LIFE AND LIES #22 | One more Light

July 20, 2020

As a teenager 

All I needed was 

A pocketful of cash 

To make my dream come true 

To see a man in person 

Whose only words I knew 

Towering over the crowd 

Amid cheers and applause 

More than sometimes 

Screaming in angst 

He was – still is 

The voice in my head 

For when I open my eyes 

The room is empty 

There is no crowd 

Nobody to applaud 

The teenage dream is lost 

As he is long gone 

But, why dismay 

Life ends, ends the disarray 

I close my eyes 

Words pour out 

And for a brief moment 

He and I are one and the same 

July 20, 2019

Another year and another day have gone by.

I am alone in my room, far away from family and friends; as if that had ever comforted me. I pore over the words scribbled before me. Random fragment of sentences, written haphazardly, they don’t make sense. I had jotted it down last year but couldn’t produce something meaningful out of it. I give it another try. After several hours, nothing worthwhile comes out. I throw it away in disgust and retire to bed.

There I twist and turn, rendered sleepless by a short poem that I had read sometime back.

The best often die by their own hand 

Just to get away 

And those left behind 

Can never quite understand 

Why anybody 

Would ever want to 

Get away 

From 

Them 

July 20, 2018

I am in the middle of an important meeting when a sudden sadness fills me up. I realize it has been a year. The new job has kept me busy. Later on, when the meeting breaks for lunch, I pen down something, a tribute of sort. Nothing coherent comes out. Still, I scribble whatever comes to my mind.

The meeting resumes. The day passes. 

Oct 27, 2017

The amphitheatre is immersed in darkness. A tune rings out accompanied by a narrow beam of light that falls on the centre of the stage, illuminating a mic, decorated with a garland of green leaves. There’s no singer present. Still, the music continues carrying with it a collective whisper, a faint sound at first but it slowly gains volume.

It’s the audience singing in unison, on its own.

I’ve become so numb. I can’t feel you there. Become so tired. So much more… 

Slowly and gradually, the audience emerges from the dark; thousands singing as one, led by no frontman, just the music.

Eventually, the song ends. All that remains is…

Chester 

Chester 

Chester 

July 20, 2017

I am in my college room, hanging out with my friends when I come to know. Some unknown algorithm must have tied its relevance to me for the news pops as a notification.

I look at my friends. They don’t know yet. I don’t know how to tell them. I stay in my chair, thinking. I don’t know how to react to this. He’s gone. 

My expressions composed, I head to the washroom. There, I look at my reflection in the mirror. It’s contorted. My eyes have welled up and before I know a tear trickles down. I am not a crying person. I wash my face before returning to the room.

Sometime later, courtesy of the internet, my friends come to know too. It’s satisfying to know that that they too had grown up listening to Linkin Park. The casual hangout turns into a night of commemoration as one by one everyone plays their favourite track. I have no recommendation. I just sit and listen.

At a time, when everyone streamed songs online, I still have each and every song of the band in mp3, a collection that had begun long back, starting from getting the songs burned on a CD at a cyber café, then having landed a mobile set, transferring all the songs to a 2GB memory card. Followed by Bluetooth came the internet, serving as a boon; all the song videos could now be downloaded in 3gp and subsequently in mp4, not just the official video but the live performances too. Sometime during that period, a dream took shape of wanting to be a part of the crowd that was cheering and applauding, in awe of the people on the stage; that someday, I’ll be there too. Someday… 

After my friends call it a night and leave, I lie on my bed with my headphones plugged in, going through one song after another. Is it enough to know a man if you know all his songs by heart; apparently not. There’s always the hindsight, though. Death adds meaning to life, I have heard often. But when an artist dies, his death weighs in on his work. I listen attentively to every song sung by him, scrutinising the words, looking for signs, a cry for help that I had previously ignored or worse, related to the pain of the troubled soul but couldn’t gauge the depth, the intensity of it. The confirmation bias doesn’t help. In my head, each song sang by him now becomes a roadmap to the destination he was always heading towards and, in the end, reached.

A song from his last album comes up. I have listened to it many times before but now I perceive it in a totally different way. Another layer, which wasn’t there before, has been added to the song.

Who cares if one more light goes out

In a sky of a million stars

Well, I do.

***

Rest in Peace, 

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