Wanderlust

Salar De Uyuni

I unashamedly admit...when I was reading today I became the lady in Sarajevo....the one with the red scarf sitting against the pillar...waiting for an eternity to unfold... this is not the first time...I've become many such people...people waiting...the ones wanting...or longing..even hoping...always loving...maybe that's why I devour books with a voracity that even I don't understand....maybe that's why I plunge headlong into those pages... maybe that's why I empathetically tell everyone around me that the books I've read are so beautiful that.....When I try to tell them I realise that those are the only moments I'm completely left with nothing to say...how do you describe that strange feeling after finishing a book that makes you want to live in it....that it physically hurts somewhere inside once you finish it.... because that's how badly you miss it...because it feels like someone yanked you away from your life so hard that it made you bleed and leave all you loved behind....because it makes you want to become that person who found his destiny in those pages.... or didn't find it maybe...mostly they didn't....For at that exact moment that they fade into the oblivion of the last word, they turn back one last time as if to say maybe I'll meet you again....the people I've become are always searching...is that disturbing? Should it worry me that I'm constantly sifting into them....I'm a fistful of sand seeping through keyholes and into that tiny gap between the floor and the door...flowing fluidly into worlds which are locked away and becoming somebody else..stolen intrusions into someone else's imagination...I panic on the days I don't have a book to read...Claustrophobia pales in comparison..I need to escape...I need the warmth of those comforting pages....Someone once told me I wander too much...I have Wanderlust I'd proudly think to myself..besides I like the fancy pomposity of the word when i twirl it on my tongue like I usually do.....wanderlust...like I'm an exotic gypsy traveller finding life and love in remote, unexplored places...I'd like to believe that I am...or that someday i will be...slapping those luscious green leaves on a wet, rainy day in the Kerala backwaters just to feel the cold spray splash onto my face... watch my reflection in the pristine mirror of saline where the lines between the horizon and the skies are cleverly smudged in the Salar Di Uyuni...watching the sunset at lake Titicaca....dip my feet into the breathtakingly multi-hued and blued and greened waters of the Great Ocean Drive.... relive the rise and the fall of the Byzantine and the Ottoman empire in Istanbul... see what Darwin saw in the Galapagos and learn what the whole fuss of evolution is about...wince in disgust as I see spiders crawl up the mossy walls of the Inca temple ruins in Peru....or wince even more when I see Komodo dragons eat their young in obscure Indonesian islands....I wander again...maybe I won't see all this before I die...but maybe it won't matter because I've already done this a million times...not just when i sleep but when I'm awake...when people think I'm here with them... listening to them...I've wandered through these worlds so many times that someday maybe I'll actually believe I went to all these places....maybe one day I'll never realise when I was here and when I wandered because those days it is reality that seems like an alien land....that day I know I'll be more at home when I become that lady with a red scarf in Sarajevo than in any other moment of my life......because something beckons me in an antique land... because a wanderer ill be forever....