EMPTY TOWN

These are rugged times for the bench-hugger. I trained for one sort of life and now here's another, with all the laws turned backwards. That sweet plain of endeavor that teems in memory is as pale and blank as a snail's forehead. At night under the cotton the sad things drift upwards; the tight wrappings on the samskaras, which for decades have resisted all tugging, loosen on their own and the heavy slabs float into the light. The pitiful false achievements, the ameliorating daydreams, the pretended authorship, the comforting delusions, the willful distortion of history all dissolve into the shimmering spring sky and personally, I find it almost unbearable.