Now I know! The last breaths are heavy and loud. Now I know how it is to see someone dying infront of you. A slow, painful death. The last-ditch effort to cling on to dear precious life just like the final wild fluttering of the candle. Who wants to die, especially an untimely death? But it is coming. The Death! I can hear it's melancholic footsteps. Yes! Unlike what you think death is not happy to take anyone away. It is not a sadistic psychopath as it is falsely blamed to be. I know because I can hear the sadness in its movements. Nevertheless, the chosen one has to leave. With a last gush of wind, it will all become history, a part of memory but never a part of memoirs; reminisced but never shall a beautiful epitaph be written for it as it shall take away with it the very ability to do so. Yes! That is what death of Imagination will lead to. Already in it's deathbed, it's rendered weak and the effects are all too visible. I wish to hold on to it but it is slipping away like quicksand. The fantasy world that it had spun around me has started to wither away. The world where I would often find shelter from the cold, brutal winds of the real world. The walls are crumbling, the windows breaking, the fireplace too doesn't have any fire left. I am being exposed to the "pragmatic", "empirical" world. World where birds never sing for you but to attract their potential mates, where rainbow is a mere physical phenomenon, where feelings generate from complex mathematical calculations. I feel like a tiger from a zoo who has all of a sudden been left in the wild to fend for itself. I have already started feeling the chill in my spine from the coldness of the wind. The anguish at being marooned is the only force that will propel me forward. Anguish resulting from absurdness of being. From the compulsion to seek meaning, from the inevitability of freedom which one finds clinging on to one's feet at every step like a leech that refuses to go. When imagination is getting ready to leave me, anguish comes with the promise to become my partner for life. I have started stretching my hand towards it; the stretching of my hand keeping pace with the dying of the chosen one. One candle will be blown away and the other shall light up. Devoid of imagination in the world of hard metal truths, propelled by anguish I will move on to the land where I shall meet my Imagination again.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The words of Pablo Neruda:
"Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep."
