If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day 'til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you.
With this song of his, Jim Croce had sung about my heart's deepest desires. And my heart, it is stupid. I have no control over it, no control over what it wants. And So, I took it out of its leash a long time ago. Like a spoiled brat with a wealthy father, now it does whatever it wants to.
It's not like I am entirely unaware of what it wants. That would be too superficial of a statement spoken out loud. I just don't understand what it wants from time to time. Like, right now, it wants to visit a place, a street full of red buses in possibly the most polluted city in the world, a city I hate with my guts. But still, it wants to do it. To get what it wants, it's diluting my emotions with a sense of longing. It's doing that, so in search of something lost, which I don't even know what is, I go on a wild sheep chase.
The thought of it is absurd. The buses it wants to see have nothing special about them. Rusty, old looking double-decker vehicles with paints coming off of here and there. These buses being on the road ten hours a day, in the intense amount of dust in the air and never being washed properly, the window panes once clear like ice are now opaque. Nothing is visible through them. Maybe that's why I had chosen these buses as the perfect place to make out. You're right there With a girl in a bustling street, letting your hands loose, and yet people passing by can see nothing at all.
I have taken a few of them there, actually, the girls, I mean. Restaurants with spaces to do such funky stuff are costly, and I'm broke. Maybe a bit cheap, too, as I will never agree to a severe dent in my wallet just for a few kisses, hence parked buses. Perhaps that is what it wants to see. Graveyard of dead memories of the past and lost bleak emotions, yet that is all it wants.
Another dilemma about all this is even if I go there, my heart will not find the satisfaction it seeks. It never does. Just to fend off its delusions, I've done similar things before and gone to places I have memories with. A jhalmuri stand my sister and I used to stop and eat from three days a week while coming back from school. The stand is not there anymore as the vendor died a few years ago, and memories of it are lost too as my sister isn't here anymore. Funny enough, the school too isn't there anymore.
Then there was this playground where I used to play with my friends. Now there remains only a tall residential building. Ironically, none of my friends from that time lives in this neighbourhood anymore. Yet my masochist heart's extreme reminiscing took me there only to stand in front of it for an hour, smoke one out and come back.
I am like a bee, perhaps. Bees have an internal clock they say, as those most precious insects can actually tell time. If they are conditioned and fed sugar water, nectar or even honey at a particular hour of the day a few times, they start going out to find that source every day on the clock. Maybe my sugar water is finding internal peace, a journey of self-discovery.
The buses have nothing special about them, except perhaps my memory about the one who got away. On a hazy afternoon, I took her there. She kept smiling all the while we talked, and never even for once it had faded. And when our silly talks had ended, I had looked deep into her crimson red eyes just to see what secrets they kept. I found nothing except for a momentary and fleeting allure of peace. Maybe that's what my heart seeks.
I'll take you there someday, my stupid heart, soon perhaps. Look for yourself and see if you can find it. Maybe then we both will be at peace.
