Inside the bubble

I am sitting at my desk, feet on the upturned dustbin, no work to talk of, grey raxine-like walls converging into a cone behind the black dell monitor, a white board blank except for a blue date of three days back marking one top corner. The outside world is blocked out by curvatious black headphones singing “o saathi re” into numbed ears. An e-book version of salman rushdie’s “satanic verses” has been fished out of the long-forgotten archives of my C-drive and is being devoured with a demonic hunger. g-talk is logged out, both cell phones lie lost and ignored in a heap in my little black bag of endless mysteries and intrigue…

After a long time, I am not bored, not sad, not lonely…I am the girl with pigtails sprawled across a rope-bed on a brick terrace in an obscure town of Punjab, drowsily reading one loved book after another, dreamily jumping from one fantasy frame into the next, while the winter sun teased the hair on her pink payjama clad legs…untouched from the world outside, her innocence virginal in its ignorance of the intricacies of lies, betrayals and untouched by lives which are nothing but farces…
I want to live this fantasy forever…never want to take off these headphones…never want to ever worry about what who thinks about me…never want to hear another lie…never want to laugh at a joke I don’t find funny…never want to share confidences with a false friend…never want to pretend to feel things I don’t…
I want to be the epileptic prophetess Ayesha one second and her ignorant sinful archangel the next. I want to swish my angry tail in desperation like the not-so-evil devil and the throw my head back as the rebellious Mishal and kick out.

I want to be a drop of time, with the universe rolled into one…
I want to be the daughter of a king and the man who killed her for a son…
I want to be a bubble in full flight, out of reach of every bursting pin…
I want to be the taint in everything pure and the virtue in the heart of every sin…
I want to be the beauties and their loving beast
And the girl who had butterflies for a feast…

Today,

I don’t want to love
I don’t want to be loved
I don’t want a kiss or a cuddle
I don’t want sweet nothings whispered into my sleepy ears
I want to be left alone in my bubble of self
I want to be free of everything…every chain, every pain, every relationship, every obligation, every desire, every smoldering fire…