Mortal

I am something of a sucker for a good daydream. Being a poet and a reader, I guess that comes with the  territory. The long car rides to Delhi filled with the one universe I have collected.  

The books were the building blocks.  

You see, I am a thief of your imaginations. These hands have stolen more spells and worlds and Normal  than there were pages that were held between these fingers. To be constantly lost in the tumult of the  sacred solitude, to dream of escape and leave the home of your skin as your mom and dad talk on without  a care. The dreams never stop.  

I could never bind them either. 

Day turned night. Night turned sunrise. The days are filtered through the lenses of dreams both mine and  thine. Plagues would be mites in the sands of the house already destroyed in the franchises of my mind,  cooking and creating video reels which have left me vacant. To see in the mind's eye almost reality, and  that constant dread of uncertainty holding my hand as I rise. To touch doors after consuming light of the  solar kind and feel the wood and ask myself – 

real  

or  

not real.  

Imagine it growing back the leaflets it lost so long ago. 

We are a generation obsessed with catharsis. To explode and remake is in our star-baked blood. Burials of  ourselves stops with our parents, we said.  

We stuck to it too.  

Only to lose ourselves in the shrapnel and rage that came when the monstrous didn't go down without a  fight. What I would give to escape into daydreams and scream like I do as I rip through the evils that live  in ink and video cameras. Scream like there's no one watching,  

everyone watching is quietly terrified and crushed that how could they have not noticed the mountains  growing inside me until it consumed everything.  

To feel completely empty and light, what a pipe dream!  

I'll settle for empty fields and the midnight sky, safe from critical eyes. I'll settle for crying to songs and  singers who heave their heaviness into the lyrics, killing myself if someone sees me. After that, it  becomes a show.  

Wounds witnessed in the making are not wounds at all, for testimony and pity render them acts of  desperation and falsehood. We are all afraid of being the person who cried wolf in a world where we beat  down doors to demand justice for all. Instead, we rage, we pepper the world with the shrapnel of our  minds, so that others may survive. So that others may live. 

We never knew how to stop loving the world as it should be. But we don't dare to hope any more. How  can we, when our dreams were stolen from us?