I read and I live...

How do you satiate hungry eyes searching to quench a thirst?

How does one fill a void when one does not know what is needed for its redemption?

Such is life that it necessitates the delving into an escape route-to mingle into mindless relations derived out of so-called friendships or love, to drift into the unrealistic madness of cinema or devour the coming to life of words in books.

Reading, yes, I admit-I miss you. Let me confess today how I went wanton by turning to the blogosphere single-mindedly that it would make up for my erstwhile fixation of holding an actual book running into pages in my clasp. I haven’t returned to embrace you in many-a-years now. Would that explain my tossing restlessly in bed some days?

Should I blame the gradually reclining attention span or the steadily ebbing drama in my own life? A one page blog post reading of someone I admire, has been serving as a capsule perhaps to screen the symptoms though provides no cure. Or the witty one-liners on twitter that impress me no end perhaps ignite enough to ignore the larger picture! It gives me the hallucination of having “read”. Reading thus now doles out to fill some empty specks of my mind with a momentary realization of having travelled to some far-off domain, lived a reckless or meticulous life and sauntered back to my reality.

Reading is still serving me although I look not at it with the same eye.

I get magnetically pulled to any iota I see of the Victorian Ages or Romanticism symbolized by those peacefully resting in their graves now-any contemporary voices strong enough to stand at par with the Byrons, Wordsworths and Keats. Imagine the exquisiteness of ageless expressions like wandering lonely as a cloud or walking in beauty....

For such was the web they spun that getting entangled was the mind’s way of showing what a true orgasm is to the rest of the body. Such were the unadulterated emotions and expressions, as though the writers stood blind to all voices around and were enslaved to the voices in their heads.

Picking up classics or true Literature can at times have a therapeutic effect (just as much as a regular pacey best-seller). You walk down the wondering lane-what constitutes such a frame that manages to give you lines holding the grain of the ultimate truth, hand-picked from a solitary life but withstanding the test of times to reach the eternity? What immortal fountains they create and how? What triggers the unstoppable breeze that cools even the most burning of surfaces with their tender flap? Goes to prove that you can often create magic without movement or sound-magic by the gentle tap of your fingers and mind!

I read and I lived....in the days gone by when I would curl up on a sofa in a corner with a book. An illicit relation perhaps for I cared a damn how anyone looked at us-my transfixed gaze, my coy smiles, the scrunching of anxious eyes, the pleasure of reading love being made on page-me and my book, palming each other and then looking at the walls for a while, in reflection of letting sink in what the books showed me. I would move my body rarely and only when it fringed on getting numb while the mind travelled in frenzy and sometimes even that would be stationary, performing the arduous task of creating mind pictures for me-moving, pulsating images or just giving me the goose bumps with vividness painted there.

Did I become the protagonist in all I read? Yes, I experienced the greed for money, the lust for sex, the spine chilling edging in a mystery, the ache of soul for love, the crushing of entrails by a heart break, the malicious scheming for murder, the infinite search for truth. Did I come out unscarred from all I read? No, remnants of these got transfixed to me like second skin, shaping my mind, preferences and beliefs. They unwittingly went and formed a layer in my subconscious that made me think, opine and pine.

I carried the weight of whom I read for a while till fresh love began to reverberate within and another pristine crispness came between my nimble fingers, too eager to grasp the new.

Yes, Mark Twain, I agree with you when you say, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." But perhaps reading became too taxing for me-the way I wear my heart on my sleeves, I found it difficult to stop it from becoming a bookmark trapped permanently within some sheets of a book closed and done with. The pain of returning to a life less ordinary began to be weighed against the pleasure of dipping into ecstasy. Or perhaps I have just become too lazy using the garbs of responsibilities to disguise the change in me, looking for books in faces of people? I need to find myself again and I need to find a book that can find me? -A voice that sounds like the voices in my head and calms them down. 

P.S. Sorry a severe writer's block in progress here...hopefully would find my funny bone soon!