Cold Comfort

Day before yesterday I was sleeping in my room and had a terrible headache. I was lying in my cold hard bed and suddenly I had this feeling that my life is haunted.

The cold comfort of a hard bed is something I have never complained of. As a matter of fact I have always been proud of my spartan lifestyle ... and the pretension of being strong ... that I kind of do not need anyone.

That's why that nights experience is all the more strange.

Suddenly i felt all the books in the cupboards they are ghosts ... old ladies who have come out of their graves and they are trying to entice me to embrace them.

They were hauntingly beautiful and evade me whenever I got too close...like a shadow which never leaves you but which you can never catch. Then there was this voice inside me warning me of their true nature...a premonition ... that if and when I manage to touch them, I would feel a cold wooden sensation ...empty ... a void perhaps and suddenly I was very afraid. As if I have been chasing a mirage all through out.

I started wondering if they have not enticed me and kept me captive and will suck my youth out of me and leave me high and dry once I loose my strength and vigour.

I was afraid and miserable and I wanted a human touch badly.

In life there are these moments and ultimately that's all probably there is to it. I cannot explain ... I envy those who can ...The whispers of someone who is talking to you thinking you are asleep, your finger touches a body and you realise its been expecting your touch and through some magic manages to pass the sensation to you, the taste of saliva mixed with tears, the gasping for breath when you are trying to kill each other, the bitter sweet smell of armpit moist with sweat, a quite content body curling up next to yours secure and you feel the rhythm of another heart next to yours

Oh these are the moments when I know I can manage to defy my mortality ... I can laugh at the face of death ... mock it... thump my chest and burst out laughing.

And there I was in my cold hard bed ... I know when I started it was alright ... I had a glimpse of something pure, perfect, immaculate, infalliable but then I guess I lost the picture ...was trying to prove a point ... got drunk with my own ability ... then chasing glory ... ambition ... started chasing mirages.

I want it back ... the purity of innocence.