A Dark Reality - Episode 2 (Victim of the Night)

The night bared it's fangs at me in bolts of lightning. I embraced it's fury. I was at the mercy of the elements, yet all I could do was admire the beauty of it all. The shadows lived and died around me, as the lights flickered ever so often. Cars crept slowly along the serpentine corridors of the old  city. Too much of noise they made - with all their honking and screeching. I turned a corner and slowly proceeded to put some distance between myself and the pandemonium. I walked past a pub, bustling with old-timers - men who had seen the world, experienced it's brutality, and now lived to enjoy their final moments in whatever sunshine they could find seeping through the foliage of darkness that life manifest itself in.

I was still rapt in romancing the night when an elderly couple walked past me. Suddenly I felt a chill, as if Death was close. I turned to see the couple enter a dark alley they should never have taken. I ran to call them back, but it was too late. A bloodcurdling shriek momentarily usurped the domination of the thunder and the rain over the other sounds of the night. As I entered the alley, I saw the old man lying in a heap, bleeding. He was breathing his last, while his partner sat weeping by his side.

The guy who had mugged them must have been a novice. He could have just run away with the money. But his inexperience had caused him to panic and he had stabbed the old man at the slightest provocation. The woman's cries of pain were drowned out by the thunder, which had reasserted it's dominance. The night was brutal to those who were weak, and the old man had been weak. As I stood there, there was a new entrant to the convention of night sounds – that of police sirens in the distance. The woman had probably dialled 911.

I turned and walked away. Crime scenes are always a pain to be in, what with the barrage of questions and all. Besides, I didn’t exactly feel like Santa tonight. The night had claimed it’s first victim; or perhaps many more had fallen before. I didn’t care – all I knew was that reality was too dark and too scathing in it’s treatment to those who failed to understand it, or respect it.

The storm had passed – the night seemed to be brooding now. Perhaps it was choosing it’s next victim. Somebody, somewhere was going to suffer. But it won’t be me. My time was yet to come. As the erstwhile poet said –

“…I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles to go before I sleep.”           

A Dark Reality - Episode 1 (From the eyes of the Passer-by)

                           The rain wreaked havoc on the night. Torrents of ice-cold droplets seemed to dig their teeth into the very flesh of the city. People scurried for cover, to save themselves from the fury of the heavens. Old friends bonded over steaming cups of Chamomile tea and Irish coffee, while lonelier souls bundled up amongst strangers to seek refuge from the chill.

            I stood and watched. Cynicism brimmed over in my mind as I saw a young couple kissing like lovers reunited after decades. “Young Blood…”, smirked my mind – “slave to the whims of sadistic hormones which make us go round and round in a cyclic chain of inevitable disappointment. Sooner or later, one of the two will move on to greener pastures, leaving the other broken, bruised and prone to suicide.” The scars of my last relation were still too fresh for me to get over my cynicism. A torrid affair it had been - full of lust, passion and a craving for excesses that I had never experienced before. When it ended, I realized I had fallen in love, but alas, the girl had not been of such noble disposition. She didn’t think twice before moving on. I smirked again, this time at my own naïveté, for having fallen into the snares of the very delusion that I perennially sniggered at.

            Yet, I was happy for having fallen in love. “It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all…” – goes the noble old saying. “Bullshit!”, is what I say. I did not have such noble beliefs. My mistake brought me joy because I reveled in the fact that I was imperfect. I liked being ‘real’.

            Will Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. The old geezer might have been right, but I had better things to do than being a character behind a mask.

            I was a gladiator, proud of the scars that life inflicted upon me, pain that my own mistakes caused me. It was my burden to bear and I loved it. I was real, all flesh and bones – not some rag-tag filthy loser who spent half his life deluding himself in the quest for perfection.

            This was my hamartia, but the paradox was that I loved my hamartia in spite of knowing how it could hurt me. “Enough introspection for one night”, my mind told me. I took one last look at the lovers lost in their Utopian bubble, and headed off into the night, replete with the wails of the city and the shadows cast by flickering street lamps – shadows that seemed to live and breathe an existence of their own.