It was a veil, a half veil of sorts, that hid the visage of the entire humanity. Sixty years do not seem far off, at least not from the phlegm that chokes the present, but still the small voice refuses to concur with the erratic visions of my memory. It spurts every morning, as my eyelids force themselves to open and meet the lush rays of the Sun that seeps in through the chink in my blinds, incongruous nevertheless. I let the blind speak for itself. In the muffled utterings in the winds that hurled it up, the light became profuse, obtrusive, loud; I saw bare before me a bearing that I knew not. An unusual comportment I hitherto had not let myself the luxury of knowing. My fingers grew numb, my feet desperate. It was but a brief revelation. The blind snapped back, thrusting itself against the pane. The winds retreated in a drunken calm as an eagle that was gliding over and suddenly pulled back its wings.

In those fluctuant mornings, I felt, or so would every lass, like a haebaragi in the bracing daylight, sapping the Sun[s] that knocked on her window at every dawn in different intensities — a little irate, a little glee — but with the same potent heart that showered her home, leaving no crevice; a haebaragi who’d say, “the bloom can wait.”

The words I spoke were muted by a sheath of tiny perforations through which no fervor I knew passed. The sugared words couldn’t reach my ear. By the wee hours of the day, a blank impasse would hover over me; the dusk would wait along with the moon that would rest its sulky face looking over the glib lights of the beacon. I’d swindled many an hour of my good days. Pining for the day when we’d dot the mature greens of youth as I sat still, by the frothless rill. I gazed intently at the ripple that formed on the waters at every huff and puff of the breeze.

But my eyes betrayed me. The light never crept in again through the half-open windowpane. The warmth of the shine, never again, traversed through the alleys of the uncharted to blister my heart. It wasn’t a revelation; it was a brief, beautiful calamity that, I was assured, would not appear again.

The transitoriness of that intrusive ray, its impatience, had gone. It was all clouded, half-baked like a face with its lorn eyeballs. Bisected by spaces which nature ruled — or had begun to rule — I was pulled asunder.

It was getting dark, moderately dark, for my senses had begun to befog my sight so much that I couldn’t sense the eeriness. I was lost somewhere. As I poured on the emotions that passed through my mind, walking through the bright and the languished, passively observing the ripples and rills that seemed not to beckon my presence, I saw a raft. A raft sailing unknown in the darkest of nights through the perennial river that had always been Ours. It had become what it used to be; the teak logs had fractured, one traveling wayward, another at the brink of a separation. Sixty years and now I’m struck by the dissonance, by the incorporeal walls nature planted between Us.

But I could see something. Now I did not expect it to shape itself into a shapeless apparition, a pale and faint form I knew, and yet knew not. A reflection of a revelation. The water is effulgent in the sedate curve of my lips. I mulled no more. I sat through the night, waiting for the Sun to bask in the warmth, again.