TELL ME IT’S NOT TRUE…

                There is a guy I know whose life is about music. No one knows him better than I do and if you ask me to define him, I’ll say, “His mood swings with the notes in a piece of a music. He is an quintessential example of how music engineers one’s life.” There is hardly anything else that this guy cares about. He’s won a major competition he’s been preparing so hard for, but you play a sad tone and he’s down. He’s witnessed his friend die in front of him, you play his favorite love song and he’s jolly again.

                He’s all alone on a 24 hours long train journey. During the day, he reads. But as the night takes over the twilight, he starts to hum his playlist. He’s loads of them, a playlist for a particular mood, a playlist to change a particular mood. And there he sits, by the window, staring into the infinite darkness of the night. He tunes his humming to the sound of the train’s screeching on the rails. And thus passes his entire journey.

                He’s weird imagination. He sings gloomy songs and imagines his own father’s funeral. It’s not the grief he imagines. It’s the aftermath of that funeral, would he able to take care of his family if his thought comes true. Then as soon as the wind changes its course, so does, his imagination, and he thinks of his father gifting him a car on his graduation.

                As he walks alone on the road, he keeps turning back to see if there is a vehicle which would run him over. And then he would start singing a painful song and imagine how much pain he can endure. He climbs a tree and falls down. He breaks his arm. He takes himself to see an orthopedic. He is in terrible pain. He notices a girl. ‘She can’t be more than 3 years old’, this he thinks. ‘How pretty she is’, he says to himself. He imagines himself singing and playing with the girl and he realizes, ‘How much I love kids’. Doctor expects him to be in pain, he’s smiling instead as if there’s a divine presence in his soul. Doctor plasters his arm, mystified.

                His mother cries on seeing his fractured arm. He is amazed at her. He imagines his own death and thinks what song his mother would sing over his dead body. Of course, she has sung songs on his birthdays, why should death be any different. Suddenly his sister plays a furious hard rock number and he jumps, embraces his mother and start dancing with her, with she sobbing all the time.

                He thinks that he’s different. He tries hard to think of all the superheroes he knows of. Does anyone have such an ability to bend around music? None comes to his mind. He stands in front of a full length mirror. His reflection asks a question, “Do you believe in God, did it ever occur to you to think that there might be a God. Of course, you do. Don’t you think you are different than others? Why do you think you fall in love and think of death at the same time? Why do you think no pain holds its sway over you? Have you endured a pain, inevitable? Have you loved a ‘love’, eternal? Who do you think you really are? You can not be what you are. Can you? Why do you think you try to find some superhero connection to yourself? Do superheroes really exist? Yes, they do. As a matter of fact, HE does. Yes, there has only been one superhero. And he has walked this earth ever since its creation. He has seen it all. He is God, God in a human form. And you know what is HE called? HE is SATAN. And HE is you. Yes, you are SATAN. Why do you think of music all the time? You invented it because you’ve always been lonely. Why do you yearn for a company and despise it at the same time?”

                ‘Go away’, he wants to scream, but on contrary, he finds himself laughing out loud. He sees his reflection disappear in the mirror. There’s nothing left of it save a white smoke, a smoke which takes the shape of the notes of Beethoven’s Symphony.  ‘This can’t be true, someone, tell me that it’s not true’, he cries with no tears, a cry with the sound of a laughter which maligns and poisons the air.

                ‘Tell me it’s not true’. ‘Tell me it’s not true’. And thus I wake up, sweating but not screaming .