Bus Stop Musings

        
  Her curls were all so intact and beautiful yesterday. Today they look ruffled, in fact today they don’t look like curls at all. She looks tired too. Her eyes sans the usual twinkle look droopy & sleepy. Maybe she was up till late last night, logged into Facebook, chatting up the day’s travails with her childhood best friend, or maybe a raanjhanaa who kept her hopeful eyes awake till dawn whispering over the phone, sweet nothings and a hundred dreams contrary to reason, for sleep can always be postponed when in love… Or maybe an exam of the worst kind? Her face looks so pale, as if drained off all the energy. Yes, an exam it must be.

          As I wait for my shuttle to get to office, I see her, as I do every day, waiting for her college bus. I see her and think of myself waiting for my bus years back at the same place. She reminds me a lot about myself years ago. Thin, spirited and bouncy most of the days, waiting eagerly for my bus to get to college, for college used to be my paradise on Earth, the garden of the springtime of my life, the memories of which I shall cherish until my last breath of air and take with me to my grave as a dream of eternal beauty.

         The charm of those days can never return. Very few things in life are reversible. Well I might be wrong there, because in fact nothing in life can be reversed. It’s through such brief moments snatched from alien lives and unknown faces that we momentarily re-live snapshots from our past…at bus stops…at coffee shops… outside college gates… and of course through photographs.

          Photographs are a beautiful way of looking at the past, but scary sometimes. Fleeting moments frozen for eternity, they remind us painfully of times that can never return... You are there and not there at the same time. You realize that the gates have been shut upon you forever. You may go back with your camera and wander through those old corridors for as long as you like… trying to salvage bits and pieces of a lost fragment of time…but the voices that are resounding in your head spurring you on, have been long dead… rebounding as echoes, wandering lost within the labyrinthine walls of your faded memories..

Pic Courtesy: Google