My Valentine

One image that shall endure is that of children, six or seven years old, playing on the Harvard steps of wimwi. The batch of 1989 is in campus for a reunion. It is their children playing, running about and otherwise doing what all seven year olds do, in the campus. Spring is almost here. Yet another week may be and we will have song birds, new shoots and leaves and clear blue skies. Or another month, if the swallows do not turn up. The kids brought an hour or two of spring themselves to this dreary campus. The brick walls start to suffocate. The faded red, turning almost to a dull brown and grey is lifeless like a failed love.

I want it to rain. Wet the walls, the grass, wash the dust off the leaves, let some moss grow on the bricks, give some colour in general. The dryness reminds me of my own loneliness.

Yesterday was Valentine's day. Not much seems to have changed from what it was in 2006. If anything, the quality of my writing has degraded.

I will find a reason and fast too. I always manage to find a reason/excuse. In this case, my defence is that I have not been writing enough. Well, I have been writing, but not thinking and writing. Not writing from my heart. Whatever.

I was a prolific/ostentatious/irritating letter writer once. I loved writing. I still do, I think. Thoughts are like water. They must flow. Thoughts with a semblance of purpose are ideas. They must be encouraged to flow. Just as water's flow can not be stopped by any force or feature, so can not thoughts' flow be stopped. The stream or flood of thoughts should find a channel or a stream or a dry river bed in order to be productive. The river beds are the inherent talents in a man. I can not paint or draw or sing for the love of my life. Many can. The channels are our conscious efforts to give a structure and a meaning for the flow. Streams are the mystics' characters.

She is a butterfly. I would be heartless if I wanted to confine her to my heart. There is happiness in freedom. So be it.

When eventually the daily baseness of life corrupts the purity of heart (and its vagaries), when the ebb and flow of common emotions engulf the highest point of our existence, that is to love for nothing, there shall be nothing in this world save the disembodied beats of a heart that fluttered once as fast as the wings of a butterfly when she saw a flower she liked fleetingly.

My words, even, are a subtraction from the beauty of that feeling, the body, a burden. So I know, for this one ethereal moment, the meaning of life and I have seen God's face, even if I am blind to it the next instant, I know, within my heart, within the heart of hearts, within my very soul ,that I loved and I loved and never lost.