Raison d’être

Words elude me. They’re slippery. Even protean–impish shape-shifters. But they manage to create countless whirlpools and eddies in my head. They dance to the rhythm of ‘The Starry Night’ and surpass the chaos of ‘The Wedding Dance.’ Words are always there, but they are always in my head. The sight of a pen or the clanking of the keys in a laptop scares them away. There have been innumerable evenings when intoxicated by the floating fragrance of the neighbourhood hasnuhana, I have tugged at and heaved the words which had begun their shamanic dance inside my head. I have offered them a range of vessels–tender poems, slender prose, intimate epistles. But the slightest suspicion of confinement unnerves them. All I am left with each time is a vision of them slithering through my fingers and scampering away. All I am left with in the end is a void.

My fugitive words therefore handicap me. I have seen people weave magic webs with words that come to them as easily as the morning sun and perhaps more beautifully than a pair of flushed wings approaching a dew-kissed flower. I have seen people conjure words and capture them in the bars of a page, in the fathomless white of a virtual screen. Words love them. Words love me too. Except, my words choose to be vagabonds.

I have long ceased pursuing the words in my head. I let them stay there, play there. Sometimes they manage to animate my lips and then others hear the sound of my words too. But it’s not often that they let the world know of their presence. My words are therefore adept escapists. What they are oblivious to is that they are something else too. Each word is a colossal ship carrying a massive cargo of meaning. And like any ship, they occasionally need to anchor. I wait for those occasions. I wait for those few rare times when, tired of all their wanderings, they decide to precipitate. It is then that I collect them in my long-vacant pages or my empty screen. I pick up as many as I can with care–for they are fragile–and store them and give them shape. The others soon set sail again. I wait at the next harbour.

As I wait this time, I have decided to carry a new receptacle to catch the words– my Scrapbook. And since my words tend to evade physical imprisonment, I have chosen a name that assures informality. Scrapbooks are welcoming. Scrapbooks don’t need decorum. Words can dance around with pictures and sketches and still tell a thousand stories. Scrapbooks cherish even the most random scribbles. Scrapbooks set words free and words love their freedom. Scrapbook will set my words free and they will love their new freedom. I stand at the harbour with a greater hope now. I want to believe that I have now got a magic sieve that would allure and catch the words the next time they visit me. I want to believe that my Scrapbook will make my words come faster, closer. I believe my words will start anchoring soon. And since Scrapbook knows its reason of being, I believe, by bringing my words to me, it would gift to me too my raison d’être.