Mustering strength, amassing ideals;
An unflagging heart for the greater good.

March, march, march forward,
With vibrancy, with courage,
With determination that never falters.

Fight, fight, fight through and through;
Forge one bright light,
A soul of steel,
A shard of green,
A brilliance of Fire,
Shining unendingly.

Thad wonders down the stretch of pavement, feet clipping wetly. The weather has been stormy, and then there is the downpour. Liz has made it a point that it is so called: downpour, and not rain, because they make a difference. The latter gives you the nice fuzzy feeling that makes you tug yourself under warm blanket, not with a mug of hot chocolate and a good book, if you can help it, but certainly with a sacred secured sense of chilly warmth of nothing-would-harm-you kind. The former is one thundery blur of hurt and chaos. For Liz, it comes with Migraine. Not migraine of any Toms and Harrys, but Migraine of Liz. The mammoth kind where the pain is as exquisite as it is electrifying, ravaging one part of your head so unforgivingly that you wish it would simply fall off like a slice of orange (for Liz, it is the left side). Sometimes, Liz says she hears bird chirping during those agonizing periods. Sometimes, there would be bursts of blinding light, although she cannot confirm if that happens visually or mentally.

Today’s downpour is no exception. Liz has since given up coaxing the twins to sleep. She has tugged herself under blanket after popping two aspirins, but with no comfort. She has creased her eyes and has made at least twenty funny shapes with her mouth. She has tossed and moaned. But pain is a sadist and has sat in her brain like a tumorous barnacle.

Thad hopes she is at least on her way to recovery now. The rain has toned down slightly since he left the doorstep. Now, it has exhausted itself into a fine dying drizzle.

As Thad walks, a brief tattoo of lightning inks the sky mutely. Meandering mist take shape and hang low in the air, glowing like ghostly figure with no more a bad intention than to spook unsuspecting kids.  The air smells like fresh earth and mint, but it is also heavy, pregnant with after-rain after-downpour quality.

(with thoughts)

Thad halts in his track as he reaches a corner. Near some grassy patches around a brick wall, he sees some feral snails (do they ever get domesticated?) sticking out their slimy heads and chewing at the ground. They always come out after the rain, snails and mist. They herald the death of rain, gingerly, gently, with their slow unhurried motion of life. Thad smiles ruefully to himself before striding down the pavement again.

It is a Thad with thoughts today. A Thad with thoughts glinting like dark jewels at the back of his mind as the downpour drips itself into a drizzle. As Liz recuperates from her Migraine, as his twins sleep into each other’s arms without their mother’s persuasion, as the mist extends its smoky fingers to touch the tentacles of snails.

The cluster of roadside trees shake their chlorophyllated crowns off droplets as a gust of wind blows across the empty street. Thad, with his thoughts, walks on. A solitude walk, lonely and loud with voices.

Numerous stopovers the track passes; and now, the final part towards the checkpoint is in sight.

And I must brace myself for the coming tide. I must dash, with old heart and renewed strength. Nightly breeze and silver moon, beaming sun and meandering clouds; beneath this vast vast sky I must be hasty, I must run.

The Sprint it will be called. So, run, run, like the wind in savanna, powerful, ruthless, with an urgent sense of purpose.

Run, run, through soaring mountains and plummeting valleys; a runner light as shadow, mighty as day.

Run, run, I must run; for not far beyond this distance, I see, the sun winks and beckons.

Waiting is a slow torture. It perches like a surgeon’s scalpel over tender skin, cold metal to cold skin; the suspense a mental pyrotechnics that bursts the sutures, almost.

It is odd waiting should be called just that, waiting — two syllabi, brief, truncated, contrived. I would have expected the lexicographers to call it something else, like con·cu·pis·cence, or perhaps claus·tro·pho·bia. Those sure sound a lot more waiting-ish, eh?

I shall sever my post now and let you wait. Maybe then you would truly get what I mean.

One thing though, before I end: There is something incriminating about the star on the north-east side of the stamp of sky I can only view from my window tonight. It is its angle, or maybe the way it dances, or is it its colour? Anyway, stars are fickle celestial objects, and my mind is a trifle fuzzy now. So perhaps, I shall just let old bygones be. After all, it might just all be illusions.

I look out of my window. The residence building rises up and up until it winks at the top of it. The sun casts its ray down. Afternoon ray; the kind that makes me remember those dusty sweaty days in the past, when I used to sit by a breezy window, with fuzzy mind, engines vibrating beneath my shoes, blurred conversations buzzing by my ears. Sometimes, a yell or a screech of tyres would jolt me out of my semi-daze, but I was generally oblivious to the vicinity.

How curious it is then that those days now slip so handily into my memory, in their full resolution, as textured as tongue, as thick as butter. I am getting old, too old perhaps. It is a sign. Amnesia only gets that far. Once you are out of the road, you reach the brink, and the panorama — it will be a perfect 20/20.

There is something strange about me these days, staying within this bosom of solitude, this cage of freedom I keep myself within. A safe harbour, an ivory tower, whatever one calls it. An idle mind is a devil’s workshop, but I think my mind is so jostled with ideas that the ideas themselves spawn their own devils. Red little elves, I imagine, tinkering with my vision and my intention, making finger-horns on my head and ugly faces behind my back. And then, I would metamorphose into a malleable dough; and some Dark Hand would extend out of the gloom — my own gloom — and start to knead me with bits of bitterness, and hatred, and wanton wishes.

I become destructive. In this cage where freedom is at its sublime, I descend into darkness and spy into the world of demons underneath. They are green, all green. Even their blood is green. I know, because I have attempted to murder one of them.

Ah, it starts to rain now. The sky outside has dipped into a greyish blue, the colour which reminds me so acutely of my first crayon. Oh yes, I remember how I had used it to paint a sky. But, ha ha, come to think of it, to paint a sky! How I wish it could be that easy, to paint whatever I want with my crayon. Tree, snail, book, a village, and of course, courage, might, wit, love.

But wait. Courage? Might? No, those are intangibles. Even for love people can yet properly portray it pictorially. Those silly little red hearts on valentine and poker cards would have given any self-respecting anatomist a flutter. But I am not an anatomist. I wish I am. It is the closest to understanding humans. Anyway, my point is: I have seen hearts, real human hearts, held them too in my very own hands. And most of the time, they are neither red nor symmetric. They are almost hideous: grey, oblong, with five deep deep punctures if you cut them out and count.

The thunder is getting scary now. I think I shall go. See you in better day!

The silence, the awkwardness

Fenced by disappointment,

Little teeth of tombs.

It is intense, but it will pass. And when it does, it will be square one. It will be an empty shell, reflecting light, consuming the weighty magnitude of loneliness.

There was chance, but it faded. And it faded. And it faded. Away into the dim light of night; sea singing, breeze sighing, stars blinking blue.

The distance, a heavy trail of shy muteness, punctuated, burdened, conflicted, wounded.

The night sinks.

Like rock to sea bottom.

Like heart to bottomless world.

It is an exotic species of pain. Dull, visceral, nagging, parasitic pain. A pain that latches itself onto the mind and oozes green slimy liquid, that gnaws at the liver and inoculates nasty biting bugs, that pinches at the lungs and pricks at the feet and releases little pixies that play noisy violins at the ears.

It is a pain of its own, and it will go. It has to, because it has been paid.

Go.

The rain that roars, the winds that wails, the sun that spears, the heat that hisses;

Never stop, never hesitate. A heart of faith — worried, tattered — pumping blood, aorta to arteries, venules to veins, whole.

The flame: lit, lilac, alive.

Go, and shine.