A soul's requiem

Upon the lowly wall of the graveyard, I leaned, lost in my reverie. Many a men had lost their grandeur to this eventual abode and many a glory rested, dust-misted, within those low confines. The tall, quiet Neem trees hovered above the graves like the silent guards. More so to ensure the tranquil than confinement – the latter being a need towards which the inhabitants here could no longer afford a tendency. I established myself by a long, neat row of graves which wore no names or distinguishing signs. A befitting brotherhood to the men who now shared the finale. Many of them would never have considered such an equality when alive, I thought. To be in league with Adam’s son, the first dead, and all hence. So diverse, them all, in living and yet so indistinctly similar now. And observing so deep a silence that you could hear the lightest of the grass straw, which adorned them unevenly, on its slightest sway.

I had been told to be there to gather a moral on life’s mundanity and then employ mine to a more useful purport. With a contrite soul though (which, in itself, I consider a false, pretentious proclamation), I feel no difference committed to the permanence that has set deep within me. There is a time in life when you experience what not many mortals did or would – a time when you change so much in being that the sincerest pleas or the profoundest events do not strike you at all; when not the saddest or happiest of moments could sink down to the cold that seems to have grasped at your very heart and soul, withering them both; when everything that had once stirred you and swollen your breast with utmost elation, the colors, the flowers, the dim, wet fragrance of mud-scented wind through rains frisking gentle against your face; all seems as ordinary as a cold English day. Howsoever you shall endeavor, this damp feeling stifles down all rigor into a slothful persistence. And you wish but to withdraw yourself from all and station and invest in solitude. Not a profound one, mark you! – it, too, a dreamy solitude with no consistent thought and rather fickle remembrances. Men have ventured to probe this abstruse phenomenon and have but failed; for not a soul fully comprehends this mental remoteness unless being struck by it. And not a single soul struck so is able to deliver the affects to others or thenceforth, recover. To a plain eye, and even to the scientific lens, a man indulged so is still physically fit to amply occupy a social space. But to talk of the man himself, he has no desire at discourse of any manner and wishes a quiet recluse. Ironically, the greater he wishes to retire from the company, the more it’s thrust upon it until he’s all too weary of the few words he has to pretentiously posit periodically at such occasions. At length, he chooses a permanent absence.

I look heavenwards and wait for a shade to murk the fine azure. There are no sings from the gods. I slowly rise, rub the dust off my jeans and walk away – a quiet requiem for all that is lost.