A Game of Truth & Life

The last quarter of the year dawns. It’s a Sunday afternoon and the overcast sky seems like a welcome relief from the hot weather. Noise from the main road does not allow a moment of peace. He sits with his laptop, staring out of the huge stained glass windows, a liberating song playing on loop in his ears, and thinking.

Thinking. He has had a lot of time to do just this over the past month. He feels he has been living in a make-believe world for a long while now. It’s a bubble that he unintentionally has created for himself. Secure and happy, but with a lie. He doesn’t want to be engulfed in the daily grind for survival. He doesn’t want to get lost in the crowd. He still searches for his true calling.
 
Nature playing a game of conflicts and contrasts at Marine Drive, Mumbai
He thinks about the one month that he has spent in the new city and the choices he has made. He thinks about the disconnected chain of events over the last week that has led him to his current state of mind. ‘It’s not something new’, he thinks, ‘I am used to it’. Or perhaps, he is too used to camouflaging it.
He thinks about the way he has lead his life for the past many years and how he can change it with a plethora of options that he has for this new beginning, if only he takes the right plunge at the right time in this new city.

What is the one thing that you want for yourself right now?’ he had asked everyone in the truth-and-dare game the other night. The question had come back to him and although he had known the exact answer for a long time now, he didn’t want to say it out loud. No preconceptions. No fears. No random shit. He simply didn’t want to say it. ‘I am waiting for someone to understand the answer to this without me explicitly saying it,’ he told himself.

It was always this. It had always been this. The reason for his adventures. The reason for his escapes. The reason for his workaholic attitude. The reason for his discontentment even after being highly acclaimed for whatever he did. There was one constant missing thing throughout. One thing which he had intentionally kept out of his bubble. One thing he always evaded when confronted with. One thing he didn’t give as much importance as he probably should have. And that’s the way how he is now defined for people.

The ringing of his phone brings him back and he swiftly silences it. He doesn’t feel like speaking to anyone, least of all with people he is not connected to at the level his thoughts are racing right now. He doesn’t want his thought process to take a break, not now, no.

He struggles to push the right keys on the keyboard. For some reason, even writing, the one thing that almost always liberates his brain from unfathomable thoughts, doesn’t seem to be working. While trying to see the art in it, he fails to catch the thought right. While expressing his thoughts openly, he carefully chooses words to not disclose it. And all of it just becomes His Story- a collection of random thoughts, perhaps none making sense. 

Perhaps he is stupid. An idiot who just loves to complicate things for himself. Perhaps it is just a big conflict in his head.


Perhaps all that is missing, all that is required to simply open him up, is the answer to that question. The one thing that he wants for himself. The answer is too simple. He just won’t say it out loud.

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