The Price of Emptiness - Part I

The Gray Side.

It's the horizon that I want. Your horizon. Your black and white side, I've seen them. If I haven't, I have felt them. I have felt their power, I know, at least a little, of what they are capable of.

Your demons. Your angels. Locked up in opposite corners of your soul. They know me. I don't know them. I don’t know if they look at me with anger or patience. But they have seen me, through the bars of their cage. They have figured out what I am. Who I am. Or at least, how I am, from the outside.

I want to,

NO

I have to,

See your horizon. Your gray side.

I have to see your gray side. Where your angels and demons meet. Where there is no wrong or right. Where you're peacefully numb, where you're happily lost. Where you're not what others see. Where you're exactly what your eyes tell me. Where you don't take a step back or run to me if you find me.

I want to see your gray side.

I'm not me.

I have neither angels, nor demons. I have a power that strolls inside me . This isn't my own. Whatever I have, I have from others. People have given me pieces of themselves and I have learnt to feed on them. And after years, I have, not one soul, not two. But bits and pieces of spirits, of ghosts, flying through each and evey corner of my body. One moment it’s the ghost that pushes my fingers to this keyboard. The next moment it's the spirits. I posses no demons, I posses no angels.

I have no white. I have no black. I have gray.

I am gray.

I differ, because I don't.

Often, I stare at your eyes, watch the way they dance when you look out of the window. When you look at the blank paper in front of you. I look at your chest rising and falling as you look at the ceiling, your fingers playing with the corners of the pillow covers. I see you, the one who doesn't want to be explained anymore. Sometimes you mindlessly lock your eyes to mine. You don’t smile, you don't frown, you don't move. But you ask. You ask with the eyes that reflect my face.

You ask.

I answer.

I am gray. And for the moment, you become one, too.

Sometimes you ask without looking. Your book rests on your lap while you look out of the window, and I sharpen my charcoal quietly on the other side of the room. You sigh. You ask.

Without looking, I answer.

Then rises a voice inside us, which drowns the silence around us.

It drowns out reality, makes it a mirage.

You flip the pages and I sharpen. Don’t move.

This is the gray side.

Slowly your voice drowns my own, mine drowns yours, but the silence of the room is still untouched.

Your demons, your angels. Your white, your black.

They've become gray.

My spirits have awakened, my ghosts are at ease.

Just a little bit more, and I will find a piece- you get up.

You get up and close your book.

Before I look back, you're already out in the balcony.

And the voices die, one by one, until nothing remains.

As I see you from the window, your eyes still have a pinch of gray. Your gray side, it's slowly pulling itself out from you, while mine, is nestled inside of me.

Now, I see you, only, in black and white.

Will you turn around and look at me? Of course you won't.

One day though, you will see my gray side.

- अनुश्रुति अधिकारी (Anushruti Adhikari)