Confession

I sit in a train, familiar rails running alongside. I just had an epiphany of sorts. I discovered that I cannot write, I never could. I just think aloud with a pencil. I shamelessly pardon myself the stutter and the doodle, the incoherence even. For I simply have to speak my mind. To someone, something, even this crinkling white paper will do. I have to spell it all out, in excruciating detail.

Today the mind is a clamor of words. Trees, tall majestic trees. Stranded ambition stretching hard to touch the sky. Now I am full of hope, and a ludicrously innocent faith in happy endings. Then again, a tree will be a tree. Its shadow it can share. But can it ever lend color to the magnificent rainbow?

Wispy fresh snow. Little gleaming flakes of time, imperceptibly melting away. It is a finite life, every moment is finite, so is every emotion, even you and me. Eternity is merely a quest, ironically- one that promises to last forever. This probably explains the excess, the extremes- my abandonment of right and wrong. Believe me, it doesn't have to be hard. "Free Spirit" is a more convenient mask than admitting decadence, even to yourself.

Numbers everywhere, on billboards, on buses. My mind is crowded with them. I like them, particularly the second decimal and percentages. Many people claim that intelligence is a turn-on. Numbers are a long shot indeed. But what better illusion of knowledge and precision?

The President smiles from the Economist's cover. I flipped it open and read a single line. And I read it again and once more before I gave up. Maybe inattention worsens with age. Maybe it is inertia, or my passive rebellion against the information brigade. Maybe the thirst for knowledge found a younger desert to ravage.

I just heard myself! These excuses are my own failed motivation masquerading in party-wear. I just read my scrawled words. My discovery holds. I cannot write, I never could. I will go back to biting my lips, to my constant anticipation, to my abrupt musings.