The Swing: Prologue

Once, I wrote on a piece of paper. On one of its faces I scribbled the word - 'Reality', on the other - 'Imagination'. Then, I left it to the winds. It went and dropped into a river. One of its faces was washed by the water. Taken in by the river. Its alphabets gone. The other face remained.

I really don't know which face remained. But, all the same, I kept living by that face. Some of the people I met in my separate lives thought imagination was my name. Others believed it was just a mask.

Sometimes, I felt I had left reality completely for imagination. At other times, I felt imagination has left me completely for reality. Actually it was a swing, I kept moving back and forth, going nowhere. And the swing became my life.

Once, a lady I had little known, had been sitting on a swing, looking at the sky, musing. Sometimes, she was no longer awake. At other times, she was no longer asleep. She lived the life of the swing for those few moments. She oscillated between the existent and the non-existent. Later she asked me how long could that moment have been existing for she had fell asleep.

When we sit on a swing what we really cover is time. But we also cover ourselves in that time. And we become beginners. Children.

Fly away, children, fly away.

This lady had opened the gate to her primordial self. And times don't exist when we are children. For time cannot stay where beauty is. This moment is the stream that runs to eternity and cannot be measured in time. And she had really lived a baby's life - waking and sleeping ..... without a pinch of deliberation.

My life in the swing had also begun thus. And I promise to start from the beginning.