Timeless Reaper In Burgundy

There once was this damsel, not quite in distress but grumpy nonetheless. Reaping the harvests of man’s illusions and learnings.
She was not a person I’d say, but a colorful manifestation, a spirit if you will, of our everyday hopes and dilemmas.

She was made up of fibers from the fabrics of nihilistic struggle, deeper consciousness, societal confinement and free will accumulated over centuries of human journey to find the elusive meaning of existence and the universe.

Her saccharine smile was made up of the combined harvest of the thinkers and people who found purpose in raging against entropy, the mundane, the obvious.
Her smile could light up all of the streets of Paris in the 1930s as Sartre and Simone wrote love letters to each other that weren’t sealed with kisses or promises for the future, yet were a memoir of a 50-year-long intellectual and soulful bond that was even stronger than the thoughts and books they left us with.

A smile that only grew wider in the 1950s as the beat generation reveled in jazz and danced over the beats of their beating heart and amorphously beautiful minds. Leaving her with poignant poetry and questions that would make us all sad and inspired.
The smile hasn’t been the same since, nor have the people.

Her hair was made of rhythmic tensions that swayed in the 60s and 70s when music and drugs gave way to a generation that believed that music is the answer to everything, and within good reason.

The opium and pot infused nights gave way to a morning breath that reeked of stale cigarettes inscribed with words  that still haunt her at ‘Hippie joints’ and ‘Classic Friday Wednesday Nights’.

But there was some sort of dissonance still, guitars strummed for a cause, words written for ‘redemption’? A call to set us free. Save us from what, from who? And why at all?
We are the keepers of constellations and dreams. Creative and stubborn, fertile and unforgiving. Belonging to something but who?

People are still blinded by their own prejudice, foresight, and fear. Centuries have passed, and it will continue, but the answers still hide in the corners we often forget to look into.
How ridiculous of a person to rely on the opposite sex to give them what they must give to themselves. Love. Hope. Security. Reassurance. Confidence. Passion.

The fire once created by man to guide him through darkness has now become so bright, that he cannot see through the drudgery and the routine as he tap dances towards the magnetic torpedo of virtual reality.

With nose now buried deep into his mobile device, and eyes glued to ‘snack-able content’, the eyes and mind are bound to suffer myopia.

She now wears shades so people can’t see the cataract of society making a home in her vision. She is still hopeful though.

She may have turned her back, but only to look at the other side, the alternate perspective. The cordoned path.

She looked at her watch and realized something she had never noticed before. Time doesn’t matter when one is alone. You are not bound by reason, purpose, or pace when time isn’t standing in your way.

We have been too busy living our life by the time, distance formula.
Move at ‘X’ speed in life in ‘Y’ number of years to reach ‘Z’point of success! Doesn’t that sound utterly ridiculous and tragic to you? Well, it did to her.

So she started walking. Her steps didn’t need to match with another or the world or its time.

If your passion is time bound, you need to talk. To no one but yourself and ask what’s time gotta do with it?

She seemed to be quite pleased with her epiphany but questions adroitly crept their way into her flow. A sort of paradox.
“Am I alone in this? Will I ever be happy? Won’t I need someone to be alone with?
The wait for the answer was going to be infinitely long, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s was playing in the waiting room. So she found the cosmic truth but of course.
“You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing”, yet you’re terrified that somebody’s going to shove you in a cage. Well, darling, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

The answer is yet to come her way, but what did was a gentle giant, her little wet-nosed validation that answers will come in time if only we give up time.
She called him Romeo, a dog. Now the thing with dogs is that they have absolutely no sense of time.

They arrive as puppies, live as puppies, and die as puppies. They can’t tell whether you were gone for 5 minutes or 5 hours. They miss you all the same. They are happy because they live.

They don’t ask ‘What are you thinking?’ every 5 minutes while you sit aimlessly by the window and sip your morning cuppa.

They follow a passion, or in their case, a squirrel or their tail. They get tired, they stop, they start chasing again. With the same enthusiasm. They don’t seek any grand badge of appreciation or liberation. It’s what makes them happy. Time is money to us but nothing to them.

So the answers will never be found because the chase must never end, for what else is there. There’s one thing though, if time is money to you, you may take a loan but it may just never be enough.
So just step out of the clockwork and give yourself a break, and step right back if you please.
There are no right answers. Only the right ones for you.
Be with someone you can be alone with. Until then, be alone, not lonely.
P.S.- Get yourself a pet. 😀

I am Wearing:

Sunglasses by Blur Store
Choker by Koovs
Off-Shoulder Dress by Spring Break
Footwear by Ajio
Watch by Roadster

Big shout-out and bear hugs to my main girls for helping me out with this one:
Part-time photographer and full-time loving Bhabhi- Neetu Pankaj Singh
The outdoorsy maven on Editing Duties- Rashi Kalra:* (Must follow her blog RIGHT NOW at Outdoorsy)