Fictitious viewings through red mist

You wake up and realize it hasn’t been more than even 4 hours since you plonked on something you thought was your bed in pitch darkness. You feel around and realize with a reluctant gratitude that it was your bed after all and surprisingly clean. You see the mound of clothes on your chair and you know why your bed is so clean.
Your neck pains if you try and move it to see who is howling away at the top of his voice. Turns out its Sonu Nigam trying to be mel-odious and bloody way too early in the morning. You shrug and go back to sleep. There is a buzz in your head accompanied by a relentless confusion about whether you are feeling fresh enough to rest more or distressed enough to wake up and shake off the feeling.

You have to rush to work in another couple of hours. You feel the pain in your right elbow every time you bend it. You realized it last night/this morning when you finished keyboarding. In a moment you realize you were wrong. It is not your right hand. Your left hand pains too. It is just that the pain was too meek to register itself and had to wait till you got used to the pain in your right hand just as you had gotten used to the pain in all the joints you never knew existed.

You rush to work in some time. Your eyes are blood-shot but no-one notices, not that you care anyways. You settle down to work immediately. You open up 15 windows, many consoles among them. Lot of work has made you stinking smart. You open them up in a particular sequence everyday so that lying down on the bottom of your screen they represent the debris that your life lately has become. You know exactly how many alt-tabs would reach you to which window and what exactly you have to type there. It works. You realized it last night when after 7 hours of such expert window switching you actually saved 15 minutes which you promptly lost waiting for the cab. You had let out an ironical laugh then. You have in fact started laughing in various modes lately. It has started coming naturally to you.

You are too immersed in your work to notice the hoopla around you because people are going early to augment their already long vacation. You don’t notice or you would rather not because it reminds you of your cancelled vacation. You just slug it out. The pain in your elbows disappears as your fingers type away sometimes injuring the keyboard probably; if only it could hit you back. Your neck anyways is incapable of turning around on its own without you swiveling on your chair. You crane it anyways as you calculate the double digit times you have spent in the office for the past double digit number of days. You shrug and wince at the same time and decide not to shrug again for sometime with a shrug. You get stares from others around you for the way you have looked and acted for the past so many days. You are perplexed. You have been much the same as before with just a scowl being an addition to what you bring to office besides sleepy eyes and a distorted metabolism that is perfectly out of sync and has no clue what is going on. You get strange delusions. You leave the office on Thursday morning and come back to office the same day thinking it is a Friday before the terrible realization hits you that it is still a Thursday.

Your to-do list increases beyond control and you know it has reached a staccato crescendo when one of the tasks in your to-do lists is to “clear up the to-do list”.
You mop up the work, postpone the dinner because of alt-tab reasons, and have it late at night when they are doling out midnight snacks. It actually becomes the best part of the day because you see a lot of interesting faces lining up for the midnight snack. They are less haggard than you and give you the who-left –you-behind? stares.
You finally make your way back home and again stumble your way to your bed leaving the clothes on top of an existing heap; reminds you of another to-do at hand.
You brush you teeth and see blood oozing out through the white foam. You spit it out in disgust. You don’t care to see what could be the problem.

You sag on your bed once again and think about good things that you have always thought about for yourself. You try and go to sleep. Even as you do that you just hope things will look up and the Mr. Tyler Durden would sleep on for a bit longer.

You don’t hope he would invite you rest in his palm of perfection. Not just yet.

Disclaimer: Everything fictitious...well almost.

My own Halo

...something I was inspired to write after listening to 'The End' by Jim Morrison and then gave up writing more of such kind after realizing just how easy it is to be so bland/bad.

also one of the 17 reasons I got less( pathetic ! ) marks in AI.

My own halo blinds me
What brings me complete freedom
is the approach that binds me

The applause would never be gone
but disturbing thoughts my mind spawns.
In search for everything in front of me....
I can never retrieve what I left behind me.

I never realized the agony would be endless
when I traded my peace for success.
Will that dawn ever come?
when far removed from this scum
I would be innocence in my own right
and dance about in the cool sunlight
of the rising sun that was once mine.

Forgive me if I was proud,
if I trampled on the vulnerable
to rise above the crowd.
Forgive me if I thought
I could be what I wanted to
without letting things happen
the way YOU wanted to

Forgive me if I thought
I had too less to lose
It was because
I put my head more than my heart to use

Now that I have the halo
it scathes my heart and drills a hole.
I got over losing everyone
but now I lost my soul.

I sit alone with my halo
I caress and talk to it.
Its heat burns my hand
and dries my throat.
I sit like this waiting,
hoping the ordeal would end.
And I keep asking myself
“Can a halo be a friend?”

...in which she takes over

He saw her and he had the entire 200 odd people spinning around him. He was simultaneously scaling heights of dizziness and the abysmal lows of the pits in his stomach. There was only one word for it. He was enamored and if he could even half describe how he felt, he would be Shakespeare minus the accented spellings.

He looked at his watch again. It was almost time. He inquired once more about the food he had ordered showing the urgency which was quite real just moments ago but had to be faked ever since she appeared and placed her order. She had come along with two of her friends, equally good, but somehow she just stood out in spite of not trying at all. Maybe it was her height or the features which swung dangerously between being termed mellow and stiff at the same time. She had the kind of features that get you bit roles in one of those Hollywood flicks about Egyptian queens where you die in the first reel and the special effects take over. In short, she had an aura about her, an elegance which somehow seemed totally out of place on the ninth floor of his office in the hustle of that food court.

He could not help glancing at her time and again quite oblivious to whether he was being discreet enough about it. He stole a quick glance at her ID but failed to get anything beyond some snatches of her name. He wished he had cheated more than he had in exams all his life. Suddenly he felt it all over again. The same exhilarating feeling he had around six years back when he first moved in to a co-ed. The blood rushed to his head. He knew he must be looking all red all over the face but he could not help it. He knew he was going to go nuts in a short while. The last thing he wanted was a distraction. She had provided just that and more and she was being pretty ruthless about it by the way.

Minutes later he was trying to eat and forget about her but his eyes were following her as if they were on their own. Sometimes it was difficult to even keep pace with her. She seemed to be just all over the place even when she was, well, being just static.

One look at her and it seemed that she was wonderfully aware of everything going around her. It was as if she already knew everything and was just playing it up so innocuously well. It was as if she knew how he was looking at her all the time, how he was going mad about her, how he was already masticating not on food but on plans of getting to know more about her. It was as if she was Luc Beson’s Fifth Element.

He saw her again the next day, same time and same place and there seemed to be a familiarity to their strangeness or it was just his high hopes. He just shrugged. He knew this was again going to be a case of Appetite Lost.

However, even as he shrugged, he could notice a firmness in it that usually comes with determination. He sighed.