Ah, what a week it has been! To be more precise, a week and a half. Travelled like a few hundred miles, fished a shit tonne and read a lot. Did almost all of which I do usually to trigger an adrenaline/dopamine rush and more! Yet I am not happy. Something profound inside has been bothering me a lot ever since I came back. It was a necessary trip, more so a health retreat which should've cleaned up my soul as it was supposed to, it had to, yet I feel a sharp and pointy taint deep inside which no matter how much I rub at is seemingly not going away!
It had started with one simple and seemingly non-violent discourse which turned awry a little too quick. For quite some time, on social media sites, I have been seeing my peers post their own clicks of the Milkyway, our galaxy which we live in. But this 22-year-old me has never even seen the silhouette of it with my own eyes. And even for longer than that, I had thought the images to be a camera trick which only can be seen with high exposures or long shutter speeds. Yet all of my friends have confirmed that they have seen it at least once where I haven't ever. Oh, what a shame! There I was, a self-proclaimed nature lover who yearns to see the northern lights, the aurora of the Arctic and the Bering sea yet I didn't even know that Milkyway galaxy was perceivable with naked human eyes!
This resulted in a slow build-up of rage towards my own self which a few nights ago burst out in the form of unrelated causation of my own misfortune. A friend of mine after finishing his tea threw the empty plastic cup on the street. And that triggered me to relate him loitering to light pollution to how I have never been able to see the Milkyway. This friend of mine is a bit on the calmer side! I have only seen him getting angry only a few times, and that evening, my nonsensical blabbers pushed him to the point of almost punching my face into a pizza dough. And then he reacted in the most unexpected way possible. Grabbed me by my wrist and took me on a ride to his parent's farmhouse in the countryside to show me the Akashganga.
And then I saw it. All of the secrets of the universe was revealed in front of me. My emotions coursing through my neurons at that moment could only be comparable to a newborn seeing the daylight for the first time ever. I had never thought that something so natural, so universal could be this humbling. From the south-west horizon, in a shade of sepia mixed with charcoal black, a long thick cloud jittering with fireflies of infinitesimal quantities hanged over in front of me. Laying down on the soft grass at half-past midnight, away from all the noise procured by the metro exodus of globalization, I felt like tiny ants looking at a mammoth, whispering to each other in a wondrous zeal, is this what God looks like?
It was supposed to be only a night trip. But my friends mum insisted on me staying there for a few days. So that I could taste Pabda fish curry! So it seemed, a grand trip was in the making!
Fished for three days straight! And at nights with multiple packs of cigarettes, only a simple shawl, I went out to see the universe in all of its glory. As soon as I sat on the grass of that riverbank, time seemed to have stopped and lost all of its meaning, its virtuoso! Only and only then, I was truly alone, basking on the rays falling from heaven, becoming a part of eternity which was not that long as it seems! for a moment there, I wanted to photograph it with my puny gears! And then I change my mind. Because * extraordinary things do not ask for attention*. My mentor might say I have stolen his words:P to that I say, fate had thrown me in front of similar pleasures to which he too has been a victim of.
While returning to my humble abode, my mind went aloof at every chance it got! Trying to make sense of how the world around me which was so bland only couple of days ago became even bleaker. The thought of being unable to perceive such marvelous seductive state of the universe again and again, as it had to be secluded and only to be seen on special occasions made me more depressed. I mean, I am in no way a zealot of natural living. I too am guilty of reaping the fruit of every privilege modernization has to offer. But the curtain that had been drawn apart that night can never be closed again. If I may, I might go as far as to say we are living in a time when the human civilization might have peaked in every way possible. But at what cost? Shrouded in fantasy, we are living in a clouded reality. A bubble of our misfortune. When it pops, who knows the extent of devastation it might cost. Yet humanity keeps spreading towards a future which is every bit as unsure as it was for the Cro-Magnons. So then, what is the point of all this, eh!
