For want of a hold...

The land is craggly. The twisty swirls of the dunes make you want to travel on them. But tempting as they are, you know their true story. You know how they shiver like fireflies and will quench themselves on a desirous touch. They are traitorous. They make you want to want them. They test you. They only want to see your eyes when you step on them. They want to see the surprise in your eyes, better yet, they want to feel the drop of your heart when you step on them and they morph into vortexes.

You see, each dune is a vortex of its own opening up to worlds unknown. Yet you know that each of these worlds is wrapped in candy paper for lure and what is inside is this shaky mass of nothingness that leeches at the warmth in your heart. Whatever warmth is still left after it has turned cold on seeing the façade falter.

You know this because you have dreamt them. But as prophecies, you cannot escape them. You may think you will if you do this and that, but a sight of those living crawly dunes and your heart is stolen. Your hear the sibilant hisses as the sand creeps under your closed eyes but because you can stop a sword cut in your dreams, you think you can stop the sands by waking up. But what if you wake up to a world where matter is sand? Where the very air is sandy? Where there is no concept of oxygen, of optimism, of hope? Where all that is there is the susurration that erodes the base of your soul and drinks from your marrow of faith?

So you want to believe but believe me, belief is overrated. Everyone wants to believe because we are lazy to find out if what we believe can be touched or smelt or felt between the thumb and index finger. You think, you will believe and this selfless act will inspire the universe to act as per your belief. But you see, this is such a selfish belief and really, how then can it happen?

I am very question-y today. I am often like this. I do not want to be like this. But you see, those sands, those fang-y colourful sands continue to shift under my feet, they caress my in-step and I hold on to the quaint trills of my fading sanity but they are relentless, they probe, they pinch, they cajole, they whisper how they want me and need me in their world of lone sands and I feel my hold slip even though I think I am in my dream and even if the hold slips, so what, I will wake up. I will wake up and see that it was all a dream but then, there is that little question that reverberates across my eardrum – which part is the dream: the waking or the sleeping and the incessant push and pull of the answer is all that I can slowly hear as I devolve into a million little sands, slowly and sandfully…