He covered her with two blankets, whispered a few words about their intertwined destinies in her ears and gently kissed her on the forehead, fighting back the urge to lie down with her on his arms. It wasn’t fully dawn yet, he could just about make out the tinge of the first few rays, which gradually kept rising, both in light and warmth. He had a couple of things to do before he hit the road at eight a.m.
It was cold and though, he was unprepared for it, he relished it, like a caveman shrugging off the imminent arrival of the ice age, motioning his small group to traverse across continents. He wished he could meet the caveman and ask him, if he had been bogged down by the thought of crossing continents, instead of the more easy choice of staying put inside the relatively warm cave and wistfully, sit in hope that everything, somehow would turn out to be fine.
The cavemen had kept going and going, until they survived.
He looked at her again and smiled a sad sort of smile, hoping she would understand. But he would totally understand if she didn’t. After all, everyone had the right to choose what he or she wanted to do, at any point of time, and who was he to enforce himself on someone, personally or professionally, lest the fate came back to bite oneself in the future. Who knew how the strings of fate functioned, or even how circumstances developed, too busy as men and women were, in the trivial blurs of superficiality and subjectivity? Who knew if they weren’t wallowing around pools of shallowness and mediocrity, content to sit back and watch the producers find meaning in what they produced? Rarely few, if any.
Who knew the systems that governed the world? Who really understood and integrated all the bits and pieces of information that swam across all the highways, streets and alleys of the world? Who really knew the implications and repercussions of truly trying to understand the way global systems were positioned, waiting for men and women to create legions upon legions of value and insight? Ask yourself, what is going on in the world right now? What is actually going on? What do you live for, who do you live for and really, deeply, who are you?
He closed his eyes and imagined the vast networked landscape of the globe, more intertwined than ever before, screaming for hope, joy and despair in equal measure, not realizing that the very act of looking up towards the heavens for their deliverance from despair, was akin to an helpless ant looking up at the boot that was going to crush it.
He opened his eyes and stared at the faces of his fellow passengers, rocking gently in their seats, lost in their thoughts, about their hustle, the previous night, other individuals better off than themselves, trying to pacify themselves through their smartphones in a bid to forget about the travails they encountered every day from their friends and families, who hoped every day, that this was their day, their day of deliverance.
His eyes crept over to the last seat, where a person of his age, in his mid-twenties, looked different. The man was dressed casually, nothing fancy, but his eyes gave it away. He saw purpose, iron-clad in its demeanor, as if the long days of rejection and hopelessness were days of waiting it out for the right opportunity and that life itself was a joy, a journey to be savoured, treasured, looking back on the days where one had almost nothing, to the days spent in bliss and debauchery, for, who knew? Who really knew what was right and what was wrong, when everyone was fighting it out for the same pie? But, who produced the pie?
Marijuana Maharaj 