Haze #DigitalAMAWithRoshan

Haze

Or maybe they're not at all.

Maybe my tizzy, my spinning sensations, my tumbling down tumultuous terrains was merely a sign that things were going wrong. Very wrong. But I didn't want to stop- we rarely do, do we- so I let gravity take me.

I let the gravel, the mud, the stones and the rocks scrape my knees and bruise my bones, and let it engulf my mouth and strangulate my breath.

I loved every minute of it.

The signs began to grow hazy and distant. They never vanished, somehow. They never completely exploded into absolute oblivion, however far they faded. The little lights that glowed next to them began to grow dimmer, people and friends and family I should've kept close and loved even closer- and some of these did blink out. Fading, fading, fading and POP! Out.

Forever.

Won't light up again.

But they never vanished.

My peanut self uncurled itself from its fetal futility and emerged as a big hulking hunk supercharged with the population's average IQ (you can do much worse in the world we live in now) and armed with education and culture and well, pretty much what most people with a middle-class Hindu upbringing are armed with these days, and thrust out into the world.

Into a world not nearly as intimidating as it had been made out to be.

Sure, wars were being fought, leaders were comparing sizes, children in burqas were dying, oil was being sucked dry, machine guns were being rattled into existence at the same pace as their RPM- but I was pretty safe. So the world seemed pretty easy and pretty boring. Not much to do, not much to improve, not much to shake up in the stable paradigm my life was existing in.

So I sought to elevate things. My mind was dull and bored.

I had money, you see, I had enough money to throw at the signs which began to swell larger and larger as I gleefully ran down streets which should, at most, be sauntered on. Strolled. Roamed in. But never full-fledged all-stops-out blazed down. Because you're too fast to see the flames, hell, you're having way too much fun breathing the fumes to even bother with the fire- and then suddenly you are ramming into a wall of thorns and bushes and threshes.

And everything's hurting and everything's pricking and blood is being plucked from your flesh and left on indifferent sticks of wood and leaves are stained with your spit and you're too fast to stop and you hope that if you run fast enough you'll escape out the other side but there is no other side, at least not now, not ever maybe and you're tumbling and falling and still making your way through and it all hurts, but you have to go on now because you can't go back, fire was following you, and so were the signs (simple, subtle, sedentary, solar-bright) but now they're too damn out of reach...