REM

9:03 am. Your maid wakes you when your last dream has just reached its climax. You were standing on a wet staircase made of unpolished black stone. There is no banister. The staircase leads you out of a house, into the rain. You don’t want to know who lives inside. You lived with him once. But still, stand rooted to the wet stone floor, unwilling to move, resisting the echoes of a voice asking you where the detergent is.

You open your eyes and the weather changes instantly. Your feet are no longer wet and a beam of sunlight is tickling your neck. For an eternal moment, your mind is utterly empty. A nano-second later, millions of impatient thoughts, raring to fill up the void, flow into your mind at a speed that is inconceivable. They jostle. They fight. They scratch each other. Each wanting its share of prominence.

You stretch and yawn. The thoughts don’t matter. Not today. You sit up and stare unabashedly into the sunlight. Then you shut your eyelids and the world turns into orange. Slowly, shapes appear and start floating randomly in the orange universe. The shapes twist, turn and distort over and over again. It reminds you of a kaleidoscope. The only difference is, these shapes don’t have the imposed symmetry of a kaleidoscope.

You start humming a song. It’s the same song that changed your life last night. And the night before that. And the first time you ever heard it years ago. You just can’t get it out of your head. It makes you do things. And you wilfully surrender. You remember. You forget. You abandon. You choose. You achieve. You let go.

And then you write.