A Game of Mirrors

I try again to start. Life moves in circles as usual, and these are moments when I say - stop! These are strange moments when the past comes back to me, and as with a circular life, I see future at the same time. 

I am not off the mark if I say I feel like standing in a hall of mirrors, where I feel like being in an endless passage, a passage to the future, built entirely of stories of the past. Once I start believing it, indeed, I feel weightless. All the baggage that I accumulated over the time, all the fears, all the emotions, fall away. I feel like staring firmly, solely, solemnly into possibilities. Just that, and nothing else - I feel creative.

I am too restless to be anything. I am too much of a dreamer to make money. Or even stay. Or love or be loved. In this life of mirrors, illusions, dreams and words, my emotions are that of a constant journey, of movement and not of anchoring. And, this may reflexive, as people I loved and those who were my anchors, left. Since then, I took everything in life for granted, just like a mound to shape my dreams with, and not the other way round. So I did with my words.

So, here are my desires and dreams, experiences and expectations, loves and losses - all lined up neatly in a hall of mirrors. The past and the future fused, the me of suburban Kolkata somewhat immersed in me of the City of London, that boy who dreamt of an idyllic life on an winter morning lying in the bed in the family house still alive and well inside the cocoon of a globe-trotting dream. Here are all the photos, indeed there has to be photos, of all the people who touched a bit of my life, all real, all that made me myself, everyone who objected that I took them for granted but did not see how they really meshed with my life and became a part of me. This journey of stories, they remain alive, still loving, living up every, ever so rare, moment. With a life usually destined to indifference, I feel special every time I stand in front of each of those mirrors, and as all mirrors light up with me on them, and invite me with their unending pathways and immense possibilities.

Here is to you, all of you, who still live in those mirrors. You know who you are. All those moments that we kept in ourselves, to take out sometime and to look at, moments of possibilities and moments of regret, a word spoken or a song sung, a desire fulfilled or an expectation denied, all that time could hold forever. Those who left, and those undeparted; those who live and those who are lost - but mirrors, mirrors, who will come back again. 

This journey of mirrors go somewhere I don't know. I stare but I still move. The closed room come alive with possibilities, bends, corners, passageways, light and shadow, all that; just as my life, me, indifferent, mediocre, just another life and person, lit up in thousand and one stories as I step into this hall of mirrors. 

Everyone has this, the hall of mirrors. Everyone would sometime enter them, and life will light up for them. I am a mirror too, some of the time, when my mirrors enter their own halls of mirrors, and play this game. Those are times I am remembered, I become alive, I am loved again. Those are times when my past becomes meaningful, an afternoon somewhere, a word spoken somewhere else, a deed done or a disappointment intense enough to live all those time, all better than the anonymous mediocrity that we live our daily lives with.

So, this game of mirrors, however idle, is better than not playing at all. Not remembering, not being remembered, suit some, but not me. It is preferable to a life of faceless consumption, even if this means staring at the emptiness of being. Indeed, the reality switches - imagination creates the world what could have been - and I play the Artist, with The Artist. His canvass is the mirror, and so is his colour: He paints with people and dreams and they become real; he creates stories that I live. And, I hope to live in someone else's stories too, told or untold.


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