The first feeling that came rushing right after I woke up this morning was confusion. The state of half sleep and half wakefulness made me question the concept of the dream this mind decided to produce during the fallen night. It was still lingering silently at the back of my mind, mocking me in the process because no matter how hard I tried, the threat to get a clear vision of the broken dream had already been snapped out of my grasp. But the remaining trace of that blurry vision was still strong enough to word out, What the hell did I just watch?
The day also started with uncertainty because even though I knew I would go out and meet with people, the concept of exact location and time was still unknown to me. But I thought, hey it could be a new adventure and boy was I right.
When the call came and I rushed out of the house, I was not prepared to face the trace of a past that I, without a second thought left behind. And in all these years, didn’t even think of reminiscing once. To me, It was a place I desperately wanted to leave, maybe even forget the memory of its existence, so missing it was never an option. But sadly the reality was far more cruel than that.
The stroke of time doesn’t leave anything out of its grasp, just like it didn’t leave the roads I used to walk on, the twists and turns I used to take to get back home, the shop where I used to buy my favorite chips, the veranda I chose to see the sky once in every week, the playground I used to play badminton.
Everything got a tad bit older with age or replaced by a new look, new people with the same old faces. Some places didn’t survive the tide of time and now the people who came after would never know what it was like, living in these same places before the changes of time.
They won’t know about the old small shop that used to be right around the corner of the only bluish house, where an old man used to sell handmade ice creams. They won’t know about the big fast food shop that once used to be a playground where most kids of the area used to come after school. They won’t know about the narrow secret path with which you could cut down a 15 minutes road into 5. They won’t know about the caged free verandas once possessed by that bluish house whose shades has now turned from vibrant to dusty, from where in the middle of the night you could see the whole city in silence, without having your privacy invaded, because no building was tall enough to block the view. How its current worn out sadder shade of blue and black glasses covered caged verandas used to be so vibrant and free.
They would never know about those old things, just like I don’t about the new. The changes came with a slap of reality and made me realize how much time has gone. The girl that used to walk on those forgotten and destroyed roads has been lost in the depth of blurriness a long time ago and now the ever so familiar places with its ocean full of unfamiliarity did nothing but invoke a longing I didn’t know was there to feel.
The tracing of past that no longer matches with reality, those faded memories that couldn’t manage to find a single thread of comparison made me wonder, was I really here at all? But then those places also started to question back saying, Were you really here at all?