A Long While

There are those days when you wish time were on your side. When you couldn't wait for tomorrow to come, however hard you tried. Every second ticked like it was a year, spawning with it a rush of thoughts each warranting enough credibility and attention that it felt surreal. Yet not so real that it could transport you. Just enough so that it could capture your mind's fancies for a while. A long while.

I was longing for the war to end. It had taken a toll on me slowly. At first, I tried not to notice the hurt. It started off as a little less than a battered ego and a bruise. I let go, claiming immunity with a self attested passport stamped with generous helpings of maturity and endurance. But the bruise needed tending, much less than that the ego yearned. Yet help didn't come, and the bruises started becoming deep cuts over time. A cut deep enough to reveal flesh and bone, and feel disgusted just imagining. The kind of wound that you couldn't stop thinking of once you saw it. 

In the distance, I could hear drunk men braving the cold singing songs and drumming with nothing more than boxes. The inebriated drone of the same song repeated to death, with the drumming so out of sync that only the ones there perhaps appreciated it. Why couldn't they see the futility of this all? Were they blind to the expanse of broken dreams that lay strewn around them. Couldn't they smell the inevitability of a slow death lurking around. A death of character, a death of their ethos, a death of everything they once thought they stood for.

I try my common antidote to frustration, a cigarette. It works. I'm fascinated by the fire, the smoke, the banal simplicity of it. It drowns out the failed attempt at music for a while. The smoke clouds my eyes, as it does my mind. The wind drags the smoke away from me, as mosquitoes home in on their meal for the day. Metal wings of my good luck charm, the butterfly lifelessly collapse at my feet. I try in vain to juggle my cigarette in one hand, while trying to prevent the bloodsuckers. It's time to stub it out. What seemed like a savior a minute ago seems like a lost cause already. 

The distant lawless sounds creep back into my mind. Now it's reduced to a cacophony. Perhaps it's time to withdraw indoors. To safer confines. A quick glance indoors makes me feel nauseous. The haven feels like a compromise now. I long for the familiar crackle of the radio. It doesn't. Perhaps for the better, I conclude. The radio is no more than a carrier of more death and misery.

The fantasy of peace feels painfully distant. However much I try to remember the fragrance of tranquility, it evades me. I feel like I should make a mental flag at the next opportunity I encounter it. So that I can remember how it feels, tastes and smells. But I will once again be lost in the euphoria of it all when that moment does arrive. For it has not eluded me forever. Peace and I are strange bedfellows. It's a vacation romance that lasts only for the short duration of what seems like an insignificant part of my life. And in between it all, I'm consumed by this war. The war within.