deviantgene

Month: January, 2025

January 29, 2025

Fear

He started at the empty page. Wait. Not he. I. This is my story.

But am I so different from him? Where do I end and he begins. The He in question, of course, being the creative artist in me who did not care about food or money or kid’s school education or any of the thousand minutiae of life.

But as I write this, I realise something, these myriad things in life are the true compost of what ultimately become a great story or a great poem.

The page is not looking so empty now, but I still feel it accusing me of something. Of infidelity. Of having forgotten how much I loved words and how words make stories and stories make life.I cannot do without them. The words. The stories. So why do I feel that this empty page is accusing me? It is almost like I can sense a silent (I had to pause here, because I forgot the word, so bear with me as I repeat myself..) almost a silent rebuke, reprimand, reproach. (In case you did not get it, I took a pause here to google exactly the word I had in  mind)

That is my fear. That is my nightmare. What if words have started deserting me. It scares me. It terriufies me. I try and lure them back with gentle promises of time spent and a love which shall no longer go unrequieted.

Because the truth is

I need the words more than they need me.

. Who am I without words. What am I. I don’t understand anything else. I understand words. And if words leave me then what will I be. No matter what has been happening in my life, the words have always been there. They do not care how much I earn or whether I am fat or thin or what my day looks like, or how much money I make.All they care about is that I pay them a visit. Every once in a while.

You know, I once had the good fortune of making to words fall in love too. Mycelial and Factory had never looked at each other with the kind of longing they did , when I set them up together. Mycelial Factory.

Come to think of it, I don’t know how many word pairs I have played cupid to over the years.

The writer does not make up the words. Words make up the writer.

And now this whole paragraph stands accusatory. Why did I forget them? The words. Books can be read or heard. Words can be said, or written. Being too busy with life is certainly not an excuse for forgetting words. Do you know, “Doomscrolling” is still upset with me because I forgot his (yes, the word identifies as male), birthday.

Do not get me started on engineered serendipity or manufactured consent. They scream at me every time I see them on page. Look, they say – We had never met each other till someone put us together. But once you had read us together, we were inseparable in your mind. Chomsky and Foucault and Russian Fairy tales and whatever else you decided to pick up, you were with us.

So when did we become a 15s wordart caption on an Instagram video?

Or merely subtitles in a movie?

I sense their anger. Their frustration.

This is what terrifies me. That I will not be able to give the words the life and the meaning they want. And eventually, they will desert me.

And on the day the last word flees

I will be no one.

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January 27, 2025

The Old woman

The twisted woman sat beneath the oak tree. You would always find her there, looking out at the world as if through the eyes of a mouse from its hole. She never spoke. Occasionally, one could see her reading a letter, but those times were few and far between.

Did I say the old woman never spoke? Well, that is not entirely true. She spoke once, her voice echoing through every room of every house and every chamber of every building. Here is what happened:

A street had lost its way. It was supposed to lead to a town, but it had completely lost its way, so now it led nowhere. A man had been shot, and there were murmurs that he was framed. His photographer grew on to be prosperous, but neither the photographer nor the man could prove the murmurs. Since then, the street had lost its way.

It was a young street, not very old. It went on for a few kilometers. The other streets were much older; they had been there since Roman times. Nobody knew who built this street, and when it rained its potholes often flooded. The other streets chose to ignore it, largely. So the street went to the old woman.

Now the old woman herself was once a town. The woman remembered what it felt like to have streets running through her like veins, to have houses nestled in her embrace like children. She had been a prosperous place once, with market squares that buzzed with life and church bells that sang through her mornings. But towns can fade, and she had faded until only her essence remained, compressed into the form of a woman who sat beneath an oak tree.

When the lost street approached her, something stirred in her ancient memory. She recognized in it the same confusion she had felt as her own streets began to blur and fade, as her buildings forgot their purposes one by one. She lifted her twisted hands from her lap for the first time in years, and that was when she spoke.

There was only one place where lost streets could find their way. The old woman knew of it. She had forgotten, of course, in the manner that the elderly know things but forget them.

“The Bazaar of Lost Dreams,” she whispered, her voice carrying the weight of centuries. “It stands where memory meets forgetting, where the cobblestones of ancient Rome still whisper to modern asphalt. Go there when the moon is a silver penny in the merchant’s palm. Look for the stall where they sell maps drawn in starlight, where the vendor’s eyes reflect roads that never were.”

The street trembled at her words, feeling its potholes fill with shadows of remembrance. “But how,” it asked, its question echoing through its empty length, “does a street walk to a bazaar?”

The old woman who was once a town smiled for the first time in decades. “The same way a town becomes a woman,” she said. “One forgotten step at a time.”

And so it was that a young street learned to fold itself like paper, gathering its length into the shape of a traveler’s footsteps, and set out to find its way in the Bazaar of Lost Dreams, where cartographers trade in possibilities and every wrong turn leads exactly where it’s meant to go.

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