That Heaven of Freedom

Lady Gaga was blaring from the room next door. “Not again!” she thought to herself.  She climbed off the bed lstrewn with literature of all kinds, trying to focus on the latest addition to her growing collection.

“Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,

Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---. “

Despite the high-pitched music, the words resounded in her head, bouncing back and forth within the precincts of her skull like a ping pong ball. Every time she’d read it she’d be taken back to a time when everything seemed like it were a bed of roses. Perhaps it was because she was mentally conditioning her thoughts to think that it was. Thoughts of confusion overwhelmed her profoundly. Her heart bore secrets that she couldn’t utter even in the absence of people, let alone confide in anyone. This time was different; she was abnormally consumed with thoughts that leaving the confines of her room would shatter her. She walked over to the dresser and stared at her reflection in the mirror, she didn’t look peculiar in any way.  It was the same plain Jane that stared back at her.

She ran the palm of her hand over her face slowly as if to feel whether she existed in true form or not. Stopping right at the feel of her soft lips, she felt a twitch inside her. “Where the clear stream of reason, has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit”, she repeated in a monotone that didn’t sound familiar. It sounded like someone else was saying it. Soon, the sun would go down and she’d be left in the pitch dark and uncertainty of nightfall. How monotonous was it that we’re unknowingly shackled by routine in our lives? How disastrous is it that we fall prey to worlds we assume we’ve created ourselves only to realize that they’re a retreat from the realities of the real world? ‘An ultimate irony ‘that’s what a writer would call it. Yet here she was staring at her reflection contemplating the very routine she created for herself.  She smiled back softly at the girl in the mirror, picked up the copy of ‘Gitanjali’ she left on the oak wood dresser and  clutched it close to her chest and once again resumed the thought process in her head. Her entire life was a novel, she the repressed heroine whose desperate attempt of seclusion is what makes others shine the spotlight over her head. Whether she was weaving the threads of the story of her life or whether it was all coincidental remained uncertain. Everyday she’d weave a fable, every fable was a yarn that she would ultimately put together into a tapestry, or what her inner self construed to be the masterpiece whereas others merely regarded the journey as life. The weaving despite at some point being tedious was the one thing she had a grasp off. She felt so much in control of it that it would drive her into a trance.

Given the option, she’d stay away from people. In her imagination she heard an iron door slam shut, unable to figure out what these doors were shutting her away from. But she liked to believe that on the other side of the door was a world where people were consumed with malice and self deprecating thought. A means without an end. But within the confines of her new surroundings were lofty wooden beams stacked with books.  But no that desire, if it were to be converted into reality, would be too easy an option to live with and that never was how things worked out in reality. Even getting what she rightfully deserved was a mammoth task she’d be required to fight tooth and nail for.

It was getting dark outside and the Lady Gaga music had subsided into loud chattering of the family members, drowning the voices of her reverie. Still clinging onto the book, she stood numbed by the rush of adrenalin. She realized that this was the absolute rush her real life was short of providing her. Once she snapped out of her fantasy world, she’d be left feeling like an open wound left to dry in the air, a body devoid of blood to sustain the functioning of her vital organs. She needed to secure a way to live in this stupor for eternity. That “heaven of freedom” where nothing was demanded of her, where she could spend numerous hours doing nothing and not be answerable to a figure of authority.  Where ‘perfection’ wasn’t something you strived for tirelessly, but were a quality inert in every individual.