Shorts 5

While crowdsourcing feels good, at times one has to satisfy one's needs to write on a particular topic. To stay true to the idea of crowdsourced cues, however, I vowed that one of the three next shorts have to be from a cue-word. Hence, the first cue-word is sourced, and the other two are mine.

Customarily, I hereby introduce the contributor of the first cue-word:

Aalok, an allegedly materialistic man with a flair for the dramatic and drily humorous, is my batchmate in CMI and an early friend. A TEDx speaker and national level debater, the Rajkot man loves languages human and formal. He knows his money and literature as well as he does his Automata Theory; and a conversation with him leaves an impression of unconventional intelligence. He is an adviser at the Latex platform Overleaf and, of late, he blogs at VaakChaturyam.

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Eventually

As of now, the hills are farther than they seem. The sky is blurry and purple -- not blue like in your picture. The filthy water below is cracked with moss and trails of ducks, and eventually the sun will light it burning hot.

Eventually, the reworked land will claim its nature; and, one hopes, you will claim yours. Nature, though, is subjective. My nature, for example, is in these very words I write, and the flow of logic that binds me to these bricks.

Eventually, I hope, you will be freer than I am.

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Crystal

You look like a human being, but one that has a trace of elfin blood somewhere in their ancestry. It gives you this pallor, this sense of distance from the sun of this world. Your eyes shine with a light from a mind that is far, far away, roaming in dimensions inaccessible to everyone who crosses your path. Your frame is slight and lost, almost as if it is only half in this plane of reality, and half somewhere else. When you sit in deep concentration, at times, I could swear you fade and glimmer away further into that other plane of existence. And, if I look closely, I think I see this fire that is too far to feel its warmth, and yet close enough to grow blinding as I squint at its distant flames. You eat and walk and read and laugh and play like a human being, but on the less rational of my days, I could swear that you were something else.

Is it on purpose that you act like a mere shadow to an invisible, more complete, self? Is it on purpose that you build this aura of mystique, this unreachability, this half-and-half of intrigue and hopelessness around you that is kind of hot with the general public?

That is what they want, when they want to touch you. They want to see if you are real, see if you can feel anything, see if you can reflect their humanity with acceptable precision. They want to reach through your skin, through what looks like a translucent curtain to a different universe, and touch your corporeal self. They want to know what you will never confirm (perhaps even to yourself!) -- if you, my mad magical friend, are, after all, just human.

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Storm

You never know why she is the way she is, and it isn't worth your time to find out. Hence, she is mad.

You never understand what he says, and it is beneath you to ask him again. Hence, he is proud.

You haven't the slightest idea about someone's history or their inner turmoil, and yet you dismiss every first impression as a storm not worth weathering.

Fighters of your own battles, writers of your own stories, wranglers of your own beasts -- I am one of you, so listen when I say this: my storm is my own, and hence is special; yet, being mine does not make it worth more understanding than another's. If I have braved the tempest, so shall I help another soul, hold another hand, guide another trembling shoulder away from darkness and desperation. In regarding another's struggle equal to my own, I shall bring glory to what, until now, was only a string of skirmishes between me and fate. If you must keep faith in only what is yours, I implore you to do so while believing that someone else might disagree, and that their story is as true as yours, that their storm is as rife as yours, that it twists within them in the most troubled hours, just like yours does.

The storm, my friend, comes to every soul in the middle of their own personal night; and sometimes, the light of one less encumbered can make all the difference. If your day is another's night, O warrior mine, share your light.

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