The boy had died. The girl had some one-in-a-zillion disease. And its name revealed the efforts gone into its conjecture to at least make it sound incurable. No, wait! The boy hadn’t died. He just had his daily dose of very-realistic day-dreams where he dies on this very fashionable couch, probably because of some voodoo connection with the girl. ( Well, the last one was my reasoning, and makes more sense than the author’s) Insomnia makes one do desperate things. And I was a victim and hence, a doer. But still, Tyler Durden seemed a hugely better option. The immense writing prowess that comes to any IITian with a 5-pointer or a love story(and maybe even NITians in this case…) was doing its job. Ah! Elusive sleep!
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Part 2( the start of something beautiful?)
Was I finally asleep? It felt creepy. I woke up on a white bed and could see a man clad in a black coat, black pants and a black hat at a distance.
‘Knock! Knock!’ But where was the door… A skinny fellow intruded into the scene. ‘Prodigal roommate returns!’ But wasn’t this similar to… ‘Uncle!’- a little girl had sneaked up from nowhere. And there was a boy with her who said, ‘I see dead people!’ I felt I didn’t belong there, but some weird sort of gravity seemed to keep me rooted. The surrounding started spinning slowly, with clouds(and when did clouds turn up there?!) changing into smears of fire. The man in the black coat had come near. ‘You can’t escape your destiny. Your mind is beautiful…’ The spinning was inducing dizziness upon me in some ungodly manner. I was collapsing fast…
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Part 3( mystic mist)
There was a gentle mist all around; thin enough to nudge the inner caprice to walk the next step without fear, without remorse, without pain. But its thickness would leave any unsuspecting wanderer, roaming in the fantastic wilderness, open to a clash against the zombie-walking dreamer. I continued walking, while my thoughts drifted into more unreal dimensions. Clairvoyant sounding ghostly voices and broken sighs seemed to come from within me, and filled the air around. But something was trying to pull me. As I struggled against the invisible force, it happened. In an instant, all the mist around turned to a water. The transition time of shock-realisation was zero. I was wrestling against the mass of water with desperate power. But the harder I tried to tear open a gush, the more it hurt. I was collapsing again… But I didn’t want to…
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Part 4(the cycle of life)
The light hurt my eyes. As they opened, more unwilling with each second, the familiarity of the place sunk. My smelly room.
‘Knock! Knock!’ I looked around for more invisible doors. The dullness of reality was something I had to get used to. I unlocked the physical door. And in stampeded, a bunch of real humans. The following lines hit my ears at the same time.
‘Oye, pani hai?’
‘Wear something fast, and come with me..’
‘We have to work for the issue…’
Not knowing which one to comply to, I nodded. Minutes later I found myself walking down a dark road, that ends up in a familiar place ahead. The blur of a fair someone with a gay smile was the last thing I knew I saw, before blacking out once again.
‘Pass me the sauce’
‘Huh?’
‘You owed me two grand that I won in my twentieth presentation. You took it from me, two minutes ago, saying you would return it two minutes later. Cough it up, boy…’
Oh! Now I knew, who the guy with the gay smile was. But it didn’t matter. As his eyes, opened up like Gollum’s while plucking the notes from my wallet, it was happening again. Ah! Insomnia is a bliss…
