StoryTeller: Tale of 2 Stairs and a Tree
The Two Stairs and the Tree
Some stories are just too strange, especially the one’s which are derived from life but could this life be called a story? Perhaps, for like stories it has a beginning and an end but sometimes for some of us life is nothing but an endless concoction of beginnings and endings, we move on from one story to another, from one life to another life. In this moving on and in this flux some of us do find a perfect story that we could hold close to our heart and this is perhaps the difference between life and stories, stories end but life goes on.
I don’t know when it actually happened for some happenings, unlike love stories which have a particular start date, are spread over several instances of time. Well let’s say it happened over several nights and I don’t know what night has to do with relationships but yeah this one blossomed over several of them. There isn’t any love if your hoping for, at least not the kind which most of us seek in life but yeah there are tears and lots of them, a heartbreak which ironically brought them closer, a death which both of them survived, several villains though they were some poor unsuspecting blabber mouthed people who couldn’t have possibly known about the part which they played and yes, last but not the least, two stairs and the tree. Now you would ask me what a tree and two stairs has to do with everything, well nothing actually but then I am the one telling the story and I happen to be in love with those two stairs and that tree.
I am a lousy storyteller as you may get to know for I don’t care much for facts but rather I care for things which I feel and really I am not here writing a year book of some kind, I am here to tell a story. There isn’t much of a story actually, just a collection of several, unostentatious, hardly remarkable coincidences but then some coincidences are meant to be, probably because sometimes coincidences are tied together by an almost diaphanous string called destiny.
Like I said there isn’t much of a story but then I have to begin somewhere and this beginning is what I am afraid of for some stories do not start at the beginning and neither did this one. Did it actually have a beginning I often think and sometimes it’s only after thousands of miles that you discover the people whom you have been walking with. But nevertheless for the sake of story or rather the sake of simplicity let’s take this discovery to be a beginning of some sorts. People meet, they say hello, they meet again, say hi, talk for some time and then they disappear only to meet at some inconsequential juncture in your life and only to repeat the above given sequence. In this story it wasn’t like that, they met but never met, never said hi or hello or how do you do and all this would have been fine had they not known each other, they as a matter of fact knew each other from the time when both of them were pimply and zit ridden teenagers though her pimply phase happen to start much later in life.
Well enough about the beginning, let us just say it begin just like that and just like that they came closer and just like that all those tears, villains, heartbreak and everything else somehow fitted itself in between and just like I said I am a lousy storyteller, I don’t care for facts and really the facts are known to the two people whom the story is about. What I am here to tell you is that there are still something’s in this world which are beyond the conventional definitions, things which go beyond conventionality, things which don’t make sense but still are true for they could make you cry.
It has been a story less story so far and really I have no story as such to tell apart from the story of two stairs and a tree. Let’s say tree is some tree whose big overgrowing branches form a kind of canopy over those two desolate and lonely two stairs and ironically enough neither the tree nor those two stairs would be complete without each other. It’s on these stairs, right underneath this tree both of them sat one day and talked about every god damn movie that has ever been made and in those instants when their eyes never met both of them were lost in a world of their own or probably this world dissolved into a void. This how it all begun, not the story of two friends who found each other but rather the story of two stairs and a tree and in this story at least one of them would be incomplete without the other and it’s in the distance between those two stairs and the tree where all their expectations, aspirations, arguments and promises will thrive. At some point of time both of them must have gotten up to walk along their respective paths, probably they met again and probably things were just as easy as the last time but still one or the other of them always tried to recreate the magic which once they both have felt. Where they able to get where they wanted to, would they as people say be friends forever, is it their destiny to be just friends or does the future holds something more for them? Probably time itself will answer these questions but one thing for sure; you don’t get to fall in love, at least with your own character especially when you are the StoryTeller.
Questions from Here, There and Deep Inside
There is a thing about human psychology; it’s a fun thing when you are evaluating everyone around you but it could get kind of scary or rather disheartening when you use it to put your own actions in perspective. Ever heard that story about a butcher who ended up cutting his own finger off with the same cleaver which he used to mince meat with? Well being your own lives judge is like the weirdest of all things, like it’s ok to look back and evaluate and apply lessons from your past but when these self appraisals drag themselves into your everyday life they literally leave you with a bluest of blue feeling. They just end up stopping you from doing what you want to do because somewhere deep inside your head is a voice telling you why you are feeling what you are feeling and no matter how plausible these reason might be sometimes we just want them to disappear for sometimes we don’t want to know why we feel what we feel. It’s like ok I don’t need reasons as to why I am feeling jealous of a friend who is out there somewhere listening and tapping her feet to some folk music while I am sitting at home watching reruns of Sex and the City and polishing off a bag of Cheetos, and that’s because I know why I am feeling jealous and no amount of reasons could actually alleviate me from my misery. Sometimes it just gets so bad that like someone is texting you and telling you all the fun stories and all those fun stories end up reminding you of everything you miss in your life but you can’t tell this to the other person because if you do you will end up being a spoilsport, if not in the eyes of someone else then in your stupid condescending eyes.
Sometimes it’s actually nice to have all the answers but then sometimes despite of having these answers, your life start to appear almost meaningless. Perhaps because some answers are never complete and you need to peek into someone else’s notebook and I think these answers that we have in our head can only tell us about what we want but where to find that missing piece is something which no amount of introspection can possibly tell us. Some of us do find that missing piece but life is seldom a treasure hunt or even if it is we seldom get to keep every piece for ourselves and sometimes the way we want to posses something in our lives also happens to be the way where we may end up losing what we love the most about that thing.
I remember hearing about a psychiatrist who after failing to look beyond the delusional aspect of marriage decided to seek some action outside the martial premise. Though I really don’t know her or her reasons, may be her husband was indeed a toad or whatever but still the fact that she couldn’t understand all that she was missing in her life, reduces her to a lousy psychiatrist. A friend once asked me why is that people cheat, I couldn’t bring myself to answer this then more so because it was Valentine’s Day and truth sometimes can be just to unsettling but now when I think about it, I realize that people cheat because of the expectations they carry along with them and seldom in life we indeed find a treasure trove.
Life is too zigzagged to be explained by any amount of psychology and really I don’t care what Jung or Freud might have said for as far as I know those guys probably succumbed to their promiscuity or rather the lack of it. One thing that I know is in this life everything couldn’t possibly and cogently be explained more so because life is too long and our brains too pea sized to think about anything that colossal. But still there are things which you know about, things which you feel, things which go beyond the realms of friendship and all that u know just end up suffocating you but still you stand and watch because you know that sometimes getting what we want means losing all that we love about it.
Tears of Happiness and of Pain
There is something about pain which make us seem insignificant, almost pale and diaphanous in comparison because there exists just so much of it in this world, at each and every step, nook and corner that whatever we are going through no matter how much emasculating it may be still doesn’t even come close to the real thing. There are people living through this pain, deprivation and poverty, people who can’t even hope leave alone cry for things which we want but these people are also the people whom I think to be the happiest because these people have a hope that someday things would once again get better, their belief in goodness is still intact and this belief is what keeps them going. Pain, if you ask me is the biggest of all levelers, it just brings about a relative simplicity to our lives, it brings about a kind of humbling feeling which makes you live for what you have even though what you have are just vestiges or excerpts of what you want. It’s when you see around yourself and allow yourself to feel something which people around you are going through, you just can’t help but cry, cry at your insignificance, at your own ineptitude in making something out of your own life. It’s always easy to cry for our pain but we have to teach ourselves to feel the pain that someone else might be feeling and believe me it’s not that tough to cry for someone else because pain is universal and all of our tears are related at some level. It’s not just about tears but the way you relate, the way allow yourself to feel and at first nothing of it will make sense more so because we as a generation have been taught to hold everything inside. The day you learn how to cry for someone else’s pain is the day when you could be truly happy because nothing could bring about more sanguinity in your life then the realization that there is still something inside of you that isn’t dead. I remember seeing my grandmother cry whenever I would return from college and also whenever I would leave, to me her tears appeared all the same but now when she has gone somewhere far and away from me, I realized all the prayers she would have said just so that she could once again see me walk back through those gates. In that instant I realized about those tears which so willfully flowed streaking her cheeks, those were the tears which flow when all the promises that you have made yourself are fulfilled. I remember the night when my friend told me about her boyfriend who cheated on her, that was the night when I first truly cried for someone else probably because the fact that someone could even think of scattering a heart as beautiful as hers was something I didn’t know how to react to. Life teaches us in retrospection and when you look back you realize there is just so much that you should have felt but never did and when you think of it you just can’t help but cry. Now when I look back, a lot of things, a lot of tearful moments make sense to me, like when my mom was pregnant with my sister, I remember placing my hand on her tummy and feel as my sister would kick and I remember clearly my mother cried at that instant and I thought it was probably because of the pain but now I know it was the joy of bringing a new life in this world was what she cried for. I don’t know what it is with me and kids but whenever I see kids I just am filled with an overwhelming sense of well being and I feel as if all is well with this world and when one of them holds my hand I don’t know why but I feel proud of offering them the sanctity which they need. Life is about giving and I don’t see why we can’t cry for someone else and believe me nothing will bring you greater joy then the fact that you have related with someone who was in pain. Pain and ecstasy are one and the same, just identifying with one brings you closer to the other. I read in a book that these tears are symbolic of our humanity; the civilization which cannot cry for itself is the civilization which invariably dies, there is nothing wrong with crying for it is one of the first things which we do when we are born and probably it’s one of the endless ways that makes us feel alive.
Love, Live, Expect
Expectations are contagious, they not just spread from one individual to another but they grow within as well, one tiny expectation at a time and then one day when you realize, your relationship has been reduced to nothing but a bundle of expectations. But we can’t simply do without expecting either because to stop expecting would be almost akin to being stuck, you stop moving when you stop expecting because to stop expecting means to stop aspiring, it means that we are comfortable with what we have and sometimes being comfortable is the last of things that we want in life. Expectations are like the simplest of all things, they are there because they are there, like a universal truth and sometimes being expectant means we are ready for something more, we are ready to be responsible, we are ready to give.
Expectations has a really deep and ingrained relationship with love or friendship or any other variation of it and I think we love because we expect and we expect from people we love, without expectations love would cease to be what we know of it to be. Expectations are what that aspire us to achieve, they nudge us to dream big, maybe we won’t get what we want but then no one gets everything they wish for in life. As far as love goes expectations take a different form, you expect people to accept whatever is that you have to give but then we start to expect too much and accept too little and this is when things start to fall apart. Love has different meanings for all of us and each of these meanings at some level seek an eternal promise, a promise of forever but forever is really a big time and I think the only way to love someone for this long a time is by letting them go because the only way to love someone forever is by letting go of these expectations and the only way to not expect anything is by becoming a stranger.
If u ask me then I would say that fulfillment is the acronym for expectations for to expect is to be human but to get all that you want is heavenly. I bet even God doesn’t have everything that he wishes more so because had he got everything he wanted then we won’t have been running this earth like a recreational vehicle and also because given the current economic slump, I am not sure if even God could afford to go shopping at any place other than the dollar store.
Like U2 says “What you don’t have you, don’t need it now” and perhaps the only way to go around these never ending expectations is by reconciling what you want with what you need but a lot of things in life are easier than done and what does Bono and his guitar toting troupe know about things that we lesser mortals have to put up with.
We all love, live, accept, expect and die, though not necessarily in the same order but if only we could bring ourselves to expect the right things and that too at the right time then probably this life would become even more meaningful.
Why Didn’t You
Why don’t you read my mind
Why don’t you tell me wrong from right
Hold my hand while I walk you through my life
A thousand stars that have lit this night
Why don’t we let them guide
As we find together our place in time.
Look deep within, look deep inside your life
For this is where all the meanings hide
Like these hidden and unsaid emotions
And all the things that we held inside
For something’s sound better if left undefined.
But if only you would have read my mind
Or read the unwritten in between these lines
And seen the truth despite the starkness of these lies
Then probably we won’t have lost what we tried so hard to find.
