Bengali

I think I've paid my dues. I hope I have. First world problems aside, they're all I've known so I'm comfortable in saying that.

I'm feeling strange tonight. My skin doesn't fit quite right. I know why and yet I want to say I don't know why.

I don't know what to make of this thing called "life". It's bizarre. It's a bit unsettling. I'm aware that the ever changing rules cannot apply and yet I try my best to apply them.

Sometimes I feel like the goldfish that you took out of the bowl. You didn't do it to watch it struggle, you just did it to watch it live. You had no idea that the act of taking it out of that bowl doomed it.

I just don't know what my bowl is. For the life of me, I don't know who took me out of the one I had.

Maybe it was Me.

I can betroth my experiences in this life to you but it will not change what you endure. It can only enhance your interpretation of endurance by way of what your old Man recalled at this moment in time, in this one place we inhabit.

People will forget what you said. They most certainly will eventually forget what you did. But I swear to you, above all, this one thing. They will never forget how you made them feel.

That's all they carry with them. That's every one's After.

This world is an inconvenient train station where we're all jostling for position on the platform. If I could give you any bit of sound advice it would be to not buy a ticket. Just hop the fence, blend in with the crowd & when no one is looking... hijack that son of a bitch.

Ride it to where the winds cannot recall your name. There you'll find freedom. There you'll find truth. There you'll find your own After. That's what we're all looking for... as it were.

And always Talk Hard.

Even in Bengali.

Before & After & Matters & Maybe

 

One day this won't sound like gibberish.

There is a before of which you cannot conceive, not yet, anyway. So many things happened, happen, and will happen. There is also an after that hasn't yet to find it's way into being a before. It's trying though. It's trying with every breath.

Afters tend to do that to the befores. They hang around until they can be what they weren't, and ironically, what they're not yet. Until they are, of course.

That's what makes the in between so fragile.

Think of the moments before you were born. Better yet, before that perfect moment when the electrons in your freshly developed brain began firing off. Think back to your time in the womb and that moment before you recognized that you Were. Granted, you had no idea where you Were or what in the world You were doing, but you Were, and that mattered most of all. Now the big question... can you recall the moment before That occurred?

What if the after doesn't actually do anything to the before... other than learn from it?

Things change, then they change again, then they change once or twice more. That is the nature of those things in between the before and the after. They don't have a choice, like you do. They do so because they must. That is why they Are.

If you try, you might be able to collect the before in one hand and the after in the other hand.

If you can pull that off, then maybe, just maybe, you'll figure out how to hold on tight to that in between. Maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to stuff it in your pocket and carry it with you.

Find a way to do so and the Before & After won't end up mattering at all.

And that... Matters.

Maybe.