Back to Life
I’d slink out from under my blanket, just to peek at whatever Shahrukh film mom and dad had on the screen. They loved that shit, Devdas was on loop so much, I could damn near lip-sync the dialogues.
“Kaun kambakht bardaasht karne ko peeta hai … hum toh peete hai ke yahan par baith sake,” the lines echoed in the silence of the room, Shahrukh’s despair was a script I could act out, even in my sleep.
Mom and dad though, would soak up this Bollywood love saga and the next day they’d be at each other’s throats like a couple of alley cats. Fuckin’ perfect picture of love, right?
Life, man, it’s a weird thing. Spent my whole childhood thinking love was just this thing in movies, a cheap trick with a killer soundtrack. Then I saw you. Not in a movie, but like a live-action gut-punch, right there in the middle of a crowd that might as well have been cardboard cutouts. Your eyes… damn, those eyes didn’t just look, they reached out and grabbed me. Stuck like gum on a sneaker, I couldn’t shake it. Made my acid trips feel like Sunday school.
Love? What a trip. Thom Yorke had it wired tight. His voice, like a sermon that knew your sins better than you did, crooning about being what you wanted. Time slowed, pixel by pixel, every one of them getting a slow-mo caress from the city’s chilly fingers. Who the fuck was I if I wasn’t who you wanted? That question gnawed at me, a rat in the walls of my mind. Chose to stay myself, for whatever fucked up reason. Maybe that was my biggest fuck-up. Maybe not.
You, with your deep dark haunting, you’re my glitch, the error code in my life’s script I just can’t debug. Fake Plastic Trees? Irony’s got nothing on you, babe. You turned fake into my favorite fetish, made me wonder if reality’s overrated. Maybe I like the synthetic sweet of you, the artificial flavor of love.
That moment, you know the one, where you grabbed my hand, gave me that last shot to ask, to say… whatever. That was my brain in a blender, my heart in a vice. And guess what? Still no fuckin’ clue. My tongue’s still tied in a knot, words stuck like they’re behind bars.
I’ve been on the run since I was fifteen, chasing horizons and dodging real life. Mountains, glaciers, starry skies – done it all, felt it all. None of it came close to the fucked-up high of holding your hand. That was my edge of the world, the peak of my Everest. And now?
Now I’m in Deosai, this sea of wild, this sky of endless. It’s beauty like a punch to the gut, so raw it could turn your trip technicolor. Is this where I make sense of you? Pollute this perfect picture with the ghost of us? Deosai, so pure, so fuckin’ pristine, and here I am, dragging my demons through it, trying to bury you along with the memories that won’t die.
So, there I stand, the weight of the past finally sinking into the heart of the meadows, a burial beneath a blanket of wildflowers and whispered goodbyes. I turn my back, the act complete, a story etched into the very earth that bore witness to my catharsis. And as I walk away, the silence is broken only by the crunch of my steps and the beat of a heart that’s starting to look ahead.
A shadow flickers at the corner of my eye – could be nothing, a trick of the light, or maybe it’s the bear, Deosai’s own silent wanderer. Or maybe it’s you, a specter from the chapter I just closed, slipping between realms. The air’s too thin to tell, and the fading light’s too dim to see clear. The mountains don’t care; they’ve seen stories like mine come and go, they’ll stand long after I’m gone.