“No…. no I am unable to do this. I can’t.”
“But why?”
“I just can’t… I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“But you do know if you don’t do this, you’ll end up feeling sad and regretful, right?”
“Maybe. Okay, yeah I probably will. But I can suppress it and move on. There are plenty of things in life to divert myself to. This isn’t the 90s anymore. Things move fast. Concentration span only lasts couple of minutes. It won’t take time to move to something else.”
“This makes no sense you know?! You’re moulding pieces to make a piece of perfection. You get all the stuff you need and you start with it. Then suddenly you stop in between and never come back. You just let it be till it rots and you just stop caring.
I don’t think you should be doing that today. Just give it a try. Don’t commit another murder of a beautiful thing.”
“No, it’s just too complicated. I don’t get it and I don’t wish to do injustice to it. Do you understand?”
“No, I absolutely don’t get anything you’re saying! It all seems like some bullcrap excuse a child would make to skip the school.”
“I don’t know how to properly explain this. Maybe…maybe, I’m not in that capacity today. You see, it happens on special days…days when I don’t care about anything else… days when there’s something so effervescent that it has to come out. These are days when my mind, or all the earthly things I’m bound to can’t stop me from doing it. These are days when time stops to matter. The world stops to matter to me. That is when I’m able to execute something like this.”
“Is this world you’re talking about too big right now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is it too big to suppress?”
“Yes it is, probably.”
“Your imagination is bigger than this world. How do you suppress that so easily?”
“I don’t know….”
“Give it a try. Fire a shot in the air. No one will see it. No one will listen. I assure you. We’re not in the 90s as you said. No one is there to see what you do. Everyone’s busy.”
“Okay… I’ll try once.
On a bright sunny day, as the rays of warmth lit up the sweat on his forehead, he continued peddling his bike on an unknown road, filled with man-made lights and poles and empty chips packs, but devoid of any humans at this hour.
No…no I can’t. It’s not my feat. I can’t describe things beautifully. I just made up stuff…which I could. It’s not the original thing. It’s not THAT anymore. And I don’t think I can describe THAT.”
“I get it. There was no sunny day in it. There were no rays of sun reflecting his sweatdrops. But he was there. What did he do? Scratch off all the beauty parts. We’ll do without them. Scratch off all the nature and man-made scenery around. Sometimes, all the scenery you need is inside yourself.
Now tell me, who was he and what did he do?“
“He was a kid. A teenager….
He was cycling…“
“Good… That’s good. Go on. What did he do? Or why was he cycling?“
“He took out his bike that day and kept peddling. He kept taking turns at every turn he had no clue of. He tried entering streets he had not seen before…“
“Hmmm…and why did he do so?“
“His aim was to get lost. He kept peddling till he reached a road from where he had no clue how to get back. He stopped when there had been enough turns, and complications in the route to memorize it completely.“
“You’re doing fine without the descriptions of the warmth of the sun.. Go ahead and explain now – Why did he do so?“
“Then, He put a stand on his bike and sat on the footpath. He closed his eyes and took a fresh breath of air in. He wanted to see if this place felt any different…if this place smelled any different. It did. It was a new place. A NEW smell! Something no one would know back in his village.
But people woke up sooner at this place. In a few minutes, ten twenty humans were in the scene.
This is when he murmured to his imaginary friend – his bike :
‘Do you think anything new, anything original is nothing original really?’
His bike, Govi, replied, ‘Why would you think so?’
‘I came up peddling to an unknown road, and felt it was new – it was original. This road became unknown because I lost my route. It became too much to comprehend. Is it the same that people just brew up things out of their imagination which are these lost roads that feel and smell like new, but are not really any new?
Like, Govi, what if everything exists and the number is just too big for us to comprehend? What if there are just a few million or trillion roads we’ve not yet discovered. What if every neuron in everyone’s brain has access to all these roads – all these ideas, inventions, discoveries – but there are only a very few we ever go to?
What if we’ve not evolved more just because we can not comprehend the amount of paths, routes and roads out there?’
‘It’s all a good big possibility. Maybe all you said is true. Maybe it is one of the roads, to explore this possibility for humans. Maybe it’s just something random you brewed up.’
‘Is there anything really random we can brew up? I think everything we create or think is just a mix of few things we’ve seen or heard before. In which case it is not random anymore. Nothing is random. Nothing is new. Nothing is original, Or creative. It’s just that we can’t trace back the formula of the final product because we’ve mixed so many things that we lost the track of it. It’s just the limitation of our computation, maybe.’
Then they sat there…looking at the never ending and seemingly incomprehensible beach waves across the road. The two sat there lost on a road in their head, and lost on a road in their life, happily touring a chain of possibilities.“
“Thank you! That’s it. That was all of it. See? You did it. Thank you. I am free now.
I finally get to go from your inside to your outside. I’m not an image anymore. I’m a story. A thought. A piece of text out there in the real world. A necklace of words.
And See? Nothing has happened. Nobody’s killing you for this. No one’s criticising you.
This didn’t need all the make-up this world has. Maybe another writer would have described the roads, the bike and everything much more in detail. But sometimes, you don’t need to be fastidious about the image. It just works like that all fine. Not knowing something actually creates it in our world, after all. Missing pieces would form an image themselves for the reader.“
“I feel better too. About you taking a form. Maybe the next time I have an image – a thought in my head, I won’t hide under the bed and leave it to rot again.“
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