Ashes

"The rendition of intuition, intuition being an abstract personification of sublime simultaneous symphonies playing incoherently and incessantly in our neurons, can be catastrophic; especially because of its vivid and varied inconsistencies, mis-interpretations. But, I can bravely embody it or them, before you. When I write to you, I don't need to be politically correct, I just need to be grammatically correct. When I do something, I don't need to be politically correct, I just need to be conscientiously correct. I don't have to, or I won't say, you complete me. You don't, because I am a nonentity. How can you complete something that doesn't exist? But, my physical absence is the testament for my esoteric and intangible presence in you." - wrote Sean to Penny.

   You are the rock,

Resolute, intrepid;

Yes, maybe.

I am the water,

Irresolute, trepid;

Yes, maybe

You can shield yourself from me; contest, will you,

You can withstand me, you think?

I’ll not flow over you, but I’ll get inside you;

Not your body I’ll devour but your soul I will drink.

You must be wondering, why this thirst.

Oh, for me...No, I am thirst.

You envisage, what’s the body and the soul, severed

They are mute, dysfunctional debris, when not allied.

Ah, I am hysterical, euphoric, ecstatic, enraptured-

After I am done with your soul, I’ll break you from the inside.

You are no god, then why deicide?

I am the one, I decide.

Had you mistaken me for a friend?

Know me better, I am a fiend.

That old house I long for,

Not house, that was home.

The garden, the greenhouse and the orchids.

This new house I do not abhor,

This house too, is home.

No garden, no greenhouse and no orchid.

And the dark blue walls that surround me, seem a tad turbid.

Or maybe they are not, maybe I am beseeching a mirage,

My mind is dis-painting the walls, to make a new collage.

Penny sauntered in the garden, with an air of nonchalance and uninhibited carelessness; cloaked in pleasant perspiration, which was being unhurriedly unveiled and consumed by the calm, cool and erotic breeze. Her face, so beautiful, so immaculately white – some of the veins around her forehead were partly visible; the veins carried a colour of dull green – portraying congruence with the green but contrast with the bright green that was all around. She walked towards the greenhouse, where the orchids resided.

The grass blades danced a little;

To the air?

The earth was the drumhead,

And her feet were the drumsticks.

And it seemed that the grass moved,

With the vibration-

When she played the drum,

Paradisaically.

Penny struggled with the pile of obtrusive materials she was carrying all at once, with an obvious intention of incarcerating them, or better incinerating them. Those were reprehensible, jejune and gratuitous entities emulsified in vitriolic flavours of obscure reminiscence that served as tools for strident infliction of affliction. They better be obliterated than ominously perpetuated. Penny dragged her feet on the cold floor. She reached the barren backyard of her house, where she dumped the junk in the waste bin.

Penny went back into the house, and walked towards the kitchen. Maybe she had forgotten something.

“You know, Penny, we could probably travel in time if we could travel at the speed of light. It’s hypothetical though, but the thought itself amuses me. I envy the quantum particles; they can travel at speeds comparable to the speed of light. Maybe, they can time travel”, conjectured Sean.

The officinal stench of the place hit Penny’s nostrils. After, a brief shake of neurotic nausea, followed by a rapid recuperation triggered by a defense mechanism of adroitly evading any manifestation of or any proclivity for an autocratic impotence of the perceptive or cognitive faculties, she entered the blood donation camp. People, on beds, squeezing sponge balls; needles stuck to their arms, drawing blood from the median cubital veins; the blood bags getting filled gradually – her sight revealed. She was just accompanying her friends, she could not donate blood; she was anaemic.

Sean : “Time when reversed spells Emit. Nice coincidence, right? If you can reverse time you can probably emit quantum particles. Hah! How lame is that?”

Penny : “Sean, I’ve been thinking, maybe, I had a twin. She doesn’t exist physically, maybe; but metaphysically, within me; like I am two people, two things at once, I am the water and she is the rock and vice versa. Sometimes it brings me to an atrocious edge of impending turmoil. We switch our places so quickly that it’s really hard to distinguish, who’s who.”

Sean : “Oh Penny, do you mean to say you have an evil twin and that she’s no one else but you? Have you been watching those darned movies which endorse those stupid ideas? Our discussion about time travel was a lot more interesting.”

Penny : “Shut up! Will you? I don’t buy that evil twin theory. Oh, about your obsessive travelling- in-time thing, I had time travelled to the future and I saw that we were not together. I showed you the finger, for being a segregated superficial shmuck.”

Sean : “Okay, I shut up!”

Penny : “Do you know about vanishing twins? It’s not very uncommon. One of the twins die very early in the mother’s womb. The dead foetus is absorbed by the mother or the other twin. It becomes nonexistent. Maybe I absorbed my twin sister, maybe she is within me.”

Sean : “Okay! Even if I believe that you had absorbed your twin sister; the time when this happened, your sister or the dead foetus had not developed a brain. So, even if she is present in you, theoretically; she can’t do anything on her own, or she can’t make you do anything.”

Penny : “You’re not getting it Sean. How do I make you understand what I am trying to say…”

Penny returned from the kitchen, holding a porcelain mug and a match box. It was the same mug from which she had coffee everyday. It was given to her by Sean.

Maybe she had time travelled into the future. Sean and her were not together, for reasons - aplenty.

Penny dropped the mug on the concrete. It was shattered into pieces.

Probably, the mug would not have broken had it been her old house, the old garden with a cushion of grass.

She lit a matchstick and dropped it in the trash bin.

Apparently, old paper catches fire easily.

She sat down.

Penny took up a piece of the broken porcelain mug and pressed it against her wrist. Slitting her writs? Oh! That was not her. But, she had always wanted to donate blood…

Sean’s last letter, in a sealed envelope burned in the trash bin –

“I know, we’re not together anymore and I know that you might not be interested in reading anything I write; but hoping that you’ve read till here, I shall continue my jabber hence and hope against hope that you shall bear with me. Do you remember our discussion about the vanishing twins? I do. Well, I don’t know which of you were prevailing then, when we broke apart (and not broke up), but I think I have an alternate theory for that. I was reading about the Tachyon the other day, a hypothetical sub-atomic particle which could travel faster than light. Maybe, you were something like that. I couldn’t see you; understand you when you were approaching me (read with me), but when you passed me (read left me), I could actually see you, understand you, both of you. You were clearly divided into two images, moving in opposite directions, one red and one blue, personified and transmogrified into the rock and the water. But, I can’t travel at the speed of light, let alone faster than that, so I could not catch you, neither of you.”

Penny longed for the orchids, the white ones, the blue ones, especially the red ones… There is a myth that Blood Orchids can resurrect people. She could use them, now.

It was (is) the sixth of February.

“Happy Birthday Penny”, Sean’s voice crackled over the telephone.

Maybe it was past, maybe it is future; or maybe in some other dimension, Penny was in her old home, and it was midnight.

Penny got engulfed in the smoke…

All that remained in the trash bin were ashes, but there were a couple of invisible remnants which could not even escape with the smoke – the vanishing twins and the tachyon.

Black pastel on 6"x4" white paper.

p.s. - The sketch was made upon a whim. I am not an artist.

Sequel - Fumes