Unheard...

My life till now, with friends who with me stand,
Hear me out and lend me a hand.

My family who suffers my sorrow,

And yet, gives me hope for the morrow.

I have my ups and downs and I continue to laugh,

That is all, a game of whether the glass is full or half.

I am who I am and laugh, I always will,

I am glad that I don't need to pray to laugh or to have a strong will. 

I build and strengthen my soul.

I presume, that is life's sole goal. 

To resolutely stand, no matter what.

To believe in truth, no matter the cost.

Hope is a fickle friend,

It cannot be trusted.

Trusted though it cannot be, it is all that remains.

And it is all that can be trusted to remain. 

I come through life, learning at every stage, 

Turning a page as I (gracefully) age. 

First there were only my mother and father,

Who doted on me and made me believe in me.

Then I had a few friends, always there for each other. 

We talked and laughed and fought, but we helped each other see. 

It is time to turn to the next chapter.

A page is all that needs to be turned. 

So difficult, it refuses to be turned.

A second hand it needs, to close the previous one,

For what is to come in the next chapter, 

One needs the other, to remember what in the previous has been learned.

I yearn to speak and be understood.

My friends who understood me over the years,

I find, my words fall on deaf ears. 

Confusion sets in and I wonder,

Why can they not hear me?

Realization dawns, it is not they but only me.

The ear that will hear the unspoken,

The touch that will mend the broken.

I say so much and yet I do not utter a word,

The dream is such, I never go unheard.

It's always the last place you look...

A few years ago, I had read a very witty reply to the line - "It's always the last place you look..." when you are looking for something and can't find it. The reply was,"Of course it is the last place you look. Why would you continue to look for it after you have found it?" A reply that in the last couple of weeks has found meaning in my life, twice!

I bought a pair of sunglasses and wore them out of the store. It felt great to wear a really nice pair of sunglasses that I had wanted to have for a long time. Also, they looked great on me! Now, within an hour of the purchase I am to have lost them in a mall. A half hour after leaving the mall, I come to realise that I do not have my sunglasses and I run back to the mall. Nobody seems to have seen them and the possibility of them having stolen is low since it was a very quiet day. All the same it was difficult to look for them in a huge store, where I had been browsing for a while. My sister-in-law who was with me, asked me to replay what I had done and where I had been. After doing that for a long time and going crazy with worry in the meantime fearing the loss of such an expensive pair of sunglasses, I pray for a miracle. Suddenly, I get a vague image in my head of some t-shirts and some connection of those t-shirts to my sunglasses. I go over to that section and surely, there resting between a pile of t-shirts are my sunglasses. In order to find my size t-shirt in that pile, I had neatly placed my sunglasses and had forgotten to pick them up. As someone who prides himself (maybe a bit too much) in being systematic, these things do tend to happen to me often. Quite interesting, but I say that the system needs a tune up once in a while. 

A couple of weeks hence, I lose the same pair of sunglasses. This time, in my own home! I come back home yesterday while having those over my eyes and remember not being able to see the keyhole properly because it's already quite dark and I am too lazy to take the sunglasses off my eyes. Today morning, of course, I can't find them. Since yesterday I was alone at home, so I couldn't even blame my parents or the maid for having misplaced them. My frustration at myself tames itself because admitting to being so absent-minded takes some serious effort. Again, following the advice of my sister-in-law, I try to replay my actions in my head and I just remember opening the door, almost blind. I had grocery bags in my hand at that time and so I try to see if I kept those sunglasses in the bags and put them in the fridge. Now, that happens to a lot of people and that would have been soothing to my conscience if that was the case, but it was not to be so. I searched the entire flat, even places where I thought it was impossible for the pair of sunglasses to be. But, I couldn't find them. 

I was sure that they were in the flat somewhere and so ultimately, I resigned to the fact that I am not going to find them. I took my messenger bag and took out all my stuff from it and went to keep it at its usual storage place and voila, there it was. My pair of sunglasses. I have no idea how they got to be there but surely they were there. I had found them. Perhaps a ghost placed them there but honestly, I have no recollection whatsoever of having placed them there. In my search for these sunglasses, I also happened to tidy up the flat a bit. But for sure, it was the last place that I would have thought to look!

My Oakley Crosshair