is why, even if he was uninformed of that, he knew that I was to stay with him."I am not a traveller, Oh! I am not a fiend." There were ghosts from time immemorial under that bed. I could hear the tumult of their rapture or suffering every night. He did not hear them, neither did his wife, who had a passive distaste with me staying at his'. She was not pleasantly conductive of the fact that I was scooping my share from their daily meals, that I was so enumerated with her sons and daughters, that I was so normalised with their, and her routines and mine, there. Each day she eyed me with a passive distaste to which I had to be squalidly oblivious, so as to keep our intents balanced. Every time I talked to her, I did so with an armoured goodwill and unflinching interest in whatever she was to do or say to keep our conversations going and our milk to be not spilled upon the carpet of support that was lactose intolerant: And so her will was betrothed to mine, like an incrementally decomposing ceaseless but never quite dissolving bond of an old couple that stood through so many trials together but was never on the perfect, or even serviceably languid pitch. "But soon the bonds of this world would have to perish". There was not much traffic in the street. I walked more... Aligning my feet after feet on the trail of many feats. The travellers repulsed me, they did it gently. It was not the gusts of wind. They pushed me gently from the trail of their feats. I was a drunken buzzard, no longer thatched over field of carrion. I was a drunken lorrydriver, he met me under the shade of a tree. He did not meet me in person, he met me from his burden of finding a living. As the heavy momentum of his truck put an irving on my shoulders, some mere bones of mine were dislocated. I felt light, very light. There was a screeching in my head. But there was no pain among the freshly revised configuration of bones and buttering upon the flesh. I turned to look at the bloodstream flowing down from a wound. It gorged then nourished the asphalt— the vanguard of bloods, swaying some freckle feets away from me. I found him, no, not the lorrydriver— the traveller. He arose from a pile of bones and flesh. He found me, no, not me— not me who had lain coldly on the asphalt, dying. He met me, me, who was scurrying away into Amaravati. He arose, there was a thick mist of blood and marrows abound, and said: no, you are not a God, you are a sacrificial foal. Look into me, look into me. Look into me. Look into me...
Funtitled #56
Shuttermerge I / Stylin' wit da Pint