the sound of laughter was getting progressively louder. a bit more coherent too. a strange place to be in. a place somewhere in between being stoned with amplified auditory senses while losing out on a sense of the coherence of time, and being absolutely straight in the head when everything makes perfect sense, or at least seems to.

life as we see it around ourselves, like the giant wheel rigged right bang in the middle of a carnival. you may confuse the carnival – with its never ending sounds which keep on clamoring for your attention, the masquerades who keep popping up in your face as fish eye lens vignettes, the garish pouts of the burlesque which attempt to seduce you, the imps with that sly glint behind those masks of rheum filled innocence, the elvish banter playing in the dust around – to be life itself. life has an inherent quality of, as they say it, coming full circle. life takes you to highs you wouldn’t have known to have ever existed, views which you could never have realized while in the throes of passion. and then it throws you down too, such that you could feel your guts making their way out of your esophagus, the scarlet of the blood in your face turning to a pale lifeless non-color, but it never drops you down. always leaves you in a limbo inches above where you could smell the muck, falling into which seems so much the easier choice at that time. except that you just need to turn around, look for the lever, and twist it with all your strength to take you up again. it’s a different story that life never tells you to look around for the lever, or where to find it for that matter. the giant wheel it is then which is life, in case you didn’t figure that out by now.

the laughs don’t stop, alongside their interspersion with idle chat, with an idler unspoken conversation deciding upon who goes home with whom. the realization of being non-existent dawns, as is a common place occurrence right on the cusp of the darkest part of night and twilight. some continue to believe it is the feeling of coming alive at this hour which supersedes everything else. the feeling of life. try negating existence at that time. liberation would acquire a meaning in that moment. even as one lies half burnt and stubbed by the sidewalk. of course, we are the ones who light up ourselves at one end and get kicks from the nicotine of emotions and feelings. pleasurable. addictive. cancerous.

the sound of the laughs keep getting feebler as they move away into the distance. the sun is trying to make its way.

the shadows just make themselves longer now.