Choose Not Part 5. Concluded

“What are you seeking? Do you really know?”

He had asked once,and the answer brought me face to face

With the truth of all my being.

What did I seek all along 

Like the soul that seeks the God within?

He knew that and that was why his question was as lucid

And simple as was his unseen being.

The anguish of alienation spoke in him

Like the words of God’s loneliness faced with a human

Who cannot read the signs

Of that which is standing to confront him,

As candid as the sky.

In retrospect, I hear the anguish;

I hear the desperation to reach

The sound of a human speech.

I see the eyes which I have never seen,

Piercing the darkness of my soul,

Piercing the wind which carried his word and made me see what lay concealed

Behind the veil that was hiding him.

He wore no mask; it was a veil that covered him.

It was a veil, half revealing the hope of a meeting

And half concealing the wounds within

Which he had wrapped in a bandage of age-long suffering

That had turned him into a stone.

“When our most precious moments are fading out fast

How can I linger in the utilities

And stop myself from telling you

The essential truth, the truth that lies within you and me?”

Those were the words of the swan-song he was singing to me-

The song that I in fear refused to hear.

Now every image that he projected for me

Comes back in its full colours,

Not a shade is lost,

Not a colour has faded out

And not a word is lost.

He was my creation and I in turn was created by him

In the image I had known of myself

In my idyllic past of long ago.

I had torn it into shreds long ago.

He came and picked up the fragments shred by shred

And put them back in place where they belonged

And an image was formed of unparalleled beauty.

He was my spirit which I had left behind

In disgust and distress and estrangement.

He was my ascetic soul come back to me, urging me to take courage

And recognize him, and utter the words

Which he longed to hear from me-

“You are that Light which I was seeking.”

He waited for me to utter those words without the fear of scrutiny.

He knew my quest and the answer too;

He knew my fears and doubts.

In turn, he was afraid that I might retract from the path

Without even setting a foot on it.

“You must loathe everything that comes between you and your answers”,

He had said once to me.

“Seize the answers in full awareness, for they can be taken,” he said.

“But if you don’t own them you will die; you will die without your answers;

And dying without owning what is yours is no good for a living soul,” said he.

How was I to know what vibrated behind his words

In the absence of his living voice and its living tone?

The need to get across to me over the oceans of distance and time

Was gnawing at his heart

And I was as dense as a stone.

He had thrown the keys across to me over an abyss with a hope

That I might catch them right and reach him where he might be.

But when I reached the house there was neither a gate nor a door, simply broken walls.

There was no door to open;

Everywhere was an endless desert.

Actually, I could see that he had slammed the door shut

When he had stepped out, but on a second thought,

He came back and threw it wide open, since the broken walls had nothing to hide.

Inside were the empty spaces and vacant walls staring down.

He had deleted all history and  the signs saying that he lived there,

The signs of his presence and all that spoke of him

Had vanished out of sight.

He had destroyed the house

Leaving nothing for me to fear in the vacuum he had left behind.

There was nothing to fear

Because nothing was there to choose.