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.