Flying Home

This unhappy man, that was me, was always sad and lonely like a dry log in green forest. I woke up one morning, more dejected than the morning before, threw away the flower-embossed curtains off the wide-open window and looked outside, for the first time. I told me, don’t be surprised, you would see what you ought to have long ago. The scarlet sun rose in the flaming horizon that painted the fresco of rhythm on the rippling water of the river. It flowed so near I never knew. I heard the rustle of dry leaves as the cool morning breeze ruffled them. The colors of the dawn sky touched my heart softly like the way the falling petals of flowers embrace the hard cinnamon ground. It was a delightful sensation, a rare one so pervasive, I never felt before. The river murmured, the melody enwrapped my senses, the way drifting clouds fill up the emptiness of the seamless sky. My face was flooded by the sensuous sunshine as I walked to the bank of the river. The first thing that caught my sight was a sand bar emerging from the water in the middle of the river. It parted the water. On its silvery sloping bed, a small tree stood whose outstretched branches danced in the wind and its emerald leaves shined in sunburst splendor. I thought these were expressions of happiness and joy that the lone tree could generate as it grew free in an isolated barren bed of sand bar, it called home. All these enticed me to sail across the coral sea to a distant barren island, and like the tree I let my life take resolute root in desolateness. I lived to see the dawns come with kaleidoscopic colors to cheer me, The sea turned into a sheath of liquid gold in ecstatic sunset hours. But I couldn’t spread my hands up in the beguiling air the way the branches of the forlorn tree did. My eyes didn’t shimmer under sun-soaked azure sky the way the nascent leaves of the lonely tree did. The insular time had made my mind a barren island. seclusion accretes in confines of lonely time… soul seeks shore of bliss My desolate mind wandered in emptiness, floating on the flotilla of the crimson cloud of twilight. It made for me a fascinating painting of formless fantasy on the blank canvas of mind that I kept in the museum of my childhood memory. The remains of un-erased passions I saw reflected from the mirror of juvenile imagination. I felt as if I was following the flight of the flitting butterflies. Perched on their latticed wings I drifted on the cascade of the whistling wind to the flamboyance of the rainbow arch. There, away from the shroud of dismayed mist, I discovered the beauty of life that led me to believe that nothing could stop me from being a bird. I then shape-shifted, spread the wings wide, and soared high in moments of reflections in the sky of reverie. I realized time had come to take my entrapped anguished mind beyond the halcyon horizon to the fathomless realm of infinite freedom, saturated with the aura of timeless bliss. I could then envision I could fly home, metamorphosed. in twilight glimmer bird flies blithe on homeward gale… the lost nest in sight