Leap of faith
She wishes to be saved by a man riding on a white horse. She dreams about this man with eyes as blue as midsummer sky and hair as dark as moonless night. He is gentle in this motions and his breath is sweet as cherry blossom. He comes to her in her dreams and embraces her. For her, this is the happiest time in her life. She grieves with the morning sun and celebrates when moon arises. Because when she dreams, she dreams of him.
Outside her window a willow trees withers and blooms. She sometimes hears it whisper her secrets of the pattern of its leaves. The tree tells her stories of men and women from another era where they conversed with trees like they conversed with one another.
"Why don't you do it now?" She asks the old willow tree.
"I talk all the time. But no one listens." The wise old tree replies. She is loss for words then.
"People stop listening to the whispers of the universe. They think reality is tangibility, measurability and rationality and thus they sever the cosmic connection between all the things in this universe." The old tree mourns for the loss of connection between humans and other living beings.
"What is reality then?" She questions the tree intrigued by its intelligence.
"Reality is a perception. Reality is a point of view. Reality is whatever people want it to be. Do you understand it?" The wise old tree questions her.
"No. Not really." She answers.
"Reality exists because people do not want to believe in the alternative. The alternative is too surreal, too complicated to understand and sometimes unable to understand at all. When people cannot put what they feel and know in words, they call it fantasy. As words have become the way of communication, reality merely reflects existence of the words itself." The tree sighs.
She understands perfectly the words of the wise old tree. When she tells her friends, they laugh at her. Her parents ignore her. She wonders if this is the way of the world and it breaks her heart when she realizes it indeed was so.
The chipmunk on the tree shares her sadness and a song bird whose name she does not know of sings her a melancholic tune whose lyrics make her cry. The bird tells her about the man who lives on the edge of dream and who dissolves into nothingness when morning star is the brightest. She asks the bird to take her message to him.
"Find him and tell him that I am waiting for him." The little bird chirps and flies way into the sky.
Her reality is skewed, everyone says. She is bullied by her peers but she pays no attention to them. She stopped paying attention to common perception of reality a long time ago. They take her to rooftop and try scaring her of the height in which they were in.
She tells them that she is not afraid but only much closer to the sky.
That irks them even more.
They dare her to stand on the edge. She does not hesitate to do so. Autumn breeze steadies her and she smiles when it tells her a joke which it heard when it passed through a different lifetime.
"I will be always there." Autumn breeze tells her in absolute certainty.
A screech, a push and gentle nudge to her shoulder has her hanging on the ledge. People shout, her parents cry and many pray for her safety. A man holds her hand which now slippery due to her perspiration.
"Give me your other hand", he tells her urgently. "Please. Help me to save you." He pleads.
She looks around. She feels the same autumn breeze enveloping her in its veil. She sees the song bird sitting on the ledge.
"Did you find him?" She asks it eagerly.
"Girl, give me your other hand. Your hands are slipping away from mine." The man hurries her.
"I did find him, my lady", the bird chirps in reply.
Autumn breeze steadies its hold on her, scent of willow drowns her senses in its musk and the song bird sings a farewell song.
A sensory overload overcomes her and she begins her travel to the edge of the dream and her eyes close in anticipation.
And when her eyes finally close, she lets go of the hand that is holding her.
In her reality, she travels through here, there, everywhere and nowhere and between now and forever.
But in a reality which you and I believe in, she simply hit the ground.
Like the old willow tree said, reality is after all a perception.
Sookie
Mannat Har Khushi Paane Ki
Cricket
