Everyday at 1 p.m. ,this past one week,I've been doing something soul-stirring.I've been having lunch up on the third floor of an unfinished building on the college campus.
Not what you expected is it?
No scintillating conversation,no beautiful music.Well,unless you count the sound of the wind blowing in your ears, at once fierce and frenzied,at once soft and soothing.That ,and the heartbreakingly beautiful silence that resonates within that unfinished space.
I love this building.It's like the agony aunt I never had,the shoulder that never was.This is where I pour it all out,not the usual hair tug-teeth gnash inducing stuff,but also some anguished wondering.It's not a place to vent frustration or something though.Sometimes I also unwind,listen to something Coldplay,and write a bit,like I am now.
What makes it a good retreat is that everything-every emotion that you throw at the stone walls rebounds and returns to you.You would think that this kind of a boomerang sounds plain awful,but it isn't like that.You just have to sit there and drown in the thought that's plaguing you till it engulfs you and you finally learn to accept it.Then,then, the pain,the resentment or whatever it is that's bothering you,ceases.
Quiet.
Eternal,evasive,unattainable quiet.
People aren't usually crazy about a landscape of stone.Not me though.Spare me your rolling hills and your bloody bloomin' flowers.
Give me some raw wet cement,some bare stone, swirls of dust clouds flying about the place and a patch of endless sky to watch.All of it.
Give me a place that's comforting in its constancy,etched irremovably on my course, as if in stone.
Give me a place that is as soulful as it is simple.
Give me a world with no mirrors,save the ones you find in other people.
Give me a world with music everywhere,like an orchestra on autopilot.
And that's why,everyday,at 1 p.m,I have my lunch up on the third floor of an unfinished building.
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